It was mid-morning when I got up and poured myself a tall glass of orange juice - the start to what I assumed would be a typical day in my household. With a "Sports Illustrated" on the table and SportsCentre on the TV I sat down to what I assumed would be an hour of fairly standard sports highlights.
But then it flashed on the screen: Shaquille O'Neal was now an officer of the law in Miami beach. Surely I thought that some fool had slipped LSD-25 into my drink - an NBA player also a cop? It sounded like the plot of some movie starring Eddie Griffin... But it had this ring of believability to it. Shaq, after all, is almost like a G-rated version of the modern basketball player. He's the latest in a long line of players that even your grandmother could love: People like Charles Barkley or Magic Johnson. If somebody like, for example, Ron Artest had suddenly decided to become a cop then we'd have reason to wonder - but Shaq is a natural fit.
Maybe it's the way that he can disarm anybody with his personality, maybe it's the way that he always seems to be smiling when the other players try to look menacing. I'm not sure, and I doubt that I ever will be. But, out of the current list of NBA superstars, he stands out as the one that could pull this off without looking foolish. Granted, his role is more of a spokesperson then anything else, but such a role is natural for him: as a internationally known superstar, he's already in such a role for the NBA - not to mention his commercials for those 'Crunch Bars' from a while back. Even if he doesn't do anything other then star in the occassional commercial - although, according to the Miami Beach Police Department, "He's here to conduct investigations and make arrests" - it's a dollar a year that could have been worse spent.
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