Personal Life
O'Neal is a Muslim. He married Shaunie Nelson on December 26, 2002. The couple have four children (Shareef, Amirah, Shaqir, and Me'arah), and Nelson has one son from a previous relationship (Myles). O'Neal also has a daughter from a previous relationship (Taahirah).
On September 4, 2007, O'Neal filed for divorce from Shaunie in a Miami-Dade Circuit court. Shaunie later said that the couple had gotten back together and that the divorce was withdrawn. However, on November 10, 2009, Shaunie filed an intent to divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. In summer 2010, O'Neal began dating reality TV star Nikki "Hoopz" Alexander. The couple resided at O'Neal's home in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
O'Neal is a 2009 inductee of the New Jersey Hall of Fame. O'Neal became a freemason in 2011 after becoming a member of Widow's Son Lodge No. 28 in Boston.
In his mansion in Orlando, Florida, O'Neal built a homemade movie theater with two rows of five retractable chairs, Superman lights, another Superman symbol on the floor, a big screen, another Superman symbol on his blanket, and 5.1 surround sound. O'Neal also created an indoor basketball court.
When Hall of Fame center George Mikan died in June 2005, O'Neal extended an offer to his family to pay all of the funeral expenses, which they accepted.
Read more about this topic: Shaquille O'Neal
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)