College programs and NBA teams took note of Shaquille O’Neal’s otherworldly talents since he was in middle school. The center towered above his peers and dominated them with his superior physique, nifty footwork, and finishing. However, his mother Lucille had a hard time believing her son was a generational talent. But that changed in the 1989 McDonald’s All-American Game.
Advertisement
O’Neal dominated the nation’s best players. He scored 18 points, hauled in 16 rebounds, and blocked, an astonishing, six shots, in a 112-103 win for his team. He was named the co-MVP alongside guard Bobby Hurley, who led both teams in assists with ten.
His stellar display against the finest players in his age group gave Lucille the belief that her son could carve out a career as a basketball star. In an interview with TODAY in 2019, she said,
“The [1989] McDonald’s All-American Game on worldwide television. I said, ‘Maybe we could do something with this.’ Because the opportunity was beginning to present itself. So that he could go to college.”
Lucille seemingly believed that the top college programs would court O’Neal after his dominant display in the All-American Game. However, they didn’t wait until then to try to push the center to become one of their alumni.
Shaq had a plethora of college offers
The biggest college programs did not wait until O’Neal humiliated players in his age group on national television. The University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Illinois, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas put their best pitch to lure the center to their program. However, he then turned all of them down for one reason or another. During an appearance on the Knuckleheads podcast, he said,
“I went to [University of] North Carolina, Rick Fox showed me around, it was too, let me say this without being disrespectful, it wasn’t hood enough for me… So I went to North Carolina State, Jim Valvano. Actually, it was a guy at North Carolina State, name was Charles Shackleford, I took his whole style, he was Shaq first. So I was like I’m not going to play next to him, there can’t be two Shaqs.”
He added that Illinois was too cold for his liking and there were too many distractions in Las Vegas for him to consider joining UNLV. Eventually, he enrolled at Louisiana State University, whose head coach Dale Brown first courted O’Neal when he was 13.
The center, who was already 6-foot-6, lived at an Army base in Germany with his stepfather, and Brown ended up visiting. He spotted the young star and incorrectly assumed he was older than he looked.
Brown asked O’Neal how long he had been serving in the military and he responded that he was 13. They ended up exchanging letters after the coach’s visit and then four years later, they met again and the head coach convinced him that LSU was the place for him to be. The center concurred, and had a stellar three-year stint with the program, before declaring for the 1992 NBA draft, where the Magic picked him first overall. The rest is history.
