Scott Sargent

I hate to see Shaquille O’Neal retire, but it has been amazing for journalism.

[S]winging around the NBA every season, a rolling carnival show. When Shaquille O’Neal retires Friday at the age of 39, he will leave a void almost as oversized as he was, in every way.

After all, who can be like Shaq? Dwight Howard tries, but he is neither as good nor as funny nor as complicated, which were the pillars of The Big Aristotle’s appeal. No big man has ever been more comfortable in his own skin, or had so effortless a grasp of the reality of celebrity, or had the common touch that Shaq enjoyed. There are still pictures of Shaq, who broke in with the Magic in 1992, plastered to the walls of various Orlando burger shacks and burrito joints, smiling with the owner, making funny faces. They still love him, after all these years.

Bruce Arthur

[I’ve] never met an athlete so comfortable in his own skin, in being the person Whoever created him to be. Anyone who follows basketball is familiar with The Unhappiness of the Bigs. They are grumpy. They’d rather be anywhere else, as long as it was at a lower personal altitude than the one with which they’d been cursed. They’d all rather be two-guards. (See “Sampson, Ralph” for details.) This was not the case with Shaquille O’Neal. He revelled in who he was. He had an instinctive sense for the limits of the absurdity that is the professional athlete’s life. “They’re gonna make a cartoon out of you anyway,” he once told me. “The important thing is to make sure you control the cartoons.” The barstools in the Unfulfilled Potential Lounge are full of people who lost control of their cartoons. He never did.

CPP

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.

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.