Historical Meet-Ups

Shaquille O’Neal
Freakishly tall rim rocker

meets

Marilyn Manson
Freakishly pale shock rocker

On Saturday, January 6, 1996, a massive blizzard struck the east coast of the United States, stranding airline travelers up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Among those rerouted were Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, and the other members of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, who were en route to a game in Philadelphia but instead found themselves marooned in a hotel in Allentown, Pennsylvania for the duration of the weekend. As fate would have it, fright-wigged industrial rock frontman Marilyn Manson and his eponymous band were stuck in the same hotel, having wrapped up a gig in an Allentown club just hours before the storm hit. Also stranded were a Polish wedding party, NFL Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas’ niece, and the traveling cast of Sesame Street Live. The entire motley assemblage soon convened in the hotel sports bar, Trophies—a scene that O’Neal’s backup Jon Koncak likened to the cantina sequence in Star Wars. “It was the Twilight Zone, man,” marveled Koncak, who somehow mistook Manson and his crew for the much more interesting band Nine Inch Nails. “A bunch of basketball players, Sesame Street, and some guy with green hair dressed like the grim reaper, chain-smoking. You needed a video camera to believe it. I’m still trying to deal with it.” Not everyone was quite so captivated. “I’m pretty sure this is Hell,” Magic assistant coach Richie Adubato declared of the sojourn, upon sighting one of the Goth-attired Manson bandmates in a hotel hallway. While his Magic teammates whiled away the hours eating cheeseburgers, playing darts, and shooting pool, the 7’2” O’Neal quickly became the life of the party, signing autographs for a steady parade of local gawkers and astonished hotel guests. At one point, egged on by the Sesame Street Live cast, Shaq began singing the show’s theme song over and over again. Only the wintry weather seemed to harsh Shaq’s mellow. “The people are nice,” he remarked of Pennsylvania’s industrial heartland. “But I’m a tropical black man.”

Of all the bonds he forged that weekend, however, none was more meaningful than the one he shared with Marilyn Manson. “He was a nice guy,” the budding NBA superstar later recalled, and surprisingly “normal” in polite conversation. While the details of their colloquy weren’t revealed, O’Neal did promise to tell all one day in the form of a book-length reminiscence entitled Trapped in Allentown. Manson has never spoken publicly about the encounter, which took place just nine months before the release of the band’s breakthrough album Antichrist Superstar. But he evidently had a premonition of future success. When it came time to part company, Manson sidled up to Shaq with a prescient exhortation. “Remember my name,” he told The Diesel. “I’m gonna be famous.”