Either be trained or be rich, we don't really care...

Apparently, the Miami Heat's often injured center Shaquille O'Neal is rich enough to be a cop. And a damn good cop.

For those of you who don't know, in this country, in order to be a police detective you must endure a lot of physical training along with class room work and years of on the job training to procure the skills needed to catch criminals. However, if you are really, really, really wealthy, all you have to do is catch a whim like Shaq and run to the local sheriff's office and declare yourself on the clock.

I don't know about you, but that scares me. I'm glad he's not playing ball anywhere near me. Celebrities like to do this a lot. They love to go on police drug raids and generally get into things that they wanted to do when they were kids. Unfortunately, somewhere down the line they decided that they'd rather be famous and make more in a year than an average policeman would make in a lifetime.

Personally, if I knew that my tax dollars were being used to entertain Shaq with the boys in blue, I'd be pretty upset. They say, in the article I linked in the title, that he's helping look for internet predators and that he would make a great undercover cop.

First of all, he's 7-foot-1 and weighs about 350 pounds. I'd love to see him "blend" in. Second of all, I wouldn't want to know that the cops are devoting any of their attention to showing him how they track internet predators instead putting all of their focus on getting the job done.

If any old Joe Blow walked in off the street and said, "Hey, show me what you do so that I can join in the fun," he'd be laughed out of the police station. Instead, Shaq will be a certified cop before too long and could legally carry a .40 caliber automatic pistol and make real arrests. Too bad a nasty bruise on his thigh will put him on workman's comp for 2 weeks.

I'm glad I don't plan on travelling to Florida.

The biggest problem I have with all of this is that Shaq said that when he's done "playing" (he never really said if that meant done playing basketball or done playing "cops and robbers") that he planned on being an undercover cop or a sheriff somewhere.

Yeah, that'll happen. This is also coming from a basketball player who once said in an interview that he didn't like losing because he had won at every level despite the fact that he never anything in high school or college and at the time I'm not sure he had even won an NBA championship.

I can honestly see Shaq becoming a sheriff possibly. All he has to do is get elected and that won't be too hard. Since sheriff's don't technically have to be trained to do anything but collect taxes, I'd say he's a shoe in. That county would probably be the only county without a real cop as a sheriff, but who needs training when you got money.

I've always said that.