A man-child in lotusland; inside the big world of Shaquille O'Neal.

Shaquille O'Neal, the Los Angeles Lakers center, lives, during the basketball season, in a large cream-colored mansion at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills. The exterior of O'Neal's house is discreetly opulent, and it is not until you approach the double front doors that you notice, etched in the glass, two large Superman symbols. The first superhero that O'Neal ever felt an affinity with was the Incredible Hulk, because, as he told me recently, "he was big and green." The young O'Neal knew what it was to be a physical oddity; when he was five years old, his mother was obliged to carry her son's birth certificate with her around their home town of Newark, New Jersey, to prove to bus drivers that he was not eight or nine. Somewhere around the age of seven, O'Neal switched over to Superman, and now, at the age of thirty, his allegiance is steady.

Today, O'Neal, who is seven feet one, has a Superman "S" tattooed on his left biceps, and when he slams the ball into the basket with a particularly incontrovertible defiance at the Staples Center, the Lakers' home court, the Superman theme is played over the loudspeakers. The Superman logo is engraved in the headlights of his silver Mercedes, one of about fifteen cars and trucks he owns. More than five hundred framed Superman comic-book covers hang on the wall of a corridor in his off-season house, in Orlando, where he also has a vintage Superman pinball machine. For a while, he had a Superman bedspread on his bed. O'Neal considers it lucky that he shares a first initial with Superman. "The only reason I call myself Superman is that it starts with 'S,' " he says. "If my name was Tim, I couldn't be Superman. It wouldn't look right."

One of O'Neal's grandmothers died recently, and at her funeral he contemplated the design of his own final resting place. "I started to think about what my mausoleum would look like, and I thought it should be all marble, with Superman logos everywhere," he told me. "There would be stadium seating, and only my family would have the key, and they would be able to go in there and sit down, like in a little apartment. My grave would be right there, and there would be a TV showing, like, an hour-long video of who I was."

O'Neal considers himself to have a dual nature. "Shaquille is corporate, nice-looking, soft-spoken, wears suits, and is very cordial to people, whereas Shaq is the dominant athlete who is the two-time champion," he told me. "They are the same person, but it's kind of like Clark Kent and Superman. During the day, I am Shaquille, and at night I am Shaq." O'Neal also has a nemesis, an evil twin, whom he calls Elliuqahs Laeno. "That's my name spelled backward," he said. "That's the person that I am not allowed to be because of my status. He does what a normal young rich guy would do -- party, hang out, use bad language. He stays out all night, tries to practice the next day, isn't focussed. That is him. He's dead, though. I killed him off."

We were talking in a back office at the Lakers' training facility, in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles, after O'Neal had come off the court from an afternoon practice. His skin was tide-marked with drying sweat, and he sat with his legs spread wide, like those riders on the New York subway who laugh in the face of the one-man-one-seat convention. O'Neal, who weighs somewhere around three hundred and forty pounds, would need at least three seats, and perhaps four. His identification with Superman is based on his sense of himself as a crusading force for good -- good being, for the moment, the continued success of the Los Angeles Lakers, who are currently in the N.B.A. playoffs -- but it is also grounded in a sense of physical supremacy.

O'Neal is one of the largest men alive. He wears size-22 basketball shoes, which are made for him by a company called Starter; they are all white and finished with a shiny gloss, reminiscent, in their sheen and size, of the hull of a luxury yacht. (When the Lakers' equipment manager, a rotund man in the mid-five-foot range named Rudy Garciduenas, carries the shoes into the locker room before a game, he cradles them in gentle arms, as if he were the nursemaid of Otus and Ephialtes, the twin giant sons of Poseidon.) O'Neal's cars must have their interiors ripped out and their seats moved back ten inches before he is able to drive them. (His most recent acquisition is a Ferrari Spider convertible, a birthday gift from his father that was, as he pointed out to reporters in the Lakers' locker room one night, bought with his own earnings. O'Neal's Spider has its top down permanently, since he's too big for the convertible to convert.) O'Neal's pants have an outside seam of four feet six and a half inches. He has never encountered a hotel-room showerhead that was high enough for him to stand under, an inconvenience for a man who spends months at a time on the road. When he speaks on a cell phone, he holds it in front of his mouth and talks into it as if it were a walkie-talkie, and then swivels it up to his ear to listen, as if the phone were a tiny planet making a quarter orbit around the sun of his enormous head.

O'Neal isn't the tallest player in the N.B.A. -- that's Shawn Bradley, of the Dallas Mavericks, who is seven feet six -- and many teams have at least one seven-footer. But Shawn Bradley is seventy-odd pounds lighter than O'Neal, and when they are on the court together it looks as if Bradley would be well advised to abandon basketball and return to his former calling, as a Mormon missionary. O'Neal is daunting even to the most accomplished of seven-footers, like Dikembe Mutombo, of the Philadelphia 76ers, who is an inch taller than O'Neal but, at two hundred and sixty-five pounds, a bantamweight by comparison. When the 76ers met the Lakers in last year's N.B.A. Finals, Mutombo and O'Neal clashed repeatedly under the boards, with Mutombo bouncing off O'Neal's body -- the hulking, barging shoulder, the prodigious posterior backing into implacable reverse.