While he stops just short of saying the whole word, Shaquille O’Neal admits he was once on the brink of depression. On The Big Podcast, he hears from a concerned parent whose son is experiencing that disheartening period in athletic life when an injury sidelines a promising player. Shaq has endured the same ups and downs in his NBA career but overcoming them didn’t prepare him for life after retiring from basketball. It was his own concerned parent who helped him out of it.

“ I don’t know what the D feels,” he said before explaining, “I don’t like to say the word ‘depression.'” He caused a brief moment of hilarity on the set by referring to the D word. “One phrase got me back out of it… so my mom was asking me one day ‘what’s wrong?’ ‘I don’t know, I’m just, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And she looked at me and said ‘It could be worse,'” Shaq told Adam Lefkoe.

He further revealed the impact of Dr. Lucille O’Neal’s words on him. “And then that just put it in perspective. I was like, you know what I still got my house. Let me check this account, oh yeah I’m good… let me check this garage… so it was like, so my thing was why the f*** are you complaining?”

O’Neal knows the young player isn’t complaining but he relates to what they’re going through. His advice to the athlete and his mother is, “You have to push.” He wants the athlete to be mentally in control of himself and keep pushing towards his goal of getting back into the game.

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Shaquille O’Neal found ways to cope

Shaq reflected on how an injury sets you back to zero. He advised his fan to take it step by step and build it back up. It’s something similar he felt after retirement. O’Neal went through a divorce from his ex, Shaunie Henderson, at the time of his retirement. On his The Big Three podcast, he once again refused to utter the ‘D word’ but said that returning to his 76,000 sq. ft. mansion with no wife, kids, and family put him in a “funk.”

O’Neal told Lefkoe this time that he didn’t have “commercial” setup after retiring. But he quickly worked on diversifying in his post-NBA life. Apart from his multi-faceted businesses in entertainment and restaurants, Shaq reinvented himself as a DJ.

Used to playing to the gallery since he was in the NBA, performing at music festivals with a footfall of 15,000 and 20,000 gave him that feeling back. “Deejaying is similar to basketball. You gotta put on a show,” he said about his newfound passion. That’s why he encourages his fans to find a similar passion that salvages their mental health.

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