Shaquille O’Neal has always been the kind to mess around, and it appears that once led to him getting the scare of his life. O’Neal’s former teammate Brian Shaw appeared on Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast, where he recounted the first time he ever saw the big man get scared.
“So we’re in Philadelphia to ’01 playing the Finals against Philly,” Shaw said. “And on one of the days in between the games, we get to take a private tour at the Philadelphia Zoo. It’s Shaq, myself, Jerome [Crawford], Uncle Jerome.
“So, we go to the gorilla enclosure,” Shaw stated. So, the dude that’s giving us the tour, he says, ‘When we go by the gorillas, do not look the gorillas straight in the eye. They going to take it as a threat, and it’s going to make them go crazy.’ So, they have an albino silverback … rare. They got an albino silverback.
“So we go, and it’s just a glass in between us, and so we’re walking by,” Shaw continued. “So the whole time I’m thinking I ain’t looking him in the eye because the man just told us don’t look him in the eye. So, Shaq walks by and he’s looking straight like this, and then he just turns like this, and he looks right in the gorilla’s eye.
“And that big a** albino gorilla ran up to the glass and started banging on the glass real hard, and it scared [him],” Shaw added. “The first time I ever seen Shaq scared. And I immediately looked at Shaq, and he said, ‘Damn, he wasn’t lying. He going crazy.’ I said, ‘Yeah, he looking at you going, how the hell he get out there?”
So, now we know that O’Neal got his gorilla joke from Shaw. A Miami zoo executive had another wild explanation for why gorillas get intimidated when they see the big man.
It’s probably safe to say, though, that O’Neal’s making eye contact is what angered that gorilla. Fortunately, that glass held up despite getting banged on.
It is quite interesting that Shaw claims it was an albino silverback that they saw at the zoo in Philadelphia. The world’s only known albino gorilla to date, a western lowland gorilla named Snowflake, was kept at Barcelona Zoo in Barcelona from 1966 until he died in 2003.
Perhaps Shaw misremembered what kind of gorilla they came across. He wanted co-host Byron Scott to ask O’Neal about this incident the next time they crossed paths, and perhaps he could then share which one it really was.
Getting scared in this manner certainly didn’t have any impact on O’Neal on the court. He instead instilled fear with his play against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2001 NBA Finals.
O’Neal averaged 33.0 points, 15.8 rebounds, 4.8 assists, 0.4 steals, and 3.4 blocks per game for the Los Angeles Lakers. He powered the Lakers to victory in five games over the 76ers and was named Finals MVP for his efforts.
It was the second year in a row that O’Neal had led the Lakers to glory and won Finals MVP. He’d do it again in 2002, and those Lakers remain the last team to have three-peated in the NBA. It’s highly unlikely we’ll see another team pull that off in the near future.
