<strong><u><em>Ted Green:</strong></u></em> Shaq, Kobe are happy together

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Just one question from the co-MVP vote shared by Kobe and Shaq at the NBA All-Star game:

Who scripted that, David Stern or Vince McMahon? Or are they actually the same person?

The mask Shaq wore during that pregame dance was a perfect metaphor for the WWE Moment that followed the game.

By all means, wrestle with this: I happen to know from my own previous turns on the All-Star voting panel that the league prefers one MVP winner, not two.

The years in which I was given the privilege of voting, there were five of us on the panel, because five is an odd number, making a split award impossible. One year, I happened to cast the decider for Wes Unseld over Elvin Hayes. I know that because the league’s PR director told me. But it certainly wasn’t coincidental that there were five of us doing the selecting.

On Sunday, the former Lakers teammates, Kobe Hatfield and Shaq McCoy, were both highly entertaining in their own inimitable ways. Still, that split MVP felt more forced than your average Oscar acceptance speech.

Or did the ‘panelists’ forget that Shaq played 11 minutes? And that the East had no one over 6 feet 9 guarding him, so his 17 points were essentially all freebies?

Daniel Day-Lewis had as much chance of stopping Shaq as Rashard Lewis did.

Understand, it was good, clean fun. Shaq, doing his Jabberwocky dance -- or Wobbejocky as TNT’s hopelessly unhip Craig Sager called it. And then the two outsized performers and personalities, Kobe and Shaq, led the West to their lopsided victory, doing what they do: Shaq power dunking and swinging from the rim, Kobe dropping 3’s and throwing down to enhance the show.

The Big Legendaries -- in Shaq’s words -- shared the postgame stage. Shaq was happy and warm and open, as if he really missed the good old championship days. Kobe was smiling but awkward, as if he knew WE knew the whole thing seemed a little stilted. I couldn’t help but remember that Stern is a marketing genius who does everything he can to control the PR and manage the images of the NBA’s most bankable stars.

Indeed, Sunday’s game gave the Knish Commish (Stern grew up working in his father’s deli on Manhattan’s lower East Side) the perfect opening, a chance to put this messy, all-too-human feud in the league’s rearview mirror once and for all.

So now consider the hatchet buried somewhere other than in each other’s foreheads, I guess.

There in the afterglow of their shared accomplishment, it was easy to forget that, in one of his most childish stunts ever as a professional athlete, Shaq once belted out a particularly immature and inappropriate stage rap that was crude even by locker-room standards.

And although you read in various places that the two have been on OK terms for ‘about three years,’ that nasty Shaq rap took place less than one year ago. Not to introduce a bit of reality into the situation.

But on Sunday, the two future Hall of Famers who teamed for three NBA titles and one very ugly breakup of the Lakers were so Happy Together that I kept waiting for the song by the Turtles to break out.

But you know what? It’s actually better that way. Given all they did and all they meant to the Lakers and to the league, it’s really how you’d like to remember them.

So Happy Together.

-- Ted Green

Ted Green used to cover the Lakers for the L.A. Times. He is now Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News.