Shaquille O’Neal reveals more about ‘dumbass mistakes’ that cost him his family: source
Shaquille O’Neal is doubling down on airing his regrets — making it clear he should have been more grateful for his ex-wife, Shaunie, while they were married.
During a recent episode of “The Big Podcast with Shaq,” the seven-foot-one NBA legend spilled his guts to Jason Kelce, telling the Philadelphia Eagles center: “I made a lot of dumbass mistakes to where I lost my family and didn’t have anyone. I was an idiot … I lost my whole family. I’m in a 100,000-square-foot house by myself.”
Now, O’Neal has clarified that he wanted to share a hard-earned lesson from his 2002-2010 marriage.
According to a friend, O’Neal confided after the interview: “The point I was trying to make is that I want other people to learn from the mistakes that I made. You get married, you make vows and you should be thankful for what you have. Stay with it. I want people, especially those in the public eye, to learn from me.”
“He is telling people to live in the present and care about their families because they can’t be replaced,” the friend told The Post.
But others around him make it clear that O’Neal isn’t exactly sitting home alone these days.
“Maybe at some point, when he was living in his large home in Orlando, soon after the split from his wife, he was alone,” another source who knows him told The Post.
But these days, Shaq does not have a lot of time for solitude.
There are his appearances on TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” occasional color commentating for NBA games. frequent turntable performances as DJ Diesel (“Gorilla Warfare,” released last year, is his most recent album) and commercials for products such as Gold Bond, doomed FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the General auto insurance.
“He works so hard; he’s so busy,” said the source. “He has a great work ethic and is focused on being successful. I think he believes that you need to make hay while the sun is shining. And right now the sun is shining. He doesn’t give himself the downtime that other successful people do.”
Dennis Tracey, who was O’Neal’s manager in the 1990s and his college roommate before then, told The Post, “He has a posse. He’s got guys doing stuff for him all day long, shooting TikTok videos.”
But, Tracey added, “Shaq likes his alone time.”
He recalled that his former client’s “idea of entertainment” was “getting into a car and going off on his own with music blasting.”
During his NBA days, the star center had his share of somber moments.
“He shouldered a lot of the losses; he took them personal,” said Tracey. “I don’t remember ever going out and celebrating, even after winning a game.”
While O’Neal has never made clear what his “dumbass” marriage mistakes were, he’s spoken before about paying the price.
“I was bad,” he said on “The Pivot Podcast” in 2022. “I wasn’t protecting [Shaunie] and protecting those vows. Sometimes you live that double life and you get caught up in it.”
“I know it was hairy between the two of them,” Tracey said of the marriage.
“I’ve heard him say that he made mistakes that he regrets,” the source who knows O’Neal added. “I’ve heard him say he’s done dumbass stuff. I think it is in terms of things that contributed to his divorce.”
Tracey finds the dumbass part easy to believe.
“We did a lot of dumbass s–t,” he said, recalling a wager made in which O’Neal bet him $5,000 that he would not run — naked — into freezing cold ocean waters.
“But I didn’t even get to run in the ocean. As soon as I got naked, [O’Neal] took off and made me run about two miles before I caught up. I was laughing … [but] he still owes me the money.”
Additional reporting by Lydia Moynihan
