The era of the Shaq has arrived

It was, of course, Shaqnificent, so much so that if the first two episodes of the NBA finals had been a cop show Larry Bird would have spent all his time screaming for back-up.

Bird is the coach of the Indiana Pacers, a scared, scrawny-looking bunch of rubes who came to LA and lost their way amidst the bright lights. While they were blinking, nudging each other and stealing glances at Jack Nicholson sitting courtside, they were being roughed up by Shaquille O'Neal.

At last the big guy has arrived and looks like adding a championship win to the long list of endorsement deals, low-selling records and naff movies which flesh out his curriculum vitae. After eight years of playing in the NBA, eight years when his improvements have never seemed to catch up with his potential, Shaquille Rashaun O'Neal is about to become King.

O'Neal scored 40 points in game two on Friday night and took 24 rebounds off the backboard. In game one he had helped himself to 43 points and 19 rebounds. The series moved to Indianapolis last night and unless Bird has found a legal way to stop this pillaging the Indiana Pacers will be 3-0 down in a best-of-seven series by the time you read this.

There is 330lb and seven feet one inch of O'Neal, and even though you know he is big and you have prepared yourself for encountering his bigness, seeing him for the first time is like visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time. The immensity is more than you were prepared for.

It's hard not to like O'Neal, a megastar in a league where stardom is a byword for being out of control. He could be a Love Shaq, spreading himself about among the ladies, but his life heretofore is scandal free. At the other end of the spectrum he could be a Caddy Shaq, betting large on every golf hole, like Jordan before him, but he knows the fairways are for his dotage.

Shaq's eccentric. He's been painting his toenails since 1994 when he did it for a joke and knocked down 53 points against Minnesota. He is famously obsessed with Superman. When, four years ago, he gave up his 25,000-square foot domain in Isleworth, Florida, to leave the Orlando Magic and come to Los Angeles, he decided his devotion had to go way beyond the Superman room he had at his old place. So every downstairs window in his Santa Monica house has the Superman logo engraved into it.

The great oak which serves as Shaq's left arm has the logo tattooed onto it with "Man of Steel" underneath. The other arm is decorated with the phrase "The World Is Mine". That hasn't necessarily been true until now, but the world can rest easy: O'Neal's will be a benign dictatorship.

O'Neal was born with an overactive pituitary gland and an underdeveloped ego. His stepfather, one Sgt Phil Harrison, was an old-style army man who passed on a lot of tough love and discipline. Shaquille was six feet eight inches by the time he was 13 and he tiptoed through the world of his adolescence mortified by his size.

Basketball always beckoned, and his life was altered when a college coach, Dale Brown, for whom O'Neal would later play at Louisiana State University, visited Phil Harrison's army base in Wildflecken, Germany. O'Neal approached Brown for advice on how to dunk. Brown mistook him for a soldier and dispensed the advice, before asking which unit O'Neal was serving with. O'Neal announced he was 13. . Brown decided then and there that he would be recruiting O'Neal to whatever college he was coaching at five years later.

By the time O'Neal hit the NBA in 1992 they were speaking of him eclipsing Michael Jordan in commercial as well as basketball terms. Neither has happened as yet, but in LA they are keen to point out that O'Neal is only the same age now as Jordan was when he won the first of six championships with the Chicago Bulls.

He has added to his game bit by bit, and has at last found a coach and a team which can work around him.

That the coach is Jordan's old mentor, Phil Jackson (or Big Chief Triangle, as one of his rivals calls him on account of his trademark style of play and fondness for Native American artefacts and philosophy), is no coincidence. When the Lakers were looking for a new coach last summer, O'Neal put his rather large foot down and insisted that Jackson be the appointed. He has been proved right.

O'Neal has yearned for somebody to be impressed with. Despite the manchild image and the commercial distractions, O'Neal is about decency and respect. In a league where everyone is getting theirs before they've given anything back, O'Neal used to march up to the Orlando Magic front desk as a rookie player and offer them his latest ideas for charitable gigs. Over the years his money has always been where his mouth is when it comes to community work and spreading his fortune around the place.

In LA, and under the wing of Jackson, he has found a city and a coach which provide the climate for the right type of growth. His relationship with Orlando, where a penny-pinching franchise never quite spent enough to achieve dominance, turned sour eventually, and when an Orlando newspaper asked readers to vote on whether $115 million to keep Shaq in town was worth it, Orlando, which makes good dollar off a rodent, decided that one icon was plenty. Over 90 per cent voted no.

Wisely, Jackson augmented the Lakers lineup not with stars but with a couple of old guys, journeymen Ron Harper and Brian Shaw, and the team became less brash and more efficient as the year developed and the two big stars were encouraged to knuckle down.

Relations between Bryant and O'Neal have never been happy, and even as late as this spring they fought at one practice over what O'Neal regarded as Bryant's ego-driven selfishness when he has the ball. By this week, however, with glory in the offing, the Lakers have been showcasing their happy clappy sense of peace and unity, with O'Neal playfully piggybacking the injured Bryant around practice sessions and an atmosphere of mutual admiration growing between the two stars.

So Shaq O'Neal's boys are about to become the first great American sports dynasty of the millennium. The new regime brings the glamour and glitz which the NBA has been craving.

Pretty soon all boats will be rising, 'cos in Los Angeles, Showtime is Baq!