As a four-time NBA champion, Shaquille O’Neal knows a thing or two about rings. He also knows how to pay his blessings forward to other deserving people. Both of these things converged when Shaq decided to pay off a man’s engagement ring debt.
On Tuesday’s edition of NBA on TNT, Shaq dissected a viral video of him in an Atlanta-area Zales. O’Neal explained that he went into the store to buy some earrings when he heard a man paying off the debt of his engagement ring.
“I was like, ‘My man, how much is the ring?’ I’m not going to say the amount, but it’s not a lot for me,” Shaq said. “I was like, ‘You know what? Tell your girlfriend I got her. I’ll take care of it.’”
Shaq went on to detail how the man was hesitant to take the money at first, but O’Neal explained to him that he does this on a daily basis just to make people smile.
“At first, he didn’t want to take it. He was like, ‘Man, I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I do it all the time,’” Shaq assured him. “I’m just trying to make people smile, that’s all.”
Philanthropy and charitable acts are second nature to the Big Aristotle. In 2019, Shaq donated an entire house to a child who was paralyzed during a shooting in Atlanta.
We found [Isaiah’s mother, Allison Wood] a house in College Park in a nice area,” O’Neal told the local NBC affiliate. Shaq also said he’s going to furnish the home and pay the family’s rent for a year, saying it’s “sad because her son is paralyzed from the chest down and no mother should have to go [through] that.”
