Defining Jermaine O'Neal: How a made-up name linked father and son forever in basketball

Indianapolis Star

9 hours ago

LAS VEGAS – Father's Day is here, which means a time bomb of memory, nostalgia, regret and wonder is setting off in former Pacer Jermaine O'Neal Sr.'s life.
This is the day he flashes back to everything that made him, all those strengths and flaws and complexities. It's when he'll zoom out on his life at 46 to a time when he was 27, locked in the peak of his playing career and the valley of his personal life, looking to a newborn baby to help him decipher the difference.
O'Neal's second child and first son arrived that day on June 20, 2006. And as he stared into his eyes, the way his own father never once did with him, what he suddenly felt was fear.
The baby was enormous in size but entirely disproportionate. His left side was sunken in. And as the nurses whisked him away and sprinted out of the delivery room, O'Neal Sr. just remembers hearing the words 'collapsed lung."
His own heart sunk through 6 feet and 11 inches of body to somewhere beneath the floor.
The perennial Pacers All-Star burst out into the hallways and into the night in Indianapolis, unsure of where he was going. Fans clamored to the him for autographs and photos, and he pushed them away until he got into a car, only to drive for as long as the wheels in his mind spun to cosmic and dark thoughts about the universe and fairness and how connected our sins and fates and realities can become.
'I felt like God was punishing me,' O'Neal Sr. said. 'What did I do wrong?'
This first-born son was supposed to be one of his biggest steps out of the shadow of the past 18 months following the brawl in a game against the Pistons. For a year and a half, the name Jermaine O'Neal was plastered in headlines and newscasts and on the jersey of the man in those lowlights throwing a punch at a Pistons fan.
The name wasn't even real, he'd later find out, just like he'd later find out that he had more than 30 siblings. That was one of the many lies and failed promises his dad packed into this world.
The thoughts grew darker than the skies as he drove, and finally he pulled into a cul-de-sac and shouted out through the windshield.
'I remember asking God: 'Let him live,'' O'Neal Sr. said, ''and I'm going to be a certain way.''
O'Neal spent so much of the first quarter of his life casting prayers and feeling heart-ache when it came to family. Just three years earlier, in the middle of his third season with the Pacers, his step-father was working as a team security guard when he shot himself in the head.
But this day, something different happened. O'Neal soon received a call that his baby son was on the mend, and he was going to make a full recovery.
For the first time in two generations, an O'Neal son would have a father in his life, too. And this second act, built on a second chance, had the Pacers star making one more inadvertent promise with the name he'd pass along:
Jermaine O'Neal Jr.
Nearly nineteen years later, O'Neal Sr. is staring out through black-rimmed glasses with his arms crossed from the sideline of Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers as his only son fights through a national championship quarterfinal game.
O'Neal Jr. is now a two-way wing, a four-star recruit committed to SMU and the leading scorer of one of the best high school basketball teams in America at a school called Dynamic Prep that his father built in Irvington, Texas. Wearing the No. 7, just like his father, he's playing his first and potentially last game in the shadow of the city where he was born and where his father starred for the Pacers for eight seasons.
In the first half, that juice spills into three fouls with Dynamic Prep on the ropes in what they hoped would be the first of four games on a run to the Chipotle national championship. So, the older O'Neal pulls his son to the bench, where he lets out a string of expletives before he sits down.
O'Neal Sr. speaks to his son through a white paper pulled to his lips, and then he delivers a message to the entire team during the next timeout.
'We're into whooping ass by what we do,' O'Neal Sr. said, 'not by what we say.'
Moments later, O'Neal Jr. steals the ball and slaloms through the defense before going hard into contact and laying the ball in. He steals another possession from the low block. And then he drills a corner 3 that gets the public address announcer screaming.
'Jermaine … O'Neal … Junior!'
They walk off the court together after a 19-point victory. The older O'Neal tells the younger one this is the proudest he's ever been of him. They share a post-game interview, arm-in-arm, with an ESPN camera.
But the truth about pressure is it isn't so easy to control. It needs the right level of gas, released at just the right dial. And by the end of this four-day tournament against many of the best recruits in the country, the younger O'Neal is running out of it. He tries guarding two Duke commits in the Boozer twins, Cameron and Cayden, with tight coverage until they start to make plays. His shot starts falling short. And then he's passing them up entirely.
The older O'Neal has a choice to make. He pulls his son to the bench to sit out the final quarter of his high school career in a blowout loss.
Afterward, O'Neal Sr. speaks to the entire team but cuts right into his son:
'Jermaine,' the 46-year-old coach said from the locker room, 'you never engaged yourself. Missing shots cannot allow you to check out of the game.'
O'Neal Sr. is as close as he's been to that promise in the car in the nearly two decades since he made it.
He tells his players to write this moment down, to remember how they got bullied into embarrassment in their final game together. There's anger and disappointment in his voice, mere hours after the players told their coach, 'We've got you,' in the state where his name is supposed to mean something.
'I feel like we let him down,' forward Jaden Toombs would say later.
This isn't a fairytale, not for O'Neal Sr., not for the all-star team he put together and not for the son he gave the same name. This is a journey, through fatherhood and basketball, back to the place where a brawl changed everything.
It has healing scars and open wounds and lingering questions. So when O'Neal Sr. speaks to them, he's speaking to the versions of himself that used to live here, as well as the ones that stayed away.
'Anxiety takes over,' O'Neal Sr. told them. 'Until you are willing to conquer that demon, you can never win.'
Two months after the final games of O'Neal Jr.'s high school career, he's sprinting on a court in Las Vegas during full-court games against some of the sport's best budding talent.
O'Neal Jr. grew up here in the summer time, back when his father was training to keep an 18-year NBA career going. Now, it's his son spending 55 straight days out here, where he spends six days a week running plyometrics and shooting drills and playing full-court games against some of the top competition in the game.
A No. 7 jersey hangs on the back wall with dozens of Impact Basketball alumni that reads, 'O'Neal.'
The name Jermaine O'Neal is made up. It was passed to O'Neal Sr. after a man named Clifford was released from prison, sought a name change to reinvent his life and fathered two sons, only to disappear again.
He reinvented with an Irish surname, as O'Neal derives from the Old Gaelic word "nia," which gains an English translation of "champion" or "hero." It belonged to Naill of the Nine Hostages, a fourth-century High King of Ireland who engineered military conquests. Naill's historical accomplishments remain in debate, but the myth of the warrior lives on.
O'Neal Sr. never met the man who gave him that name until he was 30 years old. That's one of the secrets he's learned in his trips back to Columbia, South Carolina, where he also learned he has more than 30 siblings with all kinds of last names.
His father went to prison, O'Neal Sr. said, and then tried to reinvent himself by changing his name to Clifford O'Neal. He fathered two sons, Clifford Jr. and Jermaine, but he only saw one of them born before disappearing again.
O'Neal Sr.'s mother was left to work multiple jobs as her son was growing into a frame that would soon jump from 6-2 to 6-9. His family owned little else, which made him feel something when his father finally called when he was 12 years old and promised to send him a Starter jacket.
O'Neal Sr. and his mother went and waited for it at the greyhound station as his father promised. The bus arrived, but the jacket never did.
So O'Neal Sr. stopped talking to his father. He zeroed in on basketball and that needed rhythm of a ball bouncing and soaring through a hoop. It's what had him skipping college and going straight to the NBA at age 17, becoming the youngest player to reach the league.
His father wasn't a part of any of it until the day when O'Neal Sr., at the age of 30, pulled up to a family reunion in South Carolina.
O'Neal Sr. introduced his two kids, 9-year-old Asjia and 3-year-old Jermaine Jr. Then he told Clifford Sr. that he was raising them the way his own father refused to all of his life.
His father said he understood. They took photos, and the group made plans to see each other soon. O'Neal Sr. would call him 'Pops,' because it was too late to become his father now, but he thought perhaps the two could at least become friends.
O'Neal Sr. returned home to Miami, where he was now playing with the Heat. He made plans to get Pops to a game of his, and then they'd go out and shop for a bunch of clothes to help get him on his feet.
Within weeks, a letter arrived in the mail. It was hand-written, front to back.
Pops started out positive with an update on his life. And then, O'Neal Sr. said, he asked for money, for himself and his pastor and his church.
And that's the final time they spoke.
A year later, O'Neal Sr. found out his father died in a car crash. And that's when more of the truth came out.
He has more than 30 siblings, his grandmother finally told him. In the years before and after he fathered O'Neal Sr., his father had been moving state to state and creating single mothers, leaving them to give their children their own last names.
He met 16 of them on a conference call after his father's death. Shortly after it started, awkward silence filled the air until O'Neal Sr. began to speak.
He told them he wasn't coming to the funeral, and he wasn't paying a single dollar for the man who never showed up for him.
He was still seething from the letter.
'I was crushed,' O'Neal Sr. said. 'That peace you finally get that you've been searching for for 30 years, it's almost like you go all the way back in regression to Day 1.'
'It's an equivalence to me,' he said, 'to the brawl.'
The brawl - that's where all this nostalgia and intensity and wonder about a name is steaming like a runaway train back to.
Moments after the tensions broke between the Pacers and Pistons in a Nov. 2004 game, after Ron Artest fouled Ben Wallace and Wallace shoved Artest and Artest sprawled out on the scorers' table and a cup of beer flew in and chaos emerged, O'Neal Sr. was escaping into a back tunnel away from the showers of popcorn and beer.
He spun around and turned back to the scene.
In his mind, he's been making that turn for the past 20 years.
That was the moment that the O'Neal name became a talking point for a generation. In a flash, a name his father made up and handed to him was in every corner of the news for months. He was in and out of court battles with the NBA, eventually appealing his suspension from 25 games down to 10. But a stigma lived on as he wasn't able to voice his side of the story, a perspective shut down for legal reasons.
And he feels like the Pacers never filled that silence either.
'The success that I had individually and, most importantly, the impact I had on the community, that was the part that crushed me,' said O'Neal Sr., who was given the NBA's Community Assist Award three times. 'You didn't have to worry about me going to jail. You didn't have to worry about me beating on a woman. You didn't have to worry about me doing drugs.
"… For whatever reason, it was as if I was criminalized for something that when you look at it, I would do it again if put in the exact same position."
That 2004-2005 season was supposed to be the ascension. O'Neal Sr. arrived via trade in 2001 from the Trail Blazers, where he was a first-round pick who sparingly played. Just 20 years old, he arrived as the star teammate to Reggie Miller following a sweep in the NBA Finals to the Lakers, who featured a fully realized warrior at the center position by the name of Shaquille O'Neal.
But O'Neal took off with the Pacers. He went from a full-time starter in his first year to the league's most improved player in his second to a third-team All-NBA pick in his third to finishing third in the league's MVP race in his fourth, when he averaged 20.1 points, 10 rebounds and 2.6 blocks and led the Pacers to a narrow loss in six games to the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Suddenly, the Pacers looked primed to take on the Pistons on the way to the franchise's first championship.
Then the brawl struck, and in a matter of minutes, a name and identity and career and championship window all changed forever. After Artest and Stephen Jackson rushed into the stands, O'Neal Sr. was on the court when the fans rushed in. He was the one rushing over to throw a punch at a fan who stepped over Anthony Johnson in the mayhem, but he slipped and didn't connect.
'Me and all the other wives are watching the game as it's unfolding, and I know him. I know he's a protector. I know all the attributes of his personality,' said his wife, Mesha O'Neal. 'When he's out there, I knew he was trying to protect his teammates and trying to protect whomever to make sure everyone's OK.
'He's lived in a fight-or-flight situation all of his life, so all he knows is survival.'
MORE:25 years later, Pacers back in NBA Finals: 'It's almost a replay of the way it felt in 2000'
He wore that valor on his sleeves, in those swats at the ball and screams into the crowd, so loud that Artest later admitted that he sprawled out on the scoring table knowing O'Neal Sr. would have his back.
"I couldn't go back and call my dad and say, 'Hey Dad, help me out. What should I do in this situation?' Or, 'How should I handle this?'" O'Neal Sr. said. "I never had that opportunity. Me learning how to do all the stuff I did was in real time, even when I failed."
O'Neal Sr. was initially suspended for 25 games, though he fought the appeals in court and won to cut to 10 games. But the toll of those suspensions and lost chemistry, including bans for Artest and Jackson, folded the 2004-2005 Pacers in before their title run began. They finished 44-38 with a second-round exit. Then Miller retired, Artest asked for a trade, and O'Neal's career would be changed forever.
That was the moment, he recalls, that the love dissipated from the game that changed his family's trajectory.
He hung on for 10 more years, including three with the Pacers, but none of them matched the MVP contending form he displayed at the ages of 25 and 26.
He spent his final six seasons with five different teams, on the move, searching for identity. The ties grew cosmic in time: In 2009, he was traded from the Raptors to the Heat to replace Shaquille O'Neal. Two years later, he agreed to become Shaquille O'Neal's backup on the Celtics, a team with an Irish leprechaun as its mascot.
He finished his career on a team called the Warriors.
He split himself between fatherhood and basketball constantly in those later years. They agreed to settle on a long-term home in Dallas, and O'Neal Sr. would only see them in offseasons in Las Vegas and other spare moments.
He kept powering on, because that's what the youngest player ever to enter the NBA was designed to do. As he fought through injuries that cost him 180 games over his final four seasons, his daughter, Asjia, would ask him why he doesn't just hang it up.
He told her some acts you can't quit on in this life. She'd remember that through two open-heart surgeries on the way to becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the Pro Volleyball Federation draft in 2023.
But not quitting is a far step from self-actualization, and he started to fear he threw that away with that attempted punch in Detroit.
He knew he was retiring before the Warriors lost in the first round of the 2015 playoffs, one year before they'd launch a dynasty. And when the final game ended, he returned to his hotel room, sprawled all 6 feet and 11 inches across the bed and cried out those 18 years.
His career has a through-line now that can be reduced simply to "before brawl" and "after brawl."
He says his request to be traded back to the Pacers during the 2011-2012 season, when Indiana broke into the Eastern Conference semifinals with an ascending 25-year-old center in Roy Hibbert, fell on deaf ears. He also said his request to sign a one-day contract to retire with the team was also met with radio silence.
For a man with the most blocks and All-Star appearances in franchise history, that silence hit like that greyhound bus that arrived without a Starter jacket.
And so for nearly 15 years, he'd live with hardly a shred of the Pacers in his everyday life. He didn't watch the games. His son grew up a big Warriors fan, with Steph Curry as his favorite player, since Golden State was the final team his father played for.
'The kid that wants to be appreciated or loved,' O'Neal Sr. said, 'doesn't want to have to tell the person to appreciate or love them.'
In a three-generation story of pain and love and success and abandonment and confusion, it took a pandemic to create the breakthrough that is happening now.
O'Neal Sr. was five years into retirement, now in full-time father mode.
O'Neal Jr. was also stuck at home, now in middle school and in search of where his passions could lie. He'd experiment in an in-home gym, where basketball was becoming both a strength and an interest.
He credits 'The Last Dance' for that, as ESPN's 10-part series on Michael Jordan's final season with the Bulls arrived in the pandemic and hit a kid who used to bury his head in his iPad instead of watching his father's games. Through Jordan's battles with management to his grating moments with teammates to his push to play through injury and sickness, the series documented his all-gas, no-breaks pursuit of a second three-peat. It's the story of how Jordan cemented himself at the time as the greatest player to ever, now with a name so enduring that one of the biggest actors in Hollywood must now go by "Michael B. Jordan."
They'd watch the episodes together and then put in two or three workouts in the full-court gym in their home. In time away from those dribbles, O'Neal Jr. looked forward to what his legacy could look like, and O'Neal Sr. would look back at what his was and still could be.
'I went from kind of liking it to loving it," O'Neal Jr. said of those times. "I couldn't go a single day without constantly touching a basketball. And now, it's all I do and think about.'
O'Neal Sr.'s attempts to turn the inspiration of the documentary into something tangible and real were more challenging. He wanted closure on the brawl, but each time he'd meet with an interested network or producer, he didn't feel like they were after the same serious conversation he wanted to have.
But one day, he received a call from a random number promising a package to his house.
What arrived was a flash drive with hours of footage surrounding the brawl. It had the newscasts that everyone saw and so much more, including court documents and security footage that showed every angle of the moment, including O'Neal Sr.'s perspective, with the fans rushing down toward him. They were clips that never made it on a newscast but became central to the criminal investigation that found that the fans were the aggressors and not the players.
'It was very hard to watch it,' Mesha O'Neal said, 'especially when we found out they had so many things to show a different side and chose not to. That was the most hurtful part for me.'
O'Neal Jr. estimates he watched the footage 19 different times. He cried through several of them. And he was felt something each time a newscast made reference to the "thug" culture of the players involved.
"It was very racist, to be honest," O'Neal Sr. said. "Let's just call it what it what it is."
With all the time in the world in a pandemic, and on the heels of a documentary that defined Jordan's time in the game, O'Neal Sr. pushed forward on a memory he had suppressed for so long. He became an executive producer of Netflix's documentary, 'Untold: Malice at the Palace,' which would show all this footage and the reflections of the players involved for the first time.
Miller reached the Hall of Fame and is still a legend in Indianapolis. Jackson would go on to win a championship with the Spurs, and Artest would do so with the Lakers.
The one still grasping for resolution was O'Neal Sr.
"The responsibility of carrying that team and being a leader was all on him, and it wasn't his fault,' Jackon said in the documentary, 'but he got blamed for it."
The documentary was released in 2021, a seminal time in the arc of the two men who shared this made-up name. As O'Neal Sr. released, O'Neal Jr. began an ascent. He fell in love with basketball, to the point where, when his local high school wouldn't let underclassmen play varsity, his father decided to invest $14 million in a program to create a different path.
Drive Nation, a business Jermaine Sr. and Mesha run together, was launched to create a space for Asjia and Jermaine Jr. to grow in their respective sports of volleyball and basketball, but it was about more than that, too. O'Neal Sr. wanted an outlet where, for many kids, he could become all the things he wished people saw in him when that punch nearly missed. This past year, that meant managing 12 student athletes.
The year the Netflix documentary was released, he had a center join the program named Jaden Toombs, who grew up with a single mother working in West Texas.
O'Neal Sr. offered him into his home, and Toombs accepted.
Now, Toombs, a four-star prospect at 6-9 and 245 pounds, wants to emulate everything he sees from O'Neal Sr.'s NBA career.
'I'm glad God told him that I needed help and led me in the right direction," Toombs said. "He changed my whole life. ... He just looks out in a way that nobody has really looked out for me."
O'Neal Jr. has grown to be a 6-3 wing player who turns steals into smooth offense. Toombs has become the post force for blocks and post-ups that the older O'Neal knows so well.
Next season, they'll play together at Southern Methodist University. Just 20 minutes from home, it's a chance to create something new at a school that just joined the Atlantic Coast Conference but has not reached the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament since 1967, or 11 years before O'Neal Sr. was born.
'There's no history behind my name there since he didn't go to college," O'Neal Jr. said. "It's a good step for me to create my own legacy."
They have no time to waste, which is why the older O'Neal cut into his son so deep after their final game together. It cuts into the only regret he said he has from his NBA career.
"Even though I played 18 years, time is when you have the moment when you're at the very best of your career and you're considered one of the very best at what you do and thinking this is going to happen year after year after year. That you'll be in the conference finals or NBA Finals year after year," O'Neal Sr. said.
"Anything can happen: fired coach, brawl, trades, mayhem."
It's why he won't let up with O'Neal Jr. Why he can't. He's living this basketball life over again, this time as the father.
'I need to build this warrior," O'Neal Sr. said.
Their final tournament together ended in a blowout loss, with O'Neal Jr. on the bench, with all of it broadcast to ESPN.
His father felt the effects of what it's like to chase a documentary like 'The Last Dance' and realize the impossibility of building movies in real-time. But on his drive away, Mesha told him he's done everything he could for these kids.
That had him writing his own letter to his son that night:
'My son,' O'Neal Sr. started out in a lengthy Instagram post, 'As I write this with tears in my eyes, I just want to take a moment to tell you how incredibly proud I am of the young man you've become on the court, off the court, and in life.
"… As you prepare for your next chapter, I have no doubt you'll build your own stardom – on your terms, in your way. … This is just the beginning.'
Their dream, built on those days in the home gym and those nights watching 'The Last Dance" and the footage from the brawl, is about more than replicating the career of a six-time All-Star.
They're shooting higher than that.
It's a tough bar for a kid to climb. The O'Neals only ever called him "Jermaine," or sometimes "little Jermaine" to others, resisting the move to "Junior" or a nickname.
This spring, little Jermaine opened up to big Jermaine about what that pressure had done to his life.
'These past two years have been the most pressure,' O'Neal Jr. said. 'That's finally when the real lights turn on. College is looming over your head. NBA scouts are talking. It's that pressure of seeing, 'Will I become close to where he was? Better? Or will I fall?''
That's where this became a two-man pursuit. A father and his only son are locked by a name now, with a past and a future on the line together.
'People are going to talk about where I'm going to end up, if I'm going to end up just as good as my dad, not as good, or ways, ways above him," O'Neal Jr. said.
"I think it'll be ways, ways above him because I'll learn from the mistakes he's made.'
This is the fire they stoked in Indianapolis this spring. It's how they begin to rewrite what the two decades before them did to their name across the sport.
And it's what brought O'Neal Sr. back to this place, his son's birthplace, where had he hid from for so long. The Pacers reached out to invite him back to Indianapolis for the Eastern Conference Finals.
He sat behind the bench, called out to Tyrese Haliburton to be a leader and felt something when a hand appeared on his back.
It was Rick Carlisle, his coach from the Pacers days, and from the brawl.
O'Neal Sr. paused to wipe a tear from his eye.