It’s well known by now that NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal has spent many years of his life training in grappling, but he recently opened up about just how much he believes it has helped his him in primary career. Although many competitive athletes and other celebrities have been involved in BJJ or wrestling in recent years, it’s important to remember the time that O’Neal is actually talking about. During the time that O’Neal spent at the top of the basketball world, professional MMA was still in it’s youth and the recent surge of popularity in Jiu-Jitsu simply hadn’t happened yet.
it might seem strange to think that grappling could have helped his career considering how different it is to basketball, but Shaquille O’Neal explained to Henry Cejudo and Kamaru Usman that it was the conditioning involved that really helped him:
“I was always losing and then my best friend in Orlando, he trained with Gracies, his name was John Burke, he teaches me this. I didn’t start winning until I started doing this. Because like, I can run, right? I was actually training the wrong way because doing this all day, you’ll never get tired. But when I started doing the wrestling, that’s when I would get tired. That’s when people would say ‘he’s out of f***ing shape!’. No, I didn’t train to wrestle. So then I said ‘do you know what? I’m not gonna do no basketball s**t’. All summer just doing that grappling, leglocks, knee-locks four, five, six people a day. Then I came in and easily went through the championship.”
That grappling over the summer wasn’t a one-off either, as Shaquille O’Neal explained that he wasn’t going to fix something that wasn’t broke:
“Then I’m a creature of habit so the second year, same thing. Third year, same thing. Then just training, I’m talking about every day… That’s all I did, what you guys do.”
In fact, O’Neal has had so much experience in grappling that he came incredibly close to having an actual match against UFC legend Georges St-Pierre. O’Neal is a big fan of MMA too, and he went on to explain how he first started watching the sport as well:
“We’re in a training camp in Hawaii, I’m walking down the street and a motherf***er grabs me. He’s strong as f**k and I’m thinking ‘oh s**t, it’s about to go down’ and we f***ing turn around and we square up. Then Vitor Belfort goes like this ‘no no no, I’m a fan of yours!’ I think this was UFC 1… Real Talk. Motherf***er just grabbed me, so I’m getting ready to square up and he’s like ‘no no no, I’m just a fan of yours!’ and he gave me tickets to his fight.”
The full interview with Shaquille O’Neal where he discusses how grappling helped his basketball career was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Pound 4 Pound with Henry Cejudo and Kamaru Usman:
