Amar’e Stoudemire shared his craziest locker room story while on Desus & Mero. He says he once saw a player get put in a headlock and choked out, but then he added that they always “played like that.”

“I saw one incident where one player kept jabbing and kept picking on and just kept talking to another player. The guy was like, ‘You know, I’m gonna get you.’ So right before the game, you got 30 minutes on the clock, you go out at about 25, start warming up. Right before we were about to start warming up, he creeps up behind him, puts him in a headlock and lays him down. Is he sleep? I go over to him like, ‘Hey man. Stop playing, let’s go man.’ He wakes up like (*looks dazed and confused*). Yeah, but they always wrassled and played like that.”

As crazy and unbelievable as Stoudemire’s story may sound, as Bleacher Report noted, a couple of years ago Shaquille O’Neal actually admitted to choking out his former Suns teammate Gordan Giricek in their locker room before a game.

The way O’Neal and Nash told it is extremely similar to what Stoudemire said, right down to the minutes, and yes, O’Neal, Nash, Giricek and Stoudemire were all on the Suns one year in 2008.

O’Neal: “When I played with Phoenix, Steve got mad at me one time in the locker room. We had a guy Gordan Giricek. I  was trying to be serious, but the guy just kept talking. I told him, I said, ‘Gordon, shut up. We only got 15 minutes. Don’t say nothing else to me, but he was playing, so I put him in a chokehold. Steve came up out the bathroom and seen him on the floor.”

Nash: “The game starts in 25 minutes and the guy’s about to die in the locker room.”

Of course, everyone laughs about it now. Well, maybe everyone except for Giricek.

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