Shaquille O’Neal has been doing the work to acknowledge his role in his divorce from Shaunie Henderson. In an interview with “Today” host Craig Melvin for his “Glass Half Full” podcast, the NBA Hall of Famer is making a fresh admission about how his own faults taught him to no longer hold one of his longest grudges.
While discussing his relationship with his biological father, Shaq admitted his problems with the man who was largely absent from his childhood no longer existed.
“Listen… Men, marriages, relationships… You go through things,” he said around the 6:30 point of the interview. “And I wasn’t always the perfect guy in my relationship and in my marriage. So who am I to judge?”
Joe Toney, Shaq’s biological father, struggled with drug addiction and spent time behind bars for drug-related charges when Shaq was still an infant. After being released from prison, Toney signed over his parental rights to Shaq’s stepfather, Phillip Harrison. Harrison, an Army veteran, would move O’Neal and his mother to San Antonio, where his basketball career began in high school and the rest, is history.
Shaq was vocal about his relationship, or lack thereof, with Toney during the early stages of his rap career. On his sophomore album, 1994’s “Shaq Fu: Da Return,” O’Neal penned the song “Biological Didn’t Bother,” taking a line from Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” and using it to address Toney’s absence and Toney’s appearance on talk shows like Ricki Lake to try and reach back out.
“You brought me into the world but you’re not my dad,” he rapped about Toney.
Still, the two men mended a relationship years after O’Neal had retired from the NBA.
“I never really had a problem with him, just, you know… I felt that if you wanted to get to know me, you just should have,” Shaq said of Toney. “You just should have came and, you know, talked to me. It was unfortunate. I had to find out about it on ‘The Ricki Lake Show.’ I felt kind of blindsided.”
When asked if he would go back and change how he acted in his marriage with Shaunie, Shaq didn’t hesitate to say he’d “do the right thing.”
“When you make vows and you say and do certain things, you have to stand up to that,” he said. “We can always sit here and make excuses, but it was definitely no excuse for it. And you know, I’ve paid the price for it. I’ve lived in a 67,000 square foot house by myself, no kids, no nothing. You know, it kind of got to me at times. My kids, they understand. We’ve had conversations. So, my relationship with them now is perfect.”
In a previous interview with T.I., Shaq revealed that his four children, whom he shares with Shaunie, didn’t speak to him after the couple split, and he urged them not to make the same mistake.
