One may be the loneliest number, but No. 2 is what sent Shaquille O’Neal urgently mincing off the “Inside the NBA” stage last month while the cameras kept running.
O’Neal copped to the truth Thursday night during his 18th appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” giving what might be more detail than anyone needed about that sudden departure in April.
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First, he clung to the fib, saying, “I was drinking a lot of water that day. So I know I had the No. 2 run, but it was really a No. 1. So let’s just get that out of the way.”
He explained he was drinking olive oil at the time “to be sexy,” because he’d seen on Instagram that if he drank olive oil daily for 14 days, he would clean out his system and have a flat stomach. “So I was trying that.”
A laughing Fallon held his face in his hands.
“You know what,” O’Neal said. “I just made a mistake. I lied to you on national TV. It wasn’t a No. 1 run. It was a No. 2 run. I had to go bad. Oh, I had to go so bad.”
Fallon begged him to keep telling the lie. O’Neal asked whether the host had seen him squeezing his butt cheeks as he scooted away from the “Inside the NBA” desk.
Then Fallon showed a photo of what the crew did to O’Neal the next day: It put a blue porta-potty in studio on his side of the table.
Blessedly, the conversation then moved in a different direction.
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Things were a bit more serious but no less amusing back in April when O’Neal got up while a co-host was in the middle of talking and — in a big hurry — walked awkwardly in front of his fellow panelists and out the stage door. Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley weren’t sure what was going on.
“You all right, big fella?” Barkley asked with a look of concern on his face.
As the camera (cruelly) followed him, O’Neal blurted to his co-hosts to “go ahead, keep talking” while one reminded him, “Hey, we’re on TV.”
“It’s that olive oil you’ve been drinking,” Barkley said. “Hey, take some matches with you.”
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As the remaining hosts broke into giggles, Kenny Smith said, “After 40, you can’t hold it no more.”
“That wasn’t something planned, was it?” Ernie Johnson Jr. wondered.
Smith also noted that O’Neal had been drinking olive oil to clean out his system, saying, “Oh, he’s cleaning out his gut all right!”
“I did not like his gait as he left!” Johnson said.
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And Barkley simply couldn’t move past the idea of the smell.
“Please turn his mic off, that’s all,” Smith quipped. Then, as Smith tried to return to talking about L.A. Clippers forward Kawhai Leonard, the team in TNT’s Studio J came through with the instant replay of Shaq bailing out. Instant. Freaking. Replay.
IN SLO-MO.
The three very professional analysts immediately began very professional analysis of O’Neal’s shambolic gait.
The big man returned fairly soon after that, mumbling something about drinking too much water and about Barkley talking way too long when he really needed to cut to a break.
“Sorry about that, America,” he said.
Seriously Shaq, you have absolutely no reason to apologize. As long as you remember the matches.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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