One of the better Shaq tributes I’ve read in the last 20 or so hours:
Shaq won’t disappear. He can’t, and not because he’s so massive, but because of his personality. Like Charles Barkley, Shaq isn’t going to recede into nothingness. Some TV set is waiting for him, whether we’re talking reality or basketball. (Reality seems more his venue.) Bad enough for those of us of a certain age that basketball seems to have lost the old-fashioned pivot man, what with Yao Ming’s status so uncertain. There are only a handful of men now who continue the lineage.Mike Wilbon
And with all due respect to the Magic’s Howard, a likeable fellow with a big game, the league has nobody like Shaq. Kobe gave us some of what we missed when Jordan left, and LeBron gives us some of Magic’s flair. But there’s no facsimile of Shaq, no big, young, prodigiously talented youngster who rattles rims and flattens 7-footers with his rump backing into the basket. Nineteen years is a long, long time to do anything that requires that much physicality, and Shaq’s time as a player of consequence has been done for a minute or two.
