In his rookie year, Kobe famously had the number of airballs in the final playoff game in Utah — how did that impact the rest of his career?
Well, it was remarkable he was able to recover from that. Michael Jordan at the end of his freshman year hit the shot against Georgetown to give the Tar Heels and coach Dean Smith the NCAA Championship. Michael was the darling of Tar Heel Nation, and Kobe Bryant at the end of what would’ve been his freshman year, shot the airballs against Utah.
Sonny Vaccaro, who was the guy at Adidas responsible for bringing Kobe to the NBA as a teenager, pointed out in interviews for my book, that Kobe was probably the only teenager on the planet who could fail the Lakers in such a public manner and recover from it and go on to prosper, despite that horrific setback and disappointment for a young player.
Your book does a good job of outlining the duality of Kobe. His dad was a Lamar Odom type of guy: very athletic, obviously, but very gregarious at the same time. His mom was more stern, and he seemed to adopt her personality a little more. Do you think he would’ve been better served if he had a better balance of his mom and his dad when it came to his personality, or was it necessary for him to be successful?
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I think it’s always better to have better balance as a personality, but then we probably wouldn’t be talking about him and he wouldn’t be the guy viewed as bringing so much to the Lakers, who had ached for success.
Kobe’s ambition was a driving force in the ability of the Lakers to achieve that success. You just don’t get one without the other. We’d like to clean up these great competitors so they’d be a little more palatable to all of us culturally, but they’re driven folks for a reason, and that’s just the reality of it.
There’s one moment in the book where you really crystalize this, where at the end of the 04-05 season, Kobe gets in front of his teammates and pretty much cusses them out and tells them they don’t deserve to be on the floor with him. What was it like being a teammate of Kobe? How’d they deal with such an overbearing personality all the time?
Well, it’s difficult to be the teammate of that sort of really intense competitor, who is unafraid of angering teammates. Michael Jordan was the same way. He had very high expectations of himself and he had very high expectations of his teammates. Jordan, however, had the benefit of playing three years in college in Dean Smith’s tightly controlled system.
Kobe Bryant came to the NBA right out of high school, where he had ruled the roost. In many ways, even his coaches in AAU and high school had to be deferential to him.
And so, Kobe Bryant didn’t have that background in team basketball that had allowed Michael Jordan to gain some measure of function in the circumstances. And it upped the degree of difficulty for Kobe Bryant considerably. But it was very hard for teammates to deal with that a lot of times, but it’s just sort of the basics of the game.