Unless you're Joe or Bob, it's probably not every day you come across someone with the same name as you. It's even rarer to come across someone named after the same person as you. But two teammates on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have that in common—and that's not even the craziest part. As Greg Auman, an NFL reporter at the Athletic, noted in a Thursday tweet, Buccaneers guard Shaquille Olajuwon Mason, born in 1993, and his new teammate Shaquil Akeem Barrett, born in 1992, were both named after the same two NBA Hall of Famers: Shaquille O'Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon.
A 2016 Vice article mentioned both Mason and Barrett, then rivals, as having been named after the NBA legends, adding neither were aware of the connection before the reporting. The article focused on the rise of the name Shaquille, which "cracked the Social Security Administration's Top 1,000 baby names in 1991, after O'Neal's breakout AP Player of the Year sophomore season at LSU." It jumped to the 426th position the following year, and on to 181st in 1993, when O'Neal was named NBA Rookie of the Year.
Shaquille is derived from the Arabic name Shakil, which translates to "handsome." But Shaquille Rashaun O'Neal has offered another meaning. "[Shaquille] means 'little.' Rahsaun means 'warrior,'" he told Oprah Winfrey in a 2017 interview. "[My mother] said, 'You're my little warrior." Hakeem is an Arabic name meaning wise, while Olajuwon is a West African name said to be associated with wealth or "gifts from god." The coincidence has been a hit on social media, notes the Spun. "Hopefully, the Bucs will get the same kind of impact from both [Mason and Barrett] that O'Neal and Olajuwon had on the hardwood," writes Luke Easterling at USA Today. (More NFL stories.)
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