A neighbor called the cops on kids playing basketball. Ten years later, one of them is driving a car that Shaq bought him.

The call came in on January 15, 2016. Someone in a Gainesville, Florida, neighborhood wanted police to do something about teenagers playing basketball “too loudly” in the street. Officer Bobby White, nine years on the job, took the assignment. When he arrived, he didn’t break up the game. Instead, he got out of the car, asked who had next, and played. “Can you believe someone’s calling to complain about kids playing basketball in the streets?” he said on his dashcam. “I obviously don’t have a problem with it.” He’d left to handle a real call and promised a rematch on the way out. “I might bring some backup and get a game going,” he told the kids. The department posted the dashcam footage on Facebook, where it got about 15 million views in a few weeks under the hashtag #HoopsNotCrime. This was eighteen months after Ferguson, with the relationship between police and Black teenagers at the center of the national argument, and a video of a cop losing a pickup game hit differently than it would have in another year. Among the people who watched it was Shaquille O’Neal. On January 23, Shaq walked into the Gainesville police station. “Are you kidding me?” White said. They drove back to the same street. White got out first. “I told you I was going to bring some backup, right? You see these big boys I brought? You sure you can take them?” Then Shaq got out of the squad car. “Holy crap, it’s you,” one of the kids said. He played, ran a free-throw contest at $100 per made shot, signed basketballs, and, before he left, put everyone in a huddle. “I grew up just like this,” he told them, then had them repeat after him: “I will become whatever I want to be. I will be a leader and not a follower.” That’s usually where the story stops, but not this one. White started the Basketball Cop Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that buys hoops and equipment for kids who don’t have them and builds courts in places with none. One of the first was a backyard court for Tyree Thomas, the 15-year-old who had tossed White the ball in the original video. Thomas later told CNN that White changed what he thought about police. White kept working patrol and ran the foundation on weekends. Courts opened at apartment complexes, including one housing more than 120 kids. The foundation started shipping hoops and balls to police departments and churches in other states. The Orlando Magic honored White and the crew. That July, Shaq brought the kids to his Orlando home for lunch and a game on his court. Then, at a Gainesville holiday parade a couple of years ago, where Shaq was the grand marshal, he ran into three of the kids again, though they really weren’t kids anymore. He bought them cars on the spot: three new Audis. “It was spontaneous on his part when he was speaking to people at the parade,” White said. “Knowing Shaq, that’s how he operates.”