Being an incorrigible sociopath, I’m generally not a fan of the character profile pieces that pop up in the tabloids every now and then. Something about the Boston Herald’s fluffy article on Glen "Big Baby" Davis, however, kept me reading right into the second page, where I discovered something I’m deeply ashamed I didn’t know before.

It turns out that some eight or nine years ago Big Baby (back then just the "Moderately Large Baby") was taken by his AAU coach to visit Shaquille O’Neal at his home. Nothing strange so far. Here’s where it gets weird, though:

I was 14 or 15, and I went to his house and I was hanging with Shaq," Davis says. "He says to me, ‘Let’s go outside and wrestle.’

It gets better.

"We started wrestling. I pinned him down. He couldn’t budge me."

If in your mind’s eye you now have an image of a millionaire athlete squirming beneath a tubby, confused teenager in his backyard, I apologise. Amazingly, Shaq corroborates the account, also adding the detail that the rassling was more lucha libre than Greco Roman.

"He picked me up and body-slammed me," says Shaq. "That’s when I knew he was for real."

There’s no good way to end this article (and I use that term very loosely), so I propose that we all go our separate ways at the end of this sentence.



