The basketball icon and four-time NBA champion, 54, has two master’s degrees, a doctorate, served as a sheriff’s deputy and honorary U.S. Marshal, and once played for Doc Rivers.
Back in 2016, the basketball icon needed to install a home security system only to have a company quote him $60,000 to $80,000. During one of his routine trips to Best Buy — his favorite store — he spotted the Ring Doorbell Camera for sale at a fraction of the price and decided to give it a whirl.
“I went to China the next week and thought, ‘Damn, this thing works in China!’” O’Neal recalls to Variety.
He began hounding Colin Smeeton, his longtime manager and business partner, about meeting the owner of Ring and investing in the company. The following January, O’Neal made a beeline for Ring founder Jamie Siminoff at CES, the annual tech trade show in Las Vegas, telling him, “I’d love to find a way to partner with you but I don’t want to just be a pitchman; I want to have equity in the company.” So, O’Neal was granted what Smeeton calls “a sizable equity stake in the company” that made him millions when it sold to Amazon for $1.15 billion a year later.
“He’s constantly challenging himself and always looking for what the new opportunity is,” Smeeton says.
O’Neal sensed a similar opportunity with the NBA Slam Dunk Contest.
It had been close to a decade since the annual All-Star Weekend competition was any good (see: Zach LaVine vs. Aaron Gordon, 2016), and a quarter-century removed from the last bona fide NBA superstar participating in it (Vince Carter, 2000). The days of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant soaring through the air were long gone.
“All the best dunkers in the NBA were not showing up, and when I was growing up, the best dunkers were in the NBA,” explains O’Neal. “I would definitely up the prize money. I’d put a Ferrari in the middle of the floor for first place and a Rolls-Royce for second place.”
He continues, “The last great dunk contest we had was Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon… But then I would scroll through the internet and see these kids do dunks and look at their big [social media] followings, so me and my partners were like, ‘Let’s create a dunk league to put these guys together.’”
The result is “Dunkman,” a live televised competition where 24 of the world’s best dunkers spin and slam their way to a $500,000 grand prize, the largest in the history of competitive dunking (and $125,000 for second place). Airing across TNT and HBO Max, and presented by Authentic Studios and TNT Sports, “Dunkman” has proven to be a social media sensation, attracting over 854 million social views across platforms during its group stages. The final will air the night of Aug. 25.
And yes, there may not be NBA superstars jamming it home on “Dunkman” but you do have the unique privilege of seeing a 5-foot-9 furniture salesman from Utah with a nearly 50-inch vertical leap (Hyrum “Hyt Check” Fechser) dunk over several men on a couch and send O’Neal and his cast of commentators — Vince Carter, Draymond Green, Dwight Howard and TNT’s Adam Lefkoe — into a frenzy.
According to Smeeton, the president of Authentic Studios, Season 2 of “Dunkman” will see O’Neal scouting the world to find new talent for the competition and may even incorporate undercards, à la UFC, like a 15-and-under junior dunk contest with 9-foot rims and a women’s dunking division.
“We’ve had athletes from all over the world DMing Shaquille and the league saying, ‘I want to be in for Season 2,’ so we’re just scratching the surface,” Smeeton says.
O’Neal adds, “We’re in talks with a lot of international countries like Poland, China and others. We’re getting calls every day. We’re going to keep it going and do small events, medium events and big events, and our ultimate goal is to partner up with the NBA and take over the Dunk Contest.”
As far as his own favorite dunks, O’Neal points to his notorious dunk over the Knicks’ Chris Dudley in 1999, where he discarded him after — “I saw on the internet that that was called ‘The Most Disrespectful Dunk in History,’ and I’ll take it,” he jokes — and his absolute favorite: the Kobe alley-oop to close out the Trailblazers in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals.
“My favorite is the Kobe lob-dunk in 2000,” offers O’Neal. “We were up 3-1 in that series and [the Trailblazers] came back to bring it to Game 7, and the fuckin’ worst thing happened where I wasn’t really playing great until late, they got up 15, and I was like, ‘Shit, here we go again.’ And then Phil Jackson was like, ‘Alright, see you guys next summer,’ and we got upset and went on a legendary comeback. I would always tell Kobe, ‘When you get to the lane instead of doing all that double-pump-fake stuff just throw it up and I’ll be there.’ And he threw it up.”
O’Neal has been partnered with Authentic Studios since December 2015, and founded his production company, Jersey Legends, in 2020. It’s proved a fruitful partnership for O’Neal, resulting in TV productions like the acclaimed “Allen Iv3rson” docuseries for Prime, the Netflix reality show “Power Moves With Shaquille O’Neal,” the “Dunkman” league on TNT and another ABC/ESPN series shooting this fall, along with a number of scripted shows in development.
There was even a recent (fake) viral report that O’Neal had purchased the Los Angeles Lakers, even though the Buss family actually sold the NBA team to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner for $12.5 billion. It’s proven quite the lucrative investment for the Buss family, whose father, Dr. Jerry Buss, bought the Lakers in 1979 for $67.5 million in a deal that also included the Los Angeles Kings and the Forum. Since 1980, the Lakers have won the most NBA championships in the league with 11.
“I would love to own an NBA team and I have nothing but love and admiration for the Buss family,” O’Neal says of the deal. “One thing I learned from the Buss family is business, and I think if they did sell it would be a great business move because I know how much [Dr. Jerry Buss] bought the Lakers for. I know he’s not with us anymore, but I know he took pride in making it a family business and the family has been there through my tenure, Kobe’s tenure and LeBron’s tenure. If they did sell it for that much, then I think it was a great business move.”
There is, of course, the matter of Jeanie Buss, the Lakers’ minority owner and team governor who, in a bit of “Succession”-like drama, has contested her siblings’ sale to Iger and Kushner.
When I mention this to O’Neal, he pauses. “I never paid attention to that. There was always stuff going around, but I never got involved,” he remarks, before adding: “Actually, we should do a documentary on that!”