O’Neal was famous for his look-at-me brand and the nicknames he coined for himself. But it didn’t take long for Tim to be accepted in our world because of who he was as a solid dude and an unbelievable player.” When I go to the Bahamas, I hardly ever see gold chains and tattoos and braids. He grew up on an island surrounded by water and became a swimmer. I just think we are all products of our own environments. O’Neal continued, “I don’t think anyone ever saw him as not being black. “He is family – in the family of the greatest big men of all time.” “Tim Duncan is the greatest power forward to ever play the game – period,” Shaquille O’Neal said Monday after hearing Duncan had retired. But he’s not a brother.”Īnd now, 19 years later, how good and right that so many peers are calling him family today, even his greatest on-court rivals paying respect: His oldfangled game and stoic demeanor were so vanilla that the Duke student section took to calling him “Spock.” And he knew damn well what they were saying in NBA locker rooms and in the barbershops: Never saw the benefit in talking junk to the man guarding him. And, yes, he possessed the fundamentals of a certain hick from French Lick.ĭuncan never had the urge to ride the AND1 bus. He had Celtic Bill Russell’s incredible economy of movement – knowing when to rest, when to explode, exactly how many steps he had to slide over to rotate to someone else’s man. He had New York Knick Bill Bradley’s elbow jumper and Boston Celtic Sam Jones’ understanding of trajectories and angles when it came to using the glass. No one told him how special he was until he had spent four years in college, at Wake Forest University, which almost no one did anymore. He wasn’t a product of the Adidas or Nike camp system, those cattle calls where college and pro scouts salivate over 15-year-old hoop phenoms. That was Tim Duncan, who came out of college in 1997 just as Allen Iverson, Latrell Sprewell, Stephon Marbury and a host of other NBA players were on the cusp of becoming counterculture heroes in mainstream America. Imagine being a classical clarinet virtuoso and finding out that everybody else auditioning for a job was hoping to tour with Parliament-Funkadelic.
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