The enduring calling card of Martin, the landmark sitcom that aired from 1992-97, will never be its introspection. Yet, one moment made the show’s timeless antics take a momentary backseat. In Love in Your Face, Part 2, Martin (Martin Lawrence) plays cards with a group of older friends while continuously invoking the name of his former girlfriend, Gina (Tisha Campbell). As the guests leave, one person stays to ask why they broke up. Martin explains that he felt pressured to get married and didn’t feel he was at a place in life to pop the question.
“That’s the way I thought when I was your age. No woman was gonna hold me back. Now I got the house and I got nobody to share it with,” Luvert, played by David Connell, tells Martin in the show. “All I’m saying is, old fools used to be young fools. Think about it.”
Acknowledging one’s regrets is a timeless activity that doesn’t discriminate. For many of us, regret doesn’t completely fade either, it becomes part of our life story. For anyone who’s been paying attention in recent years, O’Neal has been preaching from the same gospel of regret. Recently, the Hall of Fame NBA center welcomed Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce onto his show, The Big Podcast with Shaq. O’Neal left Kelce with one piece of counsel at the end of their conversation.
“My advice to you [is] if you’re going to retire — accept it. Enjoy your family, brother. I made a lot of dumba– mistakes as to where I lost my family, and I didn’t have anybody. That’s not the case for you,” he said as Kelce listened intently. “So enjoy your beautiful family. 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 it. Because again, I was an idiot. I’ve talked about it a lot … lost my whole family. I’m in a 100,000-square-foot house by myself.”
In 2024, O’Neal is known for many things. He was one of the most dominant basketball players ever to play the game. He’s also perhaps the largest billboard in world history, with businesses and endorsements knowing no limits. He’s a passionate philanthropist. O’Neal, the multi-hyphenate, is most known as a savant of fun.
Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain once said, “Nobody loves Goliath.” But not in O’Neal’s case. He’s Goliath but also beloved across generations, races and backgrounds. However, his vulnerable admission shows a man who will be coming to terms with his transgressions for the rest of his life. He’s had to accept how he fractured his own family and then not let the weight of regret suffocate him. Money and success might put a sizable down payment on happiness. But O’Neal lives every day knowing the happiness he covets is the happiness he ruined thanks to the consequences of his selfish decisions. Fame can never rid a closet of its skeletons. In most cases, it exacerbates them. And according to O’Neal, it’s the reason his exists in the first place.
In December 2002, Sports Illustrated published a feature titled His Own Worst Enemy. Though the article was about the fall of O’Neal’s former LSU teammate Stanley Roberts, the title also would also come to reflect O’Neal. That same month, O’Neal and longtime girlfriend Shaunie Nelson wed in a top-secret ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On the surface, everything seemed perfect for O’Neal. He’d seemingly done what Roberts had been unable to do by becoming larger than life while not letting it swallow him whole. Surface-level emotions never tell the entire story, though. Even then, O’Neal battled demons, both internally and externally.
“I don’t trust nobody. I got a small camp and my family. I got a guy who handles my money, and I got people watching him,” O’Neal said in the article. “I hate talking on the phone. I’m moody. I’ve got a lot of stress. I have problems. I do. I have problems that will never, ever be discussed.”
During the peak of his powers on the court, O’Neal’s presence shifted franchises such as the Orlando Magic, Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat, putting the Magic on the map and bringing championships to the Lakers and Heat.
But his personal life wasn’t as storied.
Over the last 20-plus years, O’Neal has discussed his problems, specifically about his role in the dissolution of his marriage. By 2011 — the year O’Neal retired from the NBA, his divorce was finalized. In his memoir Shaq Uncut: My Story, he said that his infidelity led to his marriage’s demise. A little over a decade later, on The Pivot podcast, O’Neal opened up even more, saying he got caught up in living a “double life.” The money, fame, women and excess had become too much. The victims were his family.
“I’m not gonna say it was her. It was all me,” O’Neal said of the reasons for his divorce. “She did exactly what she was supposed to do and gave me beautiful kids, took care of the house and took care of the corporate stuff. It was all me.”
O’Neal said his actions robbed him of the privilege of having joy.
“I was a d—head,” he told People in 2022. “You don’t know how good you got something till it’s gone.”
Accountability — true accountability — is often realized through pain, torture, and, finally, acknowledging that the past can’t be changed. How we evolve is in our control. O’Neal has been owning up to the irreversible consequences of his ignorance longer than he’s been cracking jokes on Charles Barkley for never winning a ring. Last month, Shaunie Henderson (she married Pastor Keion Henderson in 2022) mentioned her former husband in her forthcoming memoir Undefeated: Changing the Rules and Winning on My Own Terms. Initially hesitant, she said O’Neal’s confessions actually “made it easier” for her to speak about their time together. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK. He told on himself,’ ” Henderson, an executive producer on VH1’s Basketball Wives, said.
I hear a lot of my grandfather in O’Neal.
He and my grandmother divorced years before I was born. To her credit, my grandmother never spoke ill of my grandfather, but the closest she came was saying, “He was incredible at being a father — not so much as a husband.” When I asked why she stayed around for so long, even knowing the extent of his actions, she said, “I took my vows seriously.”
In the final years of his life, my grandfather made it a point to express his regret and how his decisions affected our entire family. His many professional accomplishments did nothing to erase a lifetime of anguish spurred by his own selfishness. He would end every conversation the same way.
“Your grandmother deserved so much more than what I gave her,” he would tell me. That regret followed him until he died in 2008.
If you live long enough, you’ll learn the scars that never heal live far beyond the surface. O’Neal’s scars are public. Black men in therapy are necessary, and there are many signs that he has been working on himself in meaningful ways. But so is his stepfather’s militaristic mindset of owning your faults and never hiding behind them, as he told Kelce.
Accepting those self-induced scars is understanding that a person, even one as internationally famous as O’Neal, is human. Highs wouldn’t be highs without lows. It’s the calculus of life. This isn’t all of who O’Neal is, but it will always be part of his story.
What Luvert said to Martin, what my grandfather said to me and what O’Neal said to Kelce (and others) is an unassailable truth. Time can’t be reversed. The deep-seated fractures we inflict never fully heal. And what good is it not to express regret for the regret we’ve caused?
“I’ve only got peace because [my kids] don’t hate me,” O’Neal said. “If they hated me, I probably would never have peace, but because we have a relationship and we’re cool, I have peace.”
O’Neal knows joy, just like he knows pain. He’s been a catalyst for both. He’s all too familiar with the many branches of pain, such as loneliness and depression. He doesn’t shy away from what the consequences of his actions have brought him. He’ll spend the rest of his life talking about this. We’re all better off listening.
“I’m not gonna use the D-word [depression] because I know a lot of people are suffering from that,” he said last year. “But I was down.”
O’Neal doesn’t find shame in holding onto his grief. Thankfully, he’s making room for other things, too.
