Facing Kobe Bryant by Sean Deveney

Facing Kobe Bryant by Sean Deveney

Author:Sean Deveney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2016-02-17T16:00:00+00:00


I KNEW KOBE WHEN he was a kid and I was playing in Italy; I knew his father. Then when I came back and I was in Orlando, his dad brought him to one of our games with the Magic, and I could not believe how much he had grown. I think he was a junior in high school, and I was 6-6 and he was my size already. The last time I had seen him, you know, he was just a kid, but now he is walking around like a grown man. I remember he said to me that in a year he was going to be in the NBA playing against me. And I did not really know what he meant; I thought maybe he had the years wrong or something, because he was going to have to go to college for a couple of years. But he knew he was going to make it in the NBA. So I mean, an encounter like that, it kind of sticks with you, and then when I heard how good he had gotten and he winds up getting drafted, there he is playing for the Lakers. Give him credit, he was right.

Winning the championships with those teams, that was definitely the highlight. But everything else that was going on was difficult, to have everything go back and forth in public, in the media, and sort of leave it for the rest of us to clean up, people asking all of us whose side we were on. The thing was, when they stopped talking and just played, just focused on the game, they still could mostly put all of that stuff aside and win. I thought that winning would cover all that up, but I guess the organization disagreed; they thought it was enough. It was hard to wrap your mind around, though, as good as those teams were.

For Kobe, that was tough. But, everything that he went through, I can’t have anything but respect for his career and what a legend he became, because he had a real toughness. It was something that I saw day in and day out: his willingness to compete, his desire to beat you at no matter what it was you were doing. In practice he was that way. He would go at his own teammates in practice. It didn’t matter, he wanted to win. He was always going to compete at a high level, and try to play his game and will the rest of the team to lift up its level. I think in the last couple of years he had a harder time with that, because he had so many injuries, and it seemed like the injuries just kept coming and coming and there was nothing he could do. I think because of the team being the way it was, he might have liked to be more of a passer, more of a facilitator, but the team just had a lot of young players who were learning.



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