On Tuesday, Amar’e Stoudemire appeared on the best show in late night, Desus and Mero. The hosts have a knack for making their guests comfortable enough to tell some crazy stories, and Stoudemire did not disappoint.
The interview portion of the show dealt with Stoudemire’s Israeli awakening and the craziest thing the former NBA star saw in a locker room. And Stoudemire did not disappoint, telling a story about a teammate putting another in a sleeper hold just before a game.
Though Stoudemire did not say exactly who it is, here’s the segment where Stoudemire tells the story, sequestered in a single tweet.
YOOOOO this is wild!!! Which player do you think Amar'e Stoudemire was talking about? (via @desusandmero) pic.twitter.com/LWgZOJbwpu
— Alexis Morgan (@alexismorgan) January 16, 2018
“I saw one incident where one player kept jabbing and picking on, kept talking to another player,” Stoudemire said. “The guy was like, ‘I’m going to get you.’ Right before the game, you know we’ve got 30 minutes on the clock … He creeps up behind him … puts him in a head lock, lays him down.”
The full segment and a bit more of the story can be found here, and this is obviously a crazy story that involves a teammate crossing a line, either jokingly or in a malicious way. As for who this teammate is, well, we don’t know, but we can speculate and assert that a pattern of previous behavior leads us to believe Shaquille O’Neal might be guilty.
How? Let’s turn to a 2013 AZ Central story about Kendall Marshall, which is 100 percent the greatest example of burying the lede I can imagine.
It turns out O’Neal and Gordan Giricek, who had been with the Suns for all of six weeks, mixed it up verbally during a closed practice to the point that O’Neal auditioned for his WWE future. He put Giricek in a sleeper hold, except it was no fake. Giricek passed out.
Giricek played in the remainder of the season, but it was his last NBA season.
It’s entirely possible more than one sleeper hold was executed in front of Stoudemire during his NBA days, but he and Shaq were teammates in Phoenix for a spell. The point is to not mess with Shaq, I guess. And don’t choke your co-workers out, but that seems like a given.
