After losing left guard Ali Marpet to retirement and right guard Alex Cappa to the Bengals in free agency, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were suddenly very short on interior protectors for one Tom Brady. General manager Jason Licht and his staff were able to alleviate this to a point by stealing former Patriots guard Shaq Mason for a fifth-round pick.
Not only does Mason have what it takes to slip right in to protecting Brady — something he did in Foxboro from 2015 through 2019 — but he also has something interesting in common with one of his new teammates. Mason and edge-rusher Shaquil Barrett were named for the same two NBA Hall-of-Famers.
This is insane. We mentioned that new Bucs guard Shaq Mason is Shaquille Olajuwon Mason, named after the two former NBA stars. Well, his new teammate, Bucs pass-rusher Shaq Barrett, was born a year earlier in 1992, and is Shaquil Akeem Barrett, named after the same two players.
— Greg Auman (@gregauman) March 24, 2022
And as it turns out, the name Shaquille became a loot more popular around the time that the 28-year-old Mason and the 29-year-old Barrett were born.
“I liked Shaquille O’Neal and I liked Hakeem Olajuwon,” Barrett’s father Steven told Vice.com in 2016, “so I named my son after both of the centers I really liked. [O’Neal] was a good role model for my son to follow. If my son can accomplish, two percent of what O’Neal accomplished, then I’d certainly be all right with that.”
The name, which means “handsome” in Arabic, first popped on the Social Security Administration’s Top 1,000 baby names in 1991, and things just blossomed from there.
“I was the only one around with the name,” Mason said in that same article. “The first time I met another Shaq was actually Shaquille O’Neal at a Grizzlies game.”
Well, now there are two Shaqs in the same locker room. And when the Buccaneers play the Carolina Panthers, their NFC South division rival, twice in the 2022 season, they’ll run into another one: Carolina safety-backer Shaq Thompson.
“I was the only Shaq growing up until I got to high school, where I met another Shaq,” Thompson said.
Shaquille Green Thompson, however, was not named after both Shaq and Hakeem.