In one day, Shaquille O’Neal will be formally inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as part of this year’s class. His storied NBA career officially started back in the 1992 draft when the Orlando Magic took O’Neal with the No. 1 overall pick. Today, though, ESPN.com’s Jackie MacMullan recounts an amazing tale of how the Magic were worried they literally wouldn’t get the call in to take O’Neal back on that fateful June night in 1992:
Longtime commissioner David Stern kicked off the proceedings by taking the mic to declare, “The Orlando Magic is on the clock. You have five minutes to make your pick.”
All Williams needed to do was call the Magic representative in Portland, who would relay the team’s selection to the commissioner. It should have been a matter of seconds.
Yet a technical malfunction prevented the call from going through. One minute, then two, then three minutes went by. Engineers on site frantically tried to identify the problem, but the Magic had virtually no way to convey their Shaq selection to league officials in Portland.
“Now there’s a minute left to go and I’m thinking, ‘This is going to be the biggest faux pas in the history of our sport,”’ Pat Williams says. “What if we can’t make our pick?”
Alex Martins, who is now the CEO of the Magic but back then was an industrious young public relations director, stepped outside Orlando’s arena into the corridor and dialed up his oversize, boxy mobile Nokia phone, a novelty in those days. He called directly to the NBA’s New York office and relayed the choice of Shaquille
O’Neal. The selection was recorded with just seconds to spare.
“It was getting close,” Martins recalls. “I think it was down to about 20 seconds. I don’t know what they would have done if we didn’t get the pick in on time.”
Stern, reached by ESPN on Tuesday, says he has no recollection of the near snafu.
“Of course, we would have made sure nothing untoward happened, and we would have made every effort to make sure we were in contact with them one way or another,” Stern says, “but I don’t remember it. That was (former deputy commissioner) Russ Granik‘s problem. It was a great division of responsibility on my part.”
Granik is also fuzzy on the details of that night, but holding the event in Portland created some unusual obstacles, he says. So what would have happened if the Magic hadn’t been able to call Shaq’s name in time?
“We would have allotted for it somehow,” Granik says. “We’re not crazy.”
While those five minutes were harried and nerve-wracking for the Magic, they were excruciating for O’Neal, a superstitious young man who, even though the Magic had made it clear they would take him, fretted over a possible last-second change of heart.
“I wasn’t going to believe it ’til I heard it myself,” Shaq says. “They could have changed their mind and gone for (Alonzo) Mourning or (Christian) Laettner.”
Shaq’s mother, Lucille Harrison, says the family was unaware of the technical difficulties surrounding his selection, in part because they were so nervous.
“We weren’t familiar with the business of it all,” Lucille explains now. “We were excited he was picked at all.”
“What I remember most is the fact this dream Shaquille had was now happening. He was walking into the reality of it.”
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Granik says that about a month and a half before Shaquille O’Neal embarked on his dominant NBA journey, he and his father — nicknamed “Sarge” because of his stern visage — requested an audience with the commissioner and his deputy.
“It was pretty rare when that happened, but the few times (players did that) we accommodated them,” Granik says. “It’s mostly, ‘What should I know about the league? What do I need to do?’
“I made a joke to Shaq in our meeting about how much publicity he was getting. I told him, ‘We’ve been hearing a lot about you. I sure hope you can play.’ The look from his dad was unforgettable. I had to tell him, ‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding!’”
There was one other draft prospect who requested a similar audience before the draft in 1992: Christian Laettner, the star from Duke.
“Laettner told us, ‘I know I’m better than Mourning, but that guy Shaq is better than all of us,”’ Granik says.
He was right.
