Shaquille O’Neal has come under fire on social media, after making sexually charged comments about 22-year-old basketball player, Angel Reese.
O’Neal, who is 52, made the seemingly unwanted advances while appearing on a recent episode of Reese’s Unapologetically Angel podcast, during which he recalled the outfit she once wore to an event in Chicago. Referring to the blue shorts the WNBA star wore while appearing on Nick Cannon‘s sketch comedy and rap improv show Wild ‘N Out earlier this month, O’Neal suggested that kind of attire could earn Reese money, prompting outrage from listeners.
“Imagine you in them same little a** shorts you had on at the ‘Wild ‘N Out’ show, dunking,” O’Neal said of Reese’s off-court appearance, “you know how many T-shirts you gon’ sell? You trippin’.” While the comments alone proved uncomfortable enough, fans were especially angered by the fact that O’Neal was suggesting Reese sell the T-shirts as a way of levelling the playing field to earn as much as her male basketball peers, and this topic of unequal pay in the NBA has been the center of much discourse in recent months.
The advances seemed to make Reese feel uneasy, and she promptly shut down the topic before changing the subject of the conversation. “OK, all right, all right, all right,” Reese said in response to the former Los Angeles Lakers star’s comments, but in fans’ minds, the damage had already been done. Taking to social media to react to the cringe-inducing soundbite, one listener said “Shaq [was] sexualizing Angel Reese when he’s 30 years her senior and has kids older than her.”
Other users said that “Reese learned a painful lesson about men through Shaq in real time,” and that O’Neal has wrongfully “gotten a free pass for being creepy” because of his NBA legend status. “I’m glad people are recognizing Shaq’s creepy and perverted behavior,” another user quipped. Elsewhere, fans said Reese must have felt “betrayed” by the comments since O’Neal is her mentor and empathized with her quickly “realizing he’s just another lonely perv.”
Supporters of Reese were also quick to shut down anyone who was criticizing her choice of attire in the first place. ““I’m blocking any weirdo saying Angel Reese somehow brought on Shaq’s pervy and inappropriate behavior by wearing short shorts,” one Reese fan wrote, with another adding that the WNBA star “can dress sexy and still not want to be sexually harassed.”
O’Neal’s reference to Reese’s choice of attire wasn’t the only moment that seemed to cause her discomfort. Later on in the podcast episode, when discussing solutions to the gender pay gap in the NBA, O’Neal suggested that the WNBA rims be lowered slightly so that more women players could dunk, prompting disapproval from Reese.
“I have a solution for [the pay gap], nobody’s gonna like my solution,” O’Neal said, before claiming that more dunks would increase women basketballer’s pay. “A lotta people gonna comment, they gon hate this, but… that’s the only thing missing [in the women’s game],” he added. Reese promptly shut down the suggestion, saying she “hates when men say that” and that “people always disrespect women regardless.”
“There’s always not gonna give us the same value as a man,” Reese added. The WNBA star seemed to have that exact argument proven by her conversation with O’Neal, but it seems the point went straight over his head. Which is saying something, because the man is seven feet tall.