Placed in most people’s hands, a stack of cash amounting to $848 looks impressive. In the hands of Shaquille O’Neal, it looks like Monopoly money. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asks. “Anything you want,” we tell him. A familiar devilish grin spreads across his face. “OK, let’s go.”
The name of the game: Spend MAXIM’s Cash! The rules: we give a celebrity 848 smackers and they blow it however they see fit.
We fly down to Orlando, Florida, with the bundle tucked inside our waistband like an amateur drug mule and drive straight to Shaq’s 24-Hour Fitness gym to hand it over. You’d probably expect the most dominant force in NBA history to be surrounded by a swarm of PR people, bodyguards, and sideways-cap-wearing douches named Turtle, but you’d be wrong. We walk into the gym’s in-house playroom, and there is just Shaq – all 216cm, 147kg of him – and his adorable four-year-old niece, Jelaiyah.
Lockout or no lockout, this year one thing is for certain: there will be no Shaq. After 19 years of banging bodies and throwing down more than 28,000 points, the man known as Shaq Diesel, the Big Aristotle, and a million other nicknames, is done. “The Big Aristotle and all those other guys are dead,” he says. “Now it’s just Shaq.”
As a last dunk in his backboard-shattering career, he’s written a memoir, Shaq Uncut, which is out now. Shaq writes the way he played: at times vicious, but always entertaining (not nearly as sweaty, though). He throws more than a few literary elbows at former teammates, but before we get to that, it’s time to go blow some dough.
For the full feature and images grab the January issue of MAXIM, in stores Dec 21 – Jan 21, 2012.
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