FINDING FATHERHOOD

PROVIDED BY O’NEAL FAMILY 

Former Pacers star Jermaine O’Neal and his son, Jermaine O'Neal Jr.

O’Neal opens up on his past, a brawl and drive to become a great dad

15 Jun 2025 - The Indianapolis Star - USA TODAY NETWORK

Nate Atkins

Jermaine O’Neal Sr. can spot a volcano ready to erupt. He’s staring out through black-rimmed glasses with his arms crossed from the sideline of Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers as his only son fights through a national championship quarterfinal game. Jermaine O’Neal Jr. is playing with a turbo on his back in his first, and potentially final, game in the shadow of the city where he was born and where his father was a star with the Pacers for eight seasons. In the first half, that juice spills into three fouls with Dynamic Prep on the ropes in what’s supposed to be the first of four games on a run to the Chipotle National Championship. So, the older O’Neal pulls his son to let the volcano build, one expletive on the bench at a time. Then he has a message to deliver, to his son and his teammates. “We’re into whooping ass by what we do,” O’Neal Sr. said, “not by what we say.”

Moments later, that volcano is erupting. Except this time, O’Neal Jr. is riding the lava. He steals a ball while in man coverage and slaloms through the defense before going hard into contact and laying the ball in. He steals another possession from the low block. And then he drills a corner 3 that gets the public address announcer screaming. “Jermaine… O’Neal… Junior!”

They walk off the court together after a 19-point victory, and the older O’Neal tells the younger one this is the proudest he’s ever been of him.

But the truth about pressure is it isn’t so easy to control. It needs the right level of gas, released at just the right dial. And by the end of this four-day tournament against many of the best recruits in the country, the younger O’Neal is running out of it. He tries guarding the Boozer twins, Cameron and Cayden, with tight coverage on the perimeter until they start to make plays. His shot starts falling short. And then he’s passing them up entirely.

The older O’Neal has a choice to make. He pulls his son to the bench to sit out the final quarter of his high school career in a blowout loss.

Afterward, O’Neal Sr. speaks to the entire team and cuts right into his son:

“Jermaine,” the 46-year-old coach said from the locker room. “You never engaged yourself. Missing shots cannot allow you to check out of the game.”

Then he tells all of his players to write this moment down, to remember how they got bullied into embarrassment in their final game together. There’s anger and disappointment in his voice, mere hours after the players told their coach, “We’ve got you,” in the state where his name is supposed to mean something.

“I feel like we let him down,” star forward Jayden Toombs would say later.

This isn’t a fairytale, not for O’Neal Sr., not for his team and not for the son he gave the same name. This is a journey, through fatherhood and basketball, back to the place where a brawl changed everything.

It has healing scars and open wounds and lingering questions.

“Anxiety takes over,” O’Neal Sr. told his team that day. “Until you are willing to conquer that demon, you can never win.”

A trail of promises

These are the moments, with a son and with basketball, that the older O’Neal once begged for. That’s why he can’t sugarcoat them. It’s why he stopped playing 11 years ago and why he keeps coaching now, why he’s pumped $14 million into building Dynamic Prep and, ultimately, why he wound up back in Indiana, or the place where this winding journey really got going.

It was 19 years ago this month that O’Neal Sr.’s second child and first son entered the world. He came out in the delivery room with immaculate size, which only made the reality more jarring: His left side was sunken in, and the terror spread from the faces of his parents to those of the nurses before he was whisked away, and all O’Neal Sr. remembers hearing was, “collapsed lung.”

He stormed out into the hallway and then into the streets, pushing past people asking for photographs of the now five-time Pacers All-Star. He drove for a bit but eventually stopped, as the rotations of the tires only further turned the wheels in his mind fearing a truth that had haunted him for a year and a half now, ever since the brawl.

“I felt like God was punishing me,” O’Neal Sr. said. “What did I do wrong?”

The answers weren’t coming, only the tears. With his car parked in a cul-de-sac, he called out.

“I remember asking God: ‘Let him live, and I’m going to be a certain way,” O’Neal said.

He wanted to be everything his own father never was.

He wanted that so badly that when he got the news that his son was going to make it through, he passed along the name, Jermaine O’Neal.

And here’s the most ironic part: The name was never his father’s to give away. He made it up after he was released from prison.

But it’s the only thing he could remember his father ever giving him directly, and that acknowledgement only threw a door back open to pain. Suddenly he sees a 12-year-old version of himself, talking on the phone for the first time with a father who threatened to kill him and his mother when O’Neal Sr. was in the womb.

But here, his father is promising a new way. He wants a relationship with his son, and he wants to prove his love to him. So, he’s sending a starter jacket to him on a greyhound bus. O’Neal Sr. tells all of his friends. He’s about to go from a poor kid to the cool one in school.

He and his mother go and wait at the greyhound station, but the jacket never arrives. And then his father has disappeared again.

SAM RICHE/INDIANAPOLIS STAR, FILE - The Pacers’ Jermaine O'Neal, right, 

gets the better of the Pistons’ Ben Wallace with this block in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals on May 28, 2004, at The Palace of Auburn Hills in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

A letter of pain

Eighteen years would pass until O’Neal Sr. would hear from his father again.

He showed up to a family reunion in South Carolina and the moment he saw him, he knew what this was.

He introduced his two kids, 9-year-old Asjia and 3year-old Jermaine Jr. Then he told his father that he was raising them the way he refused to all of his life.

His dad said he understood. And suddenly, a sliver of tension faded away. They took photos, and O’Neal Sr. and his father made plans to see each other soon. He’d call him “Pops,” because it was too late to become his father now, but he thought perhaps the two could become friends.

He returned home to Miami, where he was now playing with the Heat. He made plans to get Pops to a game of his, and then they’d go out and shop for a bunch of clothes to help get him on his feet.

For the first time since he went looking for the starter jacket, he was excited about the relationship. And then a letter arrived in the mail. It was hand-written, front to back.

Pops started out positive with an update on his life. And then he asked for money, for himself and his pastor and his church.

And that’s the final time they ever spoke.

A year later, O’Neal Sr. found out his father died in a car crash. And that’s when more of the truth came out.

He has more than 30 siblings, his grandmother finally told him. In the years before and after he fathered O’Neal Sr., Pops had been moving state to state and creating single mothers, leaving them to give their children their own last names.

He met 16 of them on a conference call after his father’s death. Shortly after it started, awkward silence filled the air until O’Neal Sr. began to speak.

He told them he wasn’t coming to the funeral, and he wasn’t paying a single dollar for the man who never showed up for him.

He was still seething from the letter, and though he’d thrown it away by now, those two pages rattled in his mind and in his soul.

“I was crushed,” O’Neal Sr. said. “That peace you finally get that you’ve been searching for for 30 years, it’s almost like you go all the way back in regression to Day 1.”

He remembers feeling that in one other space of his life.

“It’s an equivalence to me,” he said, “to the brawl.” If you want to know why Jermaine O’Neal Sr. left the Pacers and why he disappeared in the years since his 2014 retirement from the Warriors, the answers still live in that night and the punch he nearly threw during a game against the Pistons in 2004.

In a flash, a name his father made up and handed to him was in every corner of the news for months. He was in and out of court battles with the NBA, eventually appealing his suspension from 25 games down to 10. But a stigma lived on as he wasn’t able to voice his side of the story, a perspective shut down for legal reasons.

And he feels like the Pacers never quite filled that silence either.

“The success that I had individually and, most importantly, the impact I had on the community, that was the part that crushed me,” O’Neal Sr. said. “You didn’t have to worry about me going to jail. You didn’t have to worry about me beating on a woman. You didn’t have to worry about me doing drugs.

“Everything I was, I wanted my kids to see that so they can be better than that, not be in a place where you take a situation and now I’m some sort of criminal.”

The 2004-2005 season disintegrated on O’Neal and the Pacers. A title favorite fell from 61 wins and a narrow loss in the Eastern Conference Finals the year before to 44-38. A first-round exit then ended Reggie Miller’s 18-year Hall-of-Fame career.

“That cup of beer changed everything,” Miller said in the Netflix documentary, “Untold: Malice at the Palace.”

O’Neal Sr. went from a third-place MVP finish the previous year to a career-high 24.3 points per game but played just 44 total games due to the suspension and injuries.

“The responsibility of carrying that team and being a leader was all on him, and it wasn’t his fault,” former Pacers forward Stephen Jackson said of O’Neal Sr. in the documentary.

“But he got blamed for it.”

The Pacers later traded O’Neal Sr. to the Raptors. When his career was in its 16th year, he requested through his agent to return to Indianapolis to become a mentor off the bench to a team that had just broken through to the Eastern semifinals with a first-time AllStar big man in Roy Hibbert, but the request went ignored.

He’d leave as the team’s all-time leading shot blocker, a mark later surpassed by Myles Turner. He still has the most All-Star appearances of any player in franchise history with six.

But his jersey isn’t hanging in the rafters, and he doesn’t see his name in Hall-of-Fame discussions, and it’s hard not to see the missing ingredients in that disruption in his career-best season at age 26.

“Even though I played 18 years, time is when you have the moment when you’re at the very best of your career and you’re considered one of the very best at what you do and thinking this is going to happen year after year after year. That you’ll be in the conference finals or NBA Finals year after year,” O’Neal Sr. said.

“Anything can happen: fired coach, brawl, trades, mayhem.”

In his final season in the NBA in 2013-2014, he asked through his agent if he could sign a one-day contract to retire in Indianapolis. “Even though I played 18 years, time is when you have the moment when you’re at the very best of your career and you’re considered one of the very best at what you do and thinking this is going to happen year after year after year. That you’ll be in the conference finals or NBA Finals year after year. Aything can happen: fired coach, brawl, trades, mayhem.”

Jermaine O’Neal Sr.

Once again, he was met with radio silence. “The kid that wants to be appreciated or loved doesn’t want to have to tell the person to appreciate or love them,” O’Neal Sr. said.

A journey back together

The abandonment has followed him everywhere. Initially, it chased him from the sport, as he passed on signing deals with the Warriors and Mavericks in 2015 to return to Dallas to raise his growing family.

But now, it has brought him back.

O’Neal Jr. didn’t take to basketball when his father was playing. It never felt like a game he could make his own, and when he’d come to his dad’s games, O’Neal Sr. would spot him on an iPad instead of watching him play.

But after O’Neal Sr. retired, a spark started to ignite. O’Neal Jr. was at least willing to play, with his dad coaching his teams in elementary school. Then COVID-19 arrived in 2020, with O’Neal Jr. in middle school, and they spent their days of quarantine in an in-home gym, practicing up to three times a day.

“I couldn’t go a single day without constantly touching a basketball,” O’Neal Jr. said. “And now, it’s all I do and think about.”

Those days of the pandemic were also about his father coming to grips with the moment that twisted their name for the world.

After years of meeting with producers who wanted to chronicle the Pacers-Pistons brawl, he feared that nobody quite understood the serious conversations he wanted to have about the moment. This wasn’t about fondly looking back or cracking jokes after years went by. It needed to be about speaking perspective into an issue that lacked his for so many years.

One day, he received a phone call from an associate of someone who used to work at ESPN and TNT. He was told to expect a package in the mail.

Sure enough, a box arrived with an orange thumb drive. And on it were hours upon hours of security footage, of newscasts, of debate shows, of court documents related to the brawl.

That kickstarted a documentary through Netflix called “Untold: Malice at the Palace,” in which O’Neal Sr. served as an executive producer. He estimates that he watched the documentary 19 times, with 12 coming in the uncut versions, breaking into tears more times than he could count.

It brought them all back to a moment that needed resolution. The one he worked through without a father, without college, all in real time against the unpredictable.

“Me and all the other wives are watching the game as it’s unfolding, and I know him. I know he’s a protector. I know all the attributes of his personality,” said his wife, Mesha O’Neal. “When he’s out there, I knew he was trying to protect his teammates and trying to protect whomever to make sure everyone’s OK.

“He’s lived in a fight-or-flight situation all of his life, so all he knows is survival.”

Watching the clips back changed something in the memory for O’Neal Sr. This was no longer a nightmare to suppress. It was a window into the father he would become from then on out.

Less than two years after the brawl, he passed his made-up name onto a son. Together, they’d live in and shed together a reputation tied to a single moment in the highlight era of sports. And they’d do it on the kind of court where that moment took a life of its own.

This spring, between the games leading up to the Chipotle National Tournament, it was O’Neal Jr.’s time to open up to his dad.

“These past two years have been the most pressure,” O’Neal Jr. says now. “That’s finally when the real lights turn on. College is looming over your head. NBA scouts are talking.

“It’s that pressure of seeing, ‘Will I become close to where he was? Better? Or will I fall?’”

That’s the question he’ll tackle at SMU, less than a half hour away from that shadow.

He’s 6-foot-3, a four-star recruit of a completely different style than his 6-11 father. O’Neal Jr. just led one of the nation’s best high school basketball teams in scoring, all while being most known for his ability to guard five different positions.

He’s not going straight to the NBA, the way his father did as a first-round draft pick, then the youngest player ever to reach the professional ranks at age 17. That difference means everything to him now. “There’s no history behind my name there since he didn’t go to college,” O’Neal Jr. said. “It’s a good step for me to create my own legacy and to build off that in the NBA. He went into the NBA as a young kid who people didn’t believe in, this that and the third. I believe I can go to college, create my own hype and then do that in the NBA.”

“People are going to talk about where I’m going to end up, if I’m going to end up just as good as my dad, not as good, or ways, ways above him. I think it’ll be ways, ways above him because I’ll learn from the mistakes he’s made.”

That is the dream they share, the one they chased with stares and screams at the Chipotle National Tournament, the one that has a son in Las Vegas for the final 55 days of his high school life, perfecting a sport he didn’t even enjoy until his father came home to show it to him.

And it’s the one that brought them back to Indianapolis one more time, to Game 3 of the NBA Finals, in the days leading up to Father’s Day. It was O’Neal Jr.’s first Pacers game since he was 8 years old. It was one of his father’s first as a dedicated fan.

But it’s a door that opened through healing, reflection, time and understanding. The older O’Neal felt that when he came back for the Pacers’ Eastern Conference Finals Game 4 win over the Knicks, and he felt a hand on his back, only to turn around and see Rick Carlisle with a smile.

O’Neal Sr. pauses to wipe a tear from his eye. “I think I’m at peace now,” he said. “I think I’m at peace.”