Shaquille O’Neal on Mentoring WNBA’s Angel Reese & Lauren Betts

Shaquille O'Neal has taken on a role that does not come with a stat line: mentor. He has been guiding Angel Reese and, more recently, Lauren Betts, whom he brought under the Reebok umbrella. Asked how the two are settling in, with Reese in Atlanta and Betts in Washington, O'Neal kept it simple.

"They are having fun. They are playing fabulous. They are both determined to do great things," he said. "And I just stay out of their way."

That last part is the whole philosophy. For O'Neal, mentoring is not micromanaging.

"They have my number. They know if they need me, they can call me," he said. The rest is theirs to work out. Sometimes, he explained, you just have to let people figure it out on their own.

He speaks from experience, or really from the lack of it. O'Neal said he came up by himself, with no one to call when he needed advice. He taught himself by trial and error, including in front of a microphone. Say something that lands wrong, delete it and move on. Say something that works, keep doing it. Sometimes you just have to teach yourself.

The hands-off approach has its limits, though, and they show up the moment someone comes after his players.

"I wish I could punch some of these guys in their face that just pick on my Angel and pick on my Lauren," O'Neal said, "but I have to be professional."

That protectiveness is why he was one of the first to back Reese publicly, and he did not soften the reasoning. O'Neal sees a media ecosystem that rewards noise. His complaint is with what he described as amateurs flooding the profession, people who say stuff off the wall and then push hot topics on their own pages to chase followers.

"It's just a lot of nonsense," he said, "a lot of embarrassing and a lot of bullying." Then he drew a hard line on where it crosses over. "Guys bullying guys is fine, but I can't let you just bully females just so you can get likes."

For all his willingness to step in, O'Neal made a point of crediting Reese for handling herself. "Angel has a great way of standing up for herself, and I really respect that about her," he said. The mentor's job, in those moments, is to talk her down. He tells her to let it go, to not respond, that he has it covered.