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Speaking yesterday, Shaquille O'Neal said that he planned to play 735 more days, after which his career would be over.

Then he referred to himself as an "educated man."

So, on some level, I pictured the Big Education sitting down with calendars and calculators, figuring out exactly how many days there are until the end of the 2009-2010 season.

So then, of course, I had to check. Out come the calendars and the calculators.

And he's way off. 

735 days from yesterday, by my math, gets you well into September 2010, so unless he plans to play in Summer League, his 2009-2010 season -- the last on his current contract -- will be over well before then.

(My best guess is that he was just ballparking 365 x 2 (that's 730) and did a little rounding. Or he was just goofing around and the whole thing means nothing -- let's be honest he could well change his mind and retuire sooner or later than that.)

I'm sure Suns owner Robert Sarver, fishing around in his pockets for roughly $40 million in Diesel dollars between now and then, could tell you the exact date Shaq will come off the books.

After basketball O'Neal says he'd like to go into law enforcement, which will force those who hire for such positions to distinguish between someone who reveres the law and wants to uphold it, and someone who likes power, authority, and uniforms.

I honestly don't know the answer to that, but I do know that's the question.

Here's a little insight along those lines from that great Rebecca Mead New Yorker profile of O'Neal a few years ago:

O'Neal aspires to a career in law enforcement after he retires from basketball, and his profile as a player is that of a crushing, point-scoring bad cop, with no good cops in sight. "He likes to enforce things," Herb More, one of O'Neal's high-school coaches, says. But his disposition is fundamentally sunny, and if his sense of humor runs to the excruciatingly broad -- he derives great pleasure from picking up a defenseless member of the Lakers' staff, or a reporter, and manhandling him like a burly father with a squealing three-year-old -- it is deeply felt.