Shaquille O'Neal's Epic Fall

About

Shaquille O’Neal’s Epic Fall, also known as #ShaqtinaFall, is a photoshop meme based on a still image of former professional basketball player Shaquielle O’Neal falling on to the set floor during a televised broadcast in May 2015.

Origin

On May 6th, 2015, retired professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal tripped over a wire on the set of the TNT sports television show Halftime Report (shown below).

That day, O’Neal tweeted^[1] a photoshopped screen capture of the fall of himself being tackled by a professional wrestler, along with an announcement that whoever posts the “best meme” out of the incident with the hashtag “#ShaqtinaFall” would received $500 (shown below). In the first 48 hours, the tweet gathered upwards of 13,000 retweets and 11,600 favorites.

Spread

Also on May 6th, Redditor chanandlerer posted a video of the fall to the /r/nba subreddit, where it gained over 5,000 votes (96% upvoted) and 820 comments over the next 48 hours. Meanwhile, the @SBNation^[3] Twitter feed tweeted a photoshopped picture of Shaw on the ground with the character Simba from the 1994 Disney animated children’s film The Lion King (shown below).

On May 7th, O’Neal tweeted a video of comedian Kevin Hart performing a stand-up bit in which he says “Shaq, when you fall during the games it’s the funniest shit I’ve ever seen in my life” (shown below). In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the photoshop meme, including The Daily Mail,^[4]ABC^[5] and E! Online.^[6]