On a recent appearance on the “All The Smoke” podcast hosted by Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, “NBA On TNT” personality Kenny Smith talked about how he and Charles Barkley always give Shaquille O’Neal the blues for making mistakes on set.
Smith recalled one particular incident that set the tone and raised the bar for Shaq as a responsible media personality.
So Shaq comes on the show,” said Smith. “He said something like, ‘DeAndre Jordan needs to,’ and DeAndre is not playing tonight. So me and Charles, because we sit next to each other, he’s hitting me and I’m hitting him. We gonna get his ass today. So we’re just lighting into him. Oh, you don’t know this, so now we’re saying stuff about the game because we know he didn’t watch.”
“The Jet” as he’s affectionately known continued:
So then our producer comes downstairs and he’s like, ‘What the f*** is going on? Y’all giving him a hard time, you embarrassing him on our national TV.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa, since when don’t we make fun of each other when you don’t know the s**t?’ Then the producer goes like, ‘You’re right. Go get him. From that day on, he turned. He’s like, ‘I gotta be on point.’”
Shaq And Barkley Get Into It Routinely
While the entire cast gets into the nightly ribbing, Shaq and Barkley have almost come to blows on a few occasions. Who can forget their on court fight back in 1999. Or the time things got so heated that the pair’s moms had to intervene. Just so happens their mothers are good friends.
A lot of their back-and-forth tends to stem from Shaq always taunting Barkley for not winning an NBA championship, while he has four. Barkley always responds that O’Neal rode the coattails of the late, great Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade to win his titles.
Barkley is always saying he never had the help. Barkley even rattles Kenny’s cage at times, saying the former standout guard rode NBA great Hakeem Olajuwon to get his two NBA titles. The two alpha males seem to look for every opportunity to be at each other’s throat.
For more on Shaq, Chuck, Kenny and their non-stop comedy routine while covering NBA basketball, click here
