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With dominant center Shaquille O'Neal set to enter the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday, a number of previously untold stories have come out. Perhaps none is more interesting than the one about a technical difficulty that nearly prevented the Orlando Magic from selecting Shaq first overall in the 1992 draft.
Despite only have a 1-in-11 chance to land the first overall pick in the lottery, the Magic had done so, and there was really no question that O'Neal would go first overall to Orlando. But, as the draft neared, it became less of a certainty.
As ESPN's Jackie MacMullan illustrates in her wonderful column, the Shaq-to-Orlando selection wasn't a smooth process by any means.
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When the draft started, senior vice president Pat Williams simply needed to call Orlando's representative in Portland, where the draft was taking place, to make the Shaq pick official. If only it was so easy.
From MacMullan:
All Williams needed to do was call the Magic representative in Portland, who would relay the team's selection to the commissioner. It should have been a matter of seconds.
Yet a technical malfunction prevented the call from going through. One minute, then two, then three minutes went by. Engineers on site frantically tried to identify the problem, but the Magic had virtually no way to convey their Shaq selection to league officials in Portland.
“Now there's a minute left to go and I'm thinking, ‘This is going to be the biggest faux pas in the history of our sport,'” Williams says. “What if we can't make our pick?”
Alex Martins, who is now the CEO of the Magic but back then was an industrious young public relations director, stepped outside Orlando's arena into the corridor and dialed up his oversize, boxy mobile Nokia phone, a novelty in those days. He called directly to the NBA's New York office and relayed the choice of Shaquille O'Neal. The selection was recorded with just seconds to spare.
“It was getting close,” Martins recalls. “I think it was down to about 20 seconds. I don't know what they would have done if we didn't get the pick in on time.”
That would've been quite the controversy had Orlando failed to get O'Neal right as time expired. Luckily, everything ended up working out in the end, even though Shaq's stay with the Magic ended up being relatively short.
