“We Didn’t Exist & Didn’t Matter”: Shaq’s Ex-Wife Shaunie Exposed NBA WAGs Secret After Facing Harsh Rejection With Lakers

Being an NBA WAG has its requirements. Shaquille O’Neal and the formerly Shaunie Nelson were married for seven years and separated for two years before finalizing their divorce. But they had been together for a lot longer, for most of his prime NBA career, in fact. When Shaq was leading the Lakers dynasty and was the biggest star on the court at the time, he was dating Shaunie. Now Shaunie Henderson had some startling revelations about the NBA WAG life in her memoir, Undefeated. The newly-minted #1 Amazon bestselling author gave her own example to illustrate that you’re not in the WAG circle unless the NBA star puts a ring on it.

It didn’t matter that Shaq and Shaunie had a son, Shareef, and were raising her older son, Myles together. The ‘wives’ rejected her until she was Mrs. O’Neal. “At first I thought all this posturing and dismissing me was just about power games,” she wrote about the treatment she received from other Lakers’ WAGs. “But then I figured out the real reason they were shunning me. NBA side pieces were (and still are) a dime a dozen.”

That’s awfully self-deprecating, but that was Shaunie’s reality back then, struggling to fit in and not be treated as a trivial fling. “These wives had seen so many young women come and go that they figured any new girl who didn’t have a ring on her finger would be gone in the next twenty-four hours. Why bother getting to know her or investing in her if she’s just going to be kicked to the curb by the end of the road trip? And so the wives treated me, and others like me, as though we didn’t exist and didn’t matter. When the Lakers played the Indiana Pacers for the championship in 2000, and I went to Indianapolis with the team, none of the wives even spoke to me.”

We assume these ladies didn’t make the casting call for Basketball Wives years down the line. Interestingly, the majority of the cast aren’t strictly ‘wives.’ Shaunie, who is the executive producer, launched the show fresh off her divorce from Shaq, a move she says in her book was born out of necessity to survive outside the NBA life. The show was about giving her friends a platform to be themselves irrespective of their relationships with NBA pros, something she was denied before she married.

Shaunie was a film promoter and a single mom in Los Angeles when she met the city’s biggest basketball star. Two years into their relationship, their first child together (both had a child each from previous relationships) was Shareef in 2000. Their second child, Amirah, was born in 2001. They’d marry in 2002 when Shaq was a 2x champion on the verge of a 3rd. They’d welcome two more children before separating in 2009 and finalizing their divorce in 2011.

Shaunie never specified if she fit in after they married. But their relationship status was cause for another issue.

Shaunie Henderson endured public humiliation

In a different part of the book, Shaunie narrated another humiliating public incident before she married. She was at the Staples Center with her young sons when a woman and her friends confronted her. This stranger declared, “That’s my man,” for Shaq and claimed that having a kid doesn’t make Shaunie permanent.

Shaq’s friends had to diffuse the situation while Shaunie was shaken. She never told Shaq about it but it was one of the first incidents that confirmed his infidelity to her.

She said she fell into a pattern of denial till she finally divorced him. But her book proves the NBA WAG life isn’t as glamorous as some make it out to be.

Stay tuned for more such updates, and to follow what Shaq’s ex-agent, Leonard Armato, has to say about the infamous Shaq-Kobe feud, Caitlin Clark’s Olympic snub, and more, watch this video.