The Big Goodbye

" He will be for sale and he will be free. He will be a goliath for everyone to love."

So ended the story about Shaquille O'Neal that This Blog wrote for The New York Times Magazine immediately prior to O'Neal's rookie season in Orlando. This Blog hates to quote itself, but it thinks that the big fella did us both proud.

This Blog wrote about Shaq four times for four different publications. It did so not just because he is an intriguing character, though he is. It did so because the man is funnier than whistling fish. It has 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.

And did you know he could spin on his head?

We didn't get much basketball out of the guy this year, but we got the whole vast, wonderful YAWP of who he was. I'm going to miss him, even if he's not really going away. The man could really play. Basketball, too.