Well Tom Brady, it appears as if another superstar athlete is doing what he can to get the proverbial monkey off your back.
That’s because basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal admits to deflating basketballs before NBA Finals games, presumably during his time with the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant.
Shaq says that he never did so for ‘cheating’ purposes, but did so in effort to be able to palm the ball and only did so if he felt the basketball was ‘too hard’.
“Sometimes, in the games during all my championship runs, if a ball was too hard, I let air out,” the former All-Star center said in a recent episode of “The Big Podcast With Shaq.” “I’d have a needle. A friend of mine would have a needle and I would get the game ball. … I needed that extra grip, but I wasn’t doing that for cheating purposes. I just needed the extra grip for my hands so I could palm it, a la Michael Jordan, the way he used to palm it.
O’Neal said he’d walk up to the ball rack before a game, “Get the ball, ‘Tsssss’ let a little bit of air out, squeeze it — OK, good.”
I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I’m also under the impression the softer the basketball, the less chance of it bouncing around on the rim making his close shots more likely to go through the net.
So now it appears we have an NBA version of Deflategate thanks to Shaq, though, we seemingly already had such after Phil Jackson admitted to similar tactics with the New York Knicks.
Fair or foul?
