*Shaquille O’Neal sat down with FS1’s Fair Game with Kristine Leahy recently and was pressed about ex-teammate, Raja Bell’s claim that he had a secret signal that his teammates used when they wanted to freeze Kobe Bryant out.
We previously reported… according to Bell, Shaq created this code during his time with the Lakers.
“Shaq told me a story. We had a kid named Gordon Giricek on our Suns team…and Gordon would go in the game, and Gordon was about his buckets.… No matter what we were doing, no matter what the flow or the chemistry was, Gordon would be just, you know, shooting the ball,” Bell said. “But Shaq started saying, ‘Hey, guys, this is the symbol. When I give you this, Gordon doesn’t get the ball anymore.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, what is the background on that? Where’d you come up with that?’ And he was like, ‘When Kobe was young, he would be going in and just trying to get ’em, so the rest of us had a universal kind of code that if we looked at each other and went [gives signal] then that meant Kobe didn’t get the ball anymore.”
(Feb. 20, 2008 – Source: Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images North America)
When Leahy asks Shaq if Bell’s claim is solid, O’Neil starts off by playfully denying even knowing Raja Bell.
“I don’t know who that is,” he says. “There’s three ways to manipulate the mind. What you read, what you hear, and what you see. But, a lot of the times you’ve got to check your sources. I’m the source. If I don’t give you the information than it can’t be real.”
When Leahy presses further, Shaq references “Rush Hour” by telling her that she lacks the required G-14 classification to know this answer.
He then claims he doesn’t remember saying anything about Kobe and a secret code to Bell.
When asked about rumors that he showed up to Lakers practice naked one day, Shaq relies “Did I have shoes on? It’s not naked then…. The true definition of ‘naked’ is nothing on. If I had shoes on then I wasn’t naked.”
Scroll up and watch the playful moment via the clip above.
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