Most people remember Shaquille O'Neal the player as the rapping, backboard-breaking phenom with the Orlando Magic or as the "most dominant" center who won three consecutive titles with the Los Angeles Lakers and feuded with Kobe Bryant. When Shaq first signed a seven-year, $120 million contract in 1996, he was the superstar who was doing everything but winning championships. Scott Howard-Cooper, author of the 2024 book "Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty," was the Lakers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times when Shaq first came to the west coast. In this edition of Tales From the Press, Howard-Cooper talks about the early Laker years for the largest member of the Inside the NBA crew.

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

BET: What was your "Oh my gosh Shaq is enormous" moment?
SHC: Probably when I was standing next to him when he was naked except for his briefs, except for his white underwear, at about one or two o'clock in the morning at a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles.

Before, when he was with Orlando, we had talked a couple times, so I'd stood next to him and obviously I had seen him play a bunch because this was when he came to the Lakers in the summer of '96. But I think it was the setting that made it all that much more strange. He was there shooting the movie [Steel]. I spent some time on the set with him there and got to know him a little bit. Probably more than I wanted to in some ways.

BET: So he was in his briefs, in the parking lot, while shooting a movie.
SHC: They had a mini court set up. There was a basket that had been brought in, one of those rolling baskets. The portable baskets, and so he could still do a little bit of work.

We were doing various interviews and conversations during his breaks. He was doing some basketball work in between doing the movie work. I made it the lead and focus of the story. His toenails were painted purple. It was all a very strange thing. I spent the night there in downtown Los Angeles as he was doing the movie and working on his academy award nomination for Steel.

BET: Did Shaq do any type of easing his way into the locker room when he got to LA?
SHC: I don't know that Shaq does easing. I don't know that he has that club in his bag. It wasn't, "I'm here and I'm in charge." There wasn't ever a statement about "this is my team." As large as he was physically, he was even larger in personality. He was the same guy then that people see on TV now. He's very outgoing, big time sense of humor, [and] didn't back off from saying things even if they were critical. [Shaq] wasn't worried about trying to build an image as a nice guy like Kobe was at the time. Obviously, [Kobe] was in a much different situation as a rookie and a teenager focused on marketing. But yeah, Shaq was front and center from the beginning, in personality and in play.

BET: How did he react to criticism after a couple years there where the Lakers were getting swept out of the playoffs?
SHC: Well he was never good with criticism in any regard. Remember, he was getting it from day one because a lot of people in Orlando—and I guess in some places around the country as well—felt that he jilted the Magic. That was never going to change regardless of what he said or how he played.

Obviously there [were] always the comments about his free throw shooting. There was criticism about any time he may have had a bad week or so. It was, "All this guy cares about is focusing on his entertainment career."

He was always a target for criticism, and he never handled it well. I think he was frustrated that people saw the negative in things he was doing. If he would work on a movie in the middle of the offseason with no game within two months or so, he didn't see that as being any different than other players who might go on vacation with their family or other players who might play golf every day. It was just what he chose to do. But because there were these massive expectations because of the contract, the buildup, his ability—I think it was harder on him. He was the guy that always took the blame for the problem even when it wasn't his fault.

BET: During that first season, did it feel like he was living up to expectations?
SHC: Oh yeah. He had some injuries, but when he played he put up big minutes and tremendous numbers. He was a tremendous worker. We would be watching him during training camp and preseason games when they were in Honolulu. All through the year we were able to watch practice [back] then. This guy was 100 percent invested. You really saw how much he cared and was willing to put in the time, and didn't want to just take the money and sort of coast along. He wanted to tear down rims and break backboards. He was a guy that would talk big and play big. I remember the injury problems, but when he played it was really good and there was no doubt that he would be worth everything that the Lakers gave him.

BET: What kind of beating did Shaq take in the paint for the Lakers?
SHC: Well, the only way that the opponent had any chance to stop him most of the time was to get very physical, and more physical than they would with any other player at that time. The only chance you had was to gang tackle the guy inside. I remember talking to different referees and they all had a similar comment. Something along the lines of, "You could call every time Shaq had the ball inside either on him or on the opponent." It was a constant "hand the ball off to the fullback and let him run into the line of scrimmage." It's not like you could hand check the guy who's that strong and talented, and he had a tremendous amount of talent. No matter how many people—usually fans who didn't know anything—would try to make the claim that the only reason the guy is putting up these numbers is because he's beating everybody up.

BET: Initially, what was his relationship with Kobe like?
SHC: It was always a little weird, because Kobe was just so much different than anybody. It wasn't strained in the ways that it would become. A lot of guys tried to step forward and look after Kobe [when he] was a rookie. He was drafted when he was 17 years old. A lot of the veterans on that team said, "I'm gonna take this guy under my wing." Shaq was one of those guys. He tried to do what he considered the right thing, which was to embrace Kobe and look after him and help him make that difficult transition from amateur to pro. It was made even more difficult because [Kobe] was going from high school to the pros.

Shaq wanted to be Kobe's big brother and try to help. The problem was, Kobe was not going to be anybody's little brother. Kobe was, from the day he arrived, in his mind, [a] Hall of Famer in waiting. He was, "I got this. Don't worry. Just give me the ball and get out of the way."

It wasn't selfishness. I think a lot of people misread that. It was confidence on the largest amount of steroids you have ever seen. He just believed that he could make anything happen. Plus he had the additional background—whether good or bad in the case of a rookie arriving in the league—[of thinking] he had a good understanding of the NBA because of his dad's experience. Kobe had been around the game a lot in Europe and had gotten to know different guys in settings while he was in Philadelphia. Kobe felt he had been around the game enough, and felt he was good enough, and he wasn't going to let anybody portray him as needing help. He wasn't going to do the "take me under your wing and I look forward to learning from you." Even if he didn't mean it, if he would have just played along with that it would have made things a lot easier. So, it wasn't that there was friction. It was more a lot of guys just threw up their hands and said, "Well alright, you got this. Go right ahead. We're trying to help and if you don't want the help, I don't know what to say."

BET: In the playoffs that first season, there is the playoff airball game in Utah. Shaq puts his arm around him in front of the cameras. Was he the same in the locker room?
SHC: I think so, I mean nobody was happy about it. One, because of how it happened, but more than that they lost the game. Again, this was Shaq trying to do the right thing. Despite all the evidence that he had seen during the season up until then, it was Shaq sort of still trying to be that Big Brother again. The guy that goes and puts the arm around him on the court.

BET: What are some of your favorite Shaq moments?
SHC: A preseason game in Tucson, before the game I'm talking with [Lakers head coach] Del [Harris] just outside of the Lakers locker room. Somebody comes up behind me, picks me up and sort of spins me almost horizontal like I'm a barbell. I heard [Shaq's] voice, I wish I could remember what he was saying. He was making some joking comment and as he says this, he kind of did a military press and put me over his shoulders.

BET: Do you remember any of the locker room tantrums that he sometimes talks about on TNT?
SHC: I remember him being frustrated and he might have raised a voice to a reporter or something like that. I never saw him throw anything. I never saw him get physical with anybody. [If he did] he would have ended up in jail for manslaughter at the very least. He could have killed people. He wasn't the Shaq later on that fell out of shape and that was always one of the things that frustrated Kobe. That's one of the reasons their relationship turned sour. Kobe's point of view was this guy is not showing up ready to play. Then Shaq had the injuries and it was harder to keep the weight off. In the years that I was around him, Shaq in his early years could have turned humans into pretzels. He was in great shape. He worked incredibly hard. I watched a lot of practices. I watched a lot of workouts that he did after practice. To watch him go up and down the court in practice, maybe even in a five on zero drill or three on three, he was like a locomotive. This giant guy gobbling up huge amounts of space with each step, just sweat pouring off. He had years where his passion to do well made him close to unstoppable.