Turn back the clocks to 2001, when the Lakers beat their heated rivals, the Kings, in a seven game playoff series, which was just months before then Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal decided to insult the Kings by calling them Queens.

Seems simple: big-mouthed players talking trash about the other team. Yet at the same time the Lakers former coach Phil Jackson mocked Sacramento as a “cow-town,” as the Lakers continued to talk trash about their rival’s city.

Here we are, with the Kings firmly in place in Sacramento after an attempted sale and relocation that would have moved them to Settle was defeated, and that same big mouth is now a member of the new ownership group.

Talking trash is nothing new in sports. It’s the common tactic to get inot the heads of the opponents to gain a possible edge.

So when Shaq says he apologizes and the insults were part of a carefully executed marketing facade, many are more than likely ready to forgive and forget.

This is not to say that people should be protesting and boycotting the maneuver. It’s all about business, as it always has been.

Shaq made his business from coming off as the loose cannon that says what he feels needs to be said and bashing the rivals.

That sort of act is what got him as far as he has come in all this time, and suddenly renouncing that version of himself and apologizing is all part of the new plan to change his image to get in on some of the money of owning a team that is on track to rebuild themselves.

Society seems quick to accept apologies from anyone that is famous, no matter their action. Trash talking a city is a tame thing compared to drunk driving or attacking photographers but it is an example of a systematic failure.

What Shaq said and did in the past does not make him a bad person really, it just makes him entirely fake one.

Celebritie and athletes, are worshipped by society as the best thing since sliced bread and they are held up on a pedestal as the example of what to strive for.

If Shaq’s image is one built upon a foundation of lies and false apologies, then I want nothing to do with it.

This fan isn’t buying into what Shaq is selling. I’ll stick to the cows of my little cow town and continue to root for my local team the “Queens.”