Kobe, just two weeks ago on the Lakers channel out here, counted down his top 10 moments of his career, and he selected the 81-point game as his top moment. As someone that just wrote a book on him, what would you choose as his defining moment?
That’s certainly one of them. I think everyone would agree, and there are a lot of people with different opinions of Kobe, but he was a volume scorer and everyone whether you hated or loved him acknowledged that. And in many ways, as Kobe told me as a young man, a very frustrated young man, “all I want to be is ‘the man.'” In other words, the dominant figure in the NBA. In scoring 81 points, it helped him lay claim to that position as he got older.
And so I can understand why he’d say that. I tend to think of the times that Kobe bent his tremendous desire to the will of the team — the ’08 Olympics, the stretch of the 2001 playoffs where he played so much more within the team framework, and even some of his later things. So the 81 point game is amazing, no doubt, and it is a big part of the reason Kobe has the allegiance from so many people, but you know, less is always more in basketball, it’s a team sport, and I’d pick other moments.
You just said it, he wanted to be “the man.” I argue with my friends all the time, I think Pau Gasol probably should’ve been the the MVP of the 2010 NBA Finals. Do you think Kobe had to win on his terms? In other words, would he have been happy in his second stint with Phil if Pau or someone else had won the Finals MVP, or did it have to be him getting the ultimate glory?
Well, if you want to be “the man,” viewed as the greatest, then you want all the pelts. Kobe basically was this guy who ran everyone out of his life. He did himself tremendous personal damage in the midst of eliminating his family, his parents, his agent, his shoe company, his coach, his co-star in Shaq. He eliminated all of them.
As Sonny Vaccaro of Adidas said, Kobe was like the Russians with the Romanovs, he got rid of everybody. He did all of this personal damage, and of course his great will allowed him to overcome it, something even Tiger Woods was never able to do with the sort of damage he did to himself. Kobe’s damage was even greater with the rape charges, but he was very lucky. He was lucky Phil agreed to come back and coach him, and he was very lucky because he almost destroyed his final important relationship with Lakers owner Jerry Buss. Kobe was also the beneficiary of good fortune. He was very lucky to play with Shaq, and he was lucky to play with Pau Gasol.
Sonny Vaccaro was the guy who made Kobe a pro as a teenager. He was looking for the next Jordan with Adidas, and he gave Kobe millions to turn pro. Kobe’s family needed the money, and then Sonny Vaccaro insisted with a fight with the family to make Arn Tellem his agent, which in turn allowed Kobe to become a Laker. Now, Kobe might well, as Sonny told me in the interviews for this book, gone on to become a great,great basketball player, he probably would have in all likelihood. But it was only by virtue of being a Laker he was able to win championships. So yes, I think there was a period where Kobe was very much “the man” of the NBA, but he didn’t get there on his own.
Speaking of Sonny Vaccaro, I wanted to ask you about Kobe and his time with Adidas. By the end, he ripped up his contract with them —
He paid $10 million to get out of that deal!
Yea, that’s amazing to me. But it’s because he didn’t like the shoes and the marketing. He seemed painfully aware of how people viewed him, especially back then. He was very worried about Iverson. Did he not really like how the public perceived him?
I went into great detail about the shoe story, and how Kobe was made a millionaire by Adidas before he reached 18. Kobe was very fortunate to have that. But the shoes were new, and Adidas was trying to do new things in design. The guy who had played such a big role in Air Jordan, Peter Moore, was trying to help Kobe create something special. The point is Michael Jordan became a billionaire because Nike gave him a royalty on the shoes, something no one else had received. And Kobe, if he had he stayed with Adidas, he was much more valuable to adidas than he would’ve been to Nike.
Kobe has made many many good deals in his career, he’s an astute businessman. But speaking of leaving things on the table, as Sonny Vaccaro said, he probably could’ve been a billionaire today, or at least eventually. Of course, this all went down before Colorado, so there’s no telling how any of this would’ve played out. But it was interesting that Kobe grew completely frustrated with Adidas and walked away from a major role with a major company.