Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald reports:
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“The problem is that I’ve never been a player who complained or let people know how bad things were,” O’Neal said. “You get guys who are hurt and they try to play and it’s, ‘Oh, I didn’t play well because I was hurt.’ I wasn’t that player.
“I played almost two years with a torn meniscus. I tore my meniscus twice, and I never said anything because my team was going through so much and I felt like the city of Indianapolis needed any positive notion that they could get. I played through it. Nobody knows about me having to wear the big compression (clothes) just to walk around and me not being able to practice before I played in the games. People don’t know about that. Nobody knows about me taking 10 Advil a day and then having to get my liver and kidney checked. People don’t know about that.
“People always judge and they don’t know about anything that was going on on the inside. One thing I can say – and anybody can say from any team I’ve ever played on – is that when I get out there I’m going to play as hard as I possibly can, whether it’s on one leg or two legs or whatever. In the last three years of my deal, people were saying, ‘Oh, he’s not worth it.’ But I was still hurt.”
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