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As one of the most popular basketball players of all time, when Shaquille O’Neal talks, people listen. Such was the case on a recent episode of Shaq’s The Big Podcast, when the older and wiser O’Neal talked to Jason Kelce about retirement, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that he had. In the talk, O’Neal said he lost his family. Let’s take a look at what happened.
If the name Jason Kelce sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because he’s the brother of Taylor Swift’s current boyfriend, Travis Kelce. Those two have been getting crazy amounts of attention that only got hotter when Travis Kelce’s team won the Super Bowl recently.
Jason Kelce, 36, is nearing that age when professional athletes are sent off to greener pastures. He entered the NFL in 2011 after he was selected in the sixth round as a center for the Philadelphia Eagles. He’s won a Super Bowl with his team in 2018, and he’s been selected for the Pro Bowl seven times.
He’s widely considered one of the best centers to ever play the game. Now that he’s considering retirement, O’Neal offered some advice:
“My advice to you if you are going to retire: Accept it, enjoy your family, brother,” O’Neal said. Jason Kelce, by the way, is married with three young kids. O’Neal then gets real with Jason Kelce about his own life and family, saying that he made some mistakes and now lives in a mansion alone:
“I made a lot of dumbass mistakes to where I lost my family and I didn’t have anybody. That’s not the case for you, so enjoy your beautiful wife, enjoy your beautiful kids, and never dwell on what we had. What we had is what we got. You got the ring, people know who you are. Enjoy, because again, I was an idiot, and I’ve talked about it a long time. I lost my whole family. I’m in a 100,000 square-foot house by myself.”
How did Shaq “lose his family?”
In the past, O’Neal has admitted that he’s not the “best partner” to his former wife, Shaunie Nelson. He also said that he didn’t pay enough attention to the relationship, and that “It wasn’t the big stuff, it was the small stuff, and that’s my fault.”
He said he was more preoccupied with “trying to win” and make money than he was with his marriage, and that cost him everything. “I admit I wasn’t the best partner,” he said. “I just didn’t know how. I’m learning now.”
Nelson, by the way, is a celebrity herself. She came to prominence on the hit reality show Basketball Wives. She has a new book coming out called Undefeated, which O’Neal shared on his Instagram page with the playful caption “uh oh naaa im just playing congrats @iamshaunie.”
Shaq has four children with his former wife. They’ve had a rocky go of it. The couple got married on December 26, 2002 and they first filed for divorce in 2007, but that was cancelled less than a year after. His wife then filed for separation again in 2009 and the divorce would be final in 2011.
On one memorable episode of Basketball Wives, Nelson talked about how she discovered that O’Neal was being unfaithful. She received the wrong phone and found a bunch of messages from other women to him, and she got so mad she ran to the arena and went ham on O’Neals car. Here’s what she said:
“Our blackberries got switched. I went to my baby’s play at school and I was like “damn, my phone is going off a lot,” Shaunie told Evelyn Lozada on ‘Basketball Wives’. “Just girl, after girl, after girl like ‘baby last night what you did.’ And I went in the arena and I went in that garage, not only did I flatten tires, bust a few windows, I wrote on the hood of his car, ‘I cheat on my wife. I ain’t sh*t’ with a knife.”
She said she then drove beside him while he was driving on four flat tires and kept beeping the horn so people would see what she scratched into the car “the whole ride.”
Shaq also has a previous child with an ex-girlfriend named Arnetta Yardbourgh. In an appearance on Mo Talk Radio earlier this year, O’neal said that he had “two perfect women and I messed it up.”
“My first one was my baby mother, Arnetta, and then I met Shaunie. Shaunie was also a perfect woman and I messed it up.” He said despite the difficulties, he eventually mended the relationships, and now he has a good rapport with the two women.