Shaquille O'Neal: Shaq Portrays Kobe Bryant as Immature Villain in Tell-All Book

There will never be another feud among two teammates like the feud that was carried out by Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant when the two were members of the Los Angeles Lakers in the early-to-mid-2000s. It had it all, and it proved to be a gift that kept on giving.

Believe it or not, it is still giving. Better yet, its latest gift comes in book form.

A little more than two weeks from now, on Nov. 15, Shaq's new autobiography, Shaq Uncut: My Story, will hit shelves. He penned with it Around the Horn contributor Jackie MacMullan, and you can rest assured that you're going to learn a thing or two when you sit down to read it.

Most notably, you're going to learn that Kobe was, in Shaq's eyes, a selfish, arrogant, immature jerk. In fact, Shaq got so miffed with him at one point that he actually threatened to kill him.

Concerning the death threat, there are two key excerpts. Via Deadspin, here's the first:

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"So I'm on edge because I don't have a new deal, and Kobe is on edge because he might be going to jail, so we're taking it out on each other. Just before the start of the '03-'04 season the coaching staff called us in and said, 'No more public sparring or you'll get fined.'...Phil was tired of it. Karl Malone and Gary Payton were sick of it....So what happens? Immediately after that Kobe runs right out to Jim Gray and does this interview where he lets me have it. He said I was fat and out of shape. He said I was milking my toe injury for more time off, and the injury wasn't even that serious. (Yeah, right. It only ended my damn career.) He said I was 'lobbying for a contract extension when we have two Hall of Famers playing pretty much for free.' I'm sitting there watching this interview and I'm gonna explode. Hours earlier we had just promised our coach we'd stop. It was a truce broken. I let the guys know, 'I'm going to kill him.'"

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Later on, Kobe confronted Shaq and called him out for being a lousy friend for not having his back during "this Colorado thing," otherwise known as the incident that led to accusations of sexual assault. He told Shaq that he was "supposed to be my friend."

As Shaq tells the story, at least one teammate responded by calling out Kobe for being a lousy friend in his own right. That's when Shaq threatened Kobe directly:

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"Brian Shaw chimed in with 'Kobe, why would you think that? Shaq had all these parties and you never showed up for any of them. We invited you to dinner on the road and you didn't come. Shaq invited you to his wedding and you weren't there. Then you got married and didn't invite any of us. And now you are in the middle of this problem, this sensitive situation, and now you want all of us to step up for you. We don't even know you.'...Everyone was starting to calm down when I told Kobe, 'If you ever say anything like what you said to Jim Gray ever again, I will kill you.'"

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Kobe's response was a shrug and a "Whatever."

Naturally, this isn't all Shaq had to say about his feud with Kobe. He casts Kobe as a decidedly immature figure, claiming he once complained to Jerry West about being subjected to rookie hazing. He also said that Kobe often bragged about his future greatness:

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"He was so young and so immature in some ways, but I can tell you this: everything Kobe is doing now, he told me all the way back then he was going to do it. We were sitting on the bus once and he told me, 'I'm going to be the No. 1 scorer for the Lakers, I'm going to win five or six championships, and I'm going to be the best player in the game.' I was like, 'Okay, whatever.' Then he looked me right in the eye and said, 'I'm going to be the Will Smith of the NBA.'"

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Keep in mind that this would have been in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People cared more about Will Smith back then than they do now.

At any rate, pretty fascinating stuff. It has never been much of a secret that Shaq's feud with Kobe (and vice versa) was deeply personal, but that there was an actual direct death threat involved should give us an idea just how personal it was. For all we know, it might still be this personal.

As for the way Shaq portrays Kobe, I have to say that none of this stuff truly surprises me. Kobe has always had an ego, and at the time he was basically too young to handle it. He's matured a lot since Shaq left the Lakers, but back in those days he probably would have been an immature windbag with a sense of entitlement.

However...we must acknowledge that this is only one side of the story. Here's some sage-like advice from Ethan Norof, who does NBA work for Bleacher Report and Rotoworld:

Indeed. Sooner or later, you have to expect that Kobe will respond to all this in some way or another. Perhaps he'll write his own book, one that will portray Shaq as a big fat guy who will do and say anything to stay in the spotlight.

That would be the easy part. The hard part would be telling us something we don't know.