Mike Sielski | The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality

Welcome to the Philadelphia Free Library. My name is Andy Cahan. I'm the director of author events here tonight. I have the pleasure of introducing you to two journalists known for their work at The Philadelphia Enquirer. A sports columnist at The Enquirer since 2013. Mike Cielski is the author. from a series of books, including Fading, echoes the true story of two Pennsylvania high school football rivals who later found a brotherhood while in the US Army and is co-author of How be like Jackie Robinson, a collection of life lessons drawn from the pioneer. In 2015, pioneering baseball legend Selsky was voted the top sports columnist in the U.S. by the Associated Press sports editors.

His new book, The Rise Kobe Bryant and the Search of Immortality, which Bob Costas refers to as a story based on meticulous research and clearly presented. -Eyed Insights is an exploration of identity and the creation of an icon and the effect his development had on those around him. Tonight he'll be in conversation with Michael Days, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer, vice president of diversity and inclusion, and readers' editor. Engagement Days now serves on the board of visitors for the Klein School of Media and Communication at Temple University. Please welcome Mike Zielski and Michael Davis.

Since we're both journalists, you know I want to jump into the deep end initially. This is a fantastic book. oh, thank you and I know I know a little bit about how to write books, uh, and I know how long it takes and how long it takes to edit it. You did this. Kobe Bryant hasn't been there for two years, so you did this in about a year, give or take. If that is. Okay, so we're going to talk a lot about Copic, but let's talk a little about you. Okay, this is a labor of love, isn't it for you?

It really happened, yeah, it really did, so I guess about a month or two later.

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​​When Kobe died in 2020, I ended up writing about him quite a bit for the investigator, obviously because of his ties to Lower Marion, so I wrote about a half dozen columns and at one point I reached out to his high school coach named Greg Downer. I wanted to approach him about the possibility of writing a story about Kobe through Greg's eyes, you know, Greg had this up close and personal look at this kind of shooting star on the basketball court, so I called him and he finally agreed.

It was about a month or two after Cobia's death and Greg says well, it turns out I just got back from the memorial service in Los Angeles for Kobe and on the trip back I wrote down some thoughts about my relationship with him and what he meant to my. Because? I'm not sending them to you? You can take a look at them and maybe we can publish a co-authored article in the consultation, so I said great and they were really moving. The writing was very well done. personal and once I read what greg had written I thought there's a story here that I feel like people in the Philadelphia area probably know pretty well, but that the general public around the country and around the world may not be so familiar with it and the elevator speech line that came to me was that I wanted to do Batman Begins for the black mamba.

I wanted to show how Kobe's 17 years directly connected to the Philadelphia area. If you told that story the right way, you could see. the man he became during those early years and there was a lot of drama in that story there was a life in Europe for part of that time there was a state championship in 1996 there was a young man searching for his identity as an athlete As a black teenager in this kind of posh suburban community, there was this idea that Lower Marian says those two words and certain stereotypes come to mind and I wanted to delve into the history of that community and kind of establish that Kobe came back to uh when he came back and when he and his family came back from Italy, never mind their family, never mind their recruiting process, all that kind of stuff, so I met Greg, I knew a couple other people that were connected to Lower Marion and Kobe and from there I was able to take off with the project, so you know and I admit I started your book feeling good, you know you're writing about a three year old who is really strong at that point and his strong will throughout his life, but I was really surp

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d by his determination, his ability to look at himself and think about what do I need to do to be the star that I want to be, so right off the bat, there it is.

There were a lot of surp

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s for me when you started reporting on this, most of which you know, I know people have had time to read it, things that people don't know, yeah, you know it's funny, everyone, if you're familiar with it. In Kobe's basketball career, you understand how determined he was and how motivated he was towards success to the point where he got his own nickname after him, right? Nobody gave him the nickname, the black mamba, he called himself that, but for me, the most surprising part of researching his life was coming to understand how driven and determined he was at such a young age, like you said, when he was three years doing dunks at his parents' house, um knowing that he was 14 or 15 years old.

It's an appropriate thing that I see in the crowd, we have a couple of people here who are connected to me through my high school years and to learn about what Kobe was like, how he lived and how he approached his life when he was 14 15 years old, knowing that in his bones he wanted to be the best basketball player on the planet and how far he was willing to go to achieve that goal. I still can't get over it. At 15 he could barely muster the courage to talk to a member of the opposing team. sex and

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is doing what he feels he has to do to become a great basketball player, you know, he, him, him and a friend are driving by the courts in west and north philadelphia and in ardmore and they are playing a stranger kind of a version of pick-up ball where his friend has to rebound for him and his friend has to yell insults at him you go to a soft school you go to a white school you couldn't play in the public league and kobe wants him to do this so he'll be prepared for whatever comes his way, whether it's high school or whatever his basketball career is going to be beyond that, so I never ceased to be amazed by that idea that at 14 years old 15 16 was preparing for something beyond what he was doing at Lower Marion High School.

Tell the story of a junior in high school when he would get up almost in the middle of the night and go to the gym. Yes, Lower Marion. gym and work in half for two or three hours, yes, the senior year before and he would do this throughout his entire high school career, but particularly before his senior year, when all the pressure was on them, they had reached the district championship game when he was a junior and they had lost and lost early in the state playoffs that year, so he came back wanting to win a state championship and there was a presumption that the team was going to win a state championship that year , so I would choose a friend, uh, he would leave his house late at night, I mean, we were talking at 5 a.m. m., you know, he would drive the two miles from his house, his family's house on Remington Road in Lower Marion to the high school and he would get there before the principal. the teachers before any other student a janitor would let him in the janitor would have to turn on the heat in the building and the school would take five to ten minutes to warm up and he would film for an hour or two um and what For me that was interesting, I mean, obviously that shows his determination, but what to me was interesting was that he would park in one of the best parking spots on the high school campus and here's the value of the research that in itself is like, oh , who does this kid think he is?, but then you do your research and I went back to the lower marine historical society that had copies of the old student newspapers, the marionite, and I found one that had a new story that pointed out that during the At the time When Kobe was doing that, there was construction going on in and around the high school, so there were usually about 70 parking spaces around Lower Marion High School.

When he was doing that, there were actually only about 20 available and he was taking one that he would own. to a faculty member or an administrator and the people who allow him to do that and the way you know, you can see him justify it by saying you know I'm going to be better at my job than the principal is at his job. so all these teachers are at their jobs, so all my classmates will be at their jobs when they get them, so I'm going to park here and no one, I mean, if anyone objected, it was all some kind of gossip, it was all, who does it?

Kobe thinks he is, but none of the administrators or faculty members told him not to park there and he really brought basketball back to Lower Marrington. I mean, it was interesting being a city kid, uh, reading about how people were a lot more interested in football at that time. point that basketball because in the city basketball does, and the city and cities basketball is everything and that gets to the point I mentioned before about the culture in Lower Marion and the impression and reality-based images that people had from the community right before Kobe arrived, the basketball team he is playing is wearing mismatched uniforms, he enters the school in 1992, they had won a district championship about 14 or 15 years before, but it was not a school Known for basketball, she was known. as a school known for academics, it was a school known for being on the main line and everything that connotes and here he comes and they go 4 and 20 his first year, which should be impossible if you think about it, you had Kobe Bryant on your team, how are you doing 4th and 20?

And in fact, one of the four wins they had that season was in the second game of the year against my alma mater Upper Dublin. I was a senior at the time and Kobe was just a freshman, he wasn't on the team, I didn't need him to dunk me in the head or anything like that, but he changes that culture, he makes it basketball is going to be cool again at school, it's not just oh, the lacrosse team is where it's at or the football team is where it's at or hey, you play football, that's cool, oh, basketball is happening now and what it does is it brings the whole community together in a way that none of those sports could because there's a history and a side to Lower Marion that's not just the old money stereotype, but there's Ardmore, where at the turn of the century XX you know that's where black families would live and become their part of the area, uh, and other types of pockets. from Lower Marian Township and this is something that the whole community can come together on, whether you're black, whether you're white, whether you know a little bit, you know you love basketball, you don't love basketball, here's the best player in the whole country, the best. teenage player across the country and he's in our backyard, he's going to his hometown high school and let's get on the train, you know, I think when I finished the book I was still a little conflicted, was this a kid who really was? stuck in himself or he was the kid who really just wanted to do well and really wanted to please people who wanted to please his friends.

Are you somewhere in the middle with him? I think he's somewhere in between. um I think he's Kobe, he's kind of a perfect fusion. I get asked a lot if it was nature or nurture with Kobe, if he was born to do what he did or grew up that way and I think it's the perfect combination of both, clearly there was something inside him that pushed him and drove him. he, uh, to be great, you know, you see that from an early age he loves basketball, he's immersed in it, but he also had a family that would allow him to pursue that passion and establish a structure in the game, establish a structure for him Would you know that Joe and Pam were very rigorous in terms of how they raised their three children when it came to academics and how they interacted with adults and how they interacted with other people, but when it came to Kobe and basketball they were very indulgent?

I really couldn't do anything wrong in that regard and you know you have Joe, who was a tremendously talented player, a schoolyard legend in Philadelphia, a great high school player, a great college player, his mba career is not going As good as I expected, it's kind. ahead of his time, he's six foot nine, at a time when if you were six foot nine they put you close to the basket and he could go behind his back, he could dribble, he could do anything on the court, before he was like Magic Johnson. magic johnson showed up but no one knew what to do with him and he was a bit of a free spirit and he was a good storyteller so he didn't have that kind of intensity that kobe always had but he had the experiences of having gone through the nba and not having the most experience, having He had to go to Europe to achieve his fulfillment as a basketball player and then you have Pam Bryant, whose family, the Cox family, is raised devoutly Catholic, the disciplined one at home, a verystrong, a very intelligent woman and you can see where.

Kobe understands that, so to answer your question, I think he was more confident on a basketball court in the years that I covered him and I think he was trying to get away from that, you know, there's a period where who tries to fit in, falls from the sky in the fall of 1991 and when the family returns from Italy and ends up at Balikinwood Middle School, he plays baseball and there is a picture from his eighth grade yearbook. of the baseball team and all the kids on it have a baseball cap and a glove, except kobe, he's wearing a sweater which i can describe best as it would have been appropriate for someone on cosby's show to have worn this sweater if you know, 80s style, he has a white button down shirt and a sweater over it and it's just there.

He's the only kid in the photo who doesn't really belong, but through basketball he's able to assimilate into the community among his peers, you know? he finally he can connect with kids through that he can connect with kids who like rap music. he's able to connect with kids who are also taking Honors English, which he's doing, and he ends up bonding with his 10th grade English teacher, so basketball was his. in um and to be able to live in those two worlds he could be supremely confident with a basketball in his hands and he could be like a lot of teenagers um when he wasn't, do you think he would have been as successful as he was if he had stayed in Italy until he was much older no, I don't think so and I think he knew it, I think because when the family came back in the summer and then once he came back to stay in Wynwood, he plays basketball in the sunny hill league, you know the prestigious summer league where, if you have any skill and you're in and around the city of Philadelphia, that's where you're going to play to see and be seen, and he intrinsically knew that you know what.

I can't just exist in my little Marion bottom bubble or my Italian bubble and be everything I want to be in the sport of basketball. I have to test myself against the best in my age group and even a little. older than that and you see that particularly I think in the summer of 1995, when John Lucas, who was the coach of the Sixers at the time, invited him to play and play against NBA players and college players, back then he didn't There was, there was nothing real. summer league in the nba the guys just played, you know, they filled their summer days playing and there were games at st joseph university and john lucas had seen kobe play and invited him to come play with jerry stackhouse, who was the sixers first round pick. the year before and rick mhorn and all these division one college players from the area and kobe is holding his own and then some against these guys and i think he needed to do that in his head to really know this dream of going straight from high school to The NBA is not a pipe dream, I can make it happen and the summer is really a turning point for him because the thought of going to college and taking a less direct route to success in his mind fades.

Out the window, did anyone else besides his dad believe he could go straight to the NBA after high school? Very few people did, um, and part of that is a matter of circumstance because it was 1996, the year before Kevin Garnett had been the first high school player in 20 years to jump directly from high school to the NBA, but Kevin Garnett was six feet tall and a man at 18 years old. Kobe Bryant was six-foot-six, you know, Finn pipe cleaner for most of his high school years. his high school career played guard the idea that a kid like that with that build could just make the jump people couldn't conceive of that, regardless of the fact that he played guard and regardless of the fact that the NBA considered players high school as incredibly risky, so the idea that he would just go and not care about the fact, especially that he played at Lower Marion High School, it wasn't like he was playing in a basketball factory, you know, nowadays , a kid like Kobe would be at Mon Verde Academy or img Academia in Florida, he was playing for his community high school, so really, yeah, you beat Ridley, but what makes you think you'll be able to go against MJ?

You know, so, there was a lot of that kind of work against him. in public perception, uh, in terms of who thought he could do it, his parents did it, uh, Jeremy Treatman, who is a confidant and friend of his, who was kind of Lower's assistant coach, media relations representative Marion in his senior year and most importantly how it turned out in a way that sonny vaccaro thought he could do it um and that you know sunny was the sneaker mogul who signed michael jordan to nike and then left nike and ended up signing to kobe for adidas and sonny jumped on the kobe train from the beginning and he was right to do so, he was very intrigued because he loved michael jordan, he used to study videos of michael jordan and thought he would be better than michael jordan, he would watch videos of michael jordan on dates he had, kind of almost he had. kind of a quasi-girlfriend for all four years of high school before the second half of his senior year and we can get into brandy and prom if you want, but that's what he did to socialize, for him it was watching videos . from michael and magic johnson um and I got my hands on these audios these microtapes of him these interviews that he had done in the mid '90s and he talks about meeting Jordan for the first time after a Sixers Bulls game in Philadelphia and Jordan tries to pressure him to go to north carolina because that's where michael went and one of the things that coby says on the tapes is that you know as much as i admired michael, i was never going to go to north carolina because i wanted to be my own man um , that was never going to happen, so I just wanted to read it.

He was very intrigued because I want to talk a little bit about the ambassador that he had to be when he came back and you quote a like. a librarian in Lower Marion Katrina Christmas and I guess she was the moderator of something called student voice recognition as the black student. The Student Voice was the black student union organization in Lower Marion and you know what she told you. Several blacks. male students some born in west philadelphia some are more raised did not like kobe doubted and questioned his racial credibility it was an accusation he could not escape from either on the basketball court or in the hallways of his high school he juggled a lot of things, what they mean, he absolutely kids would say now, that's very true, yes, absolutely it was, um, you know, no, I use that phrase on purpose, it really fell from the sky in November December 1991 and when it came in In the book, he didn't grow up like most of the black students at Lower Marion did and he didn't grow up like virtually any of the white students did, and it was important to me to tell that aspect of the story was what it was really like for this one. child in this environment at that time.

What was he doing? He is juggling. Who am I really? I have spent eight years living in close quarters with my family where we don't see many black people. Faces when we walk through the streets of Riyeti or Pistilla or all the cities we have lived in while he, my dad, you know, plays basketball and now here I am, I want to get along with everyone, but me. I'm being pulled in a couple different directions. You know what I am. Do I fit in here? I don't fit in there? I like rap music, so I fit in with this crowd.

I'm in 10th grade honors English so he fits in with this crowd and when he graduates he's the most popular recognizable figure on campus, everyone loves him, it's a point of pride, but initially the students tried to make fun of him because he was the new kid that you know and that's what you did to the new kids. Whether they were six foot six and could dunk on you or not and he still made it work, I mean, based on your reports, it seems to me that I wouldn't say he used people, but he made the connections, he met the people where they were and they made the connections that allowed that allowed him to have several friends but they were never too friendly but they were his friends yeah that's a good way to put it I think there's a line in the book where I said it was tried on Personalities like clothes, um, for a while and I think to some extent, any high school kid goes through that, um, you're trying to figure out who you are, that's a very, you know you are, it's a tentative moment in a lot. in many ways for many of us and I really sympathize with Kobe at that time and you know the way he felt in that sense, but you see that and then you see what he was doing behind the scenes for example.

When he's a junior and senior, he knows that he's going to jump to the NBA and he's very happy to let the public think that he hasn't made up his mind yet. You know, Kobe, you're going to Duke, I don't know. Be nice, you'll go to Lasalle, you'll play for your dad, who's an assistant coach, that would be awesome, you know, I mean, I was even doing that in 2007, when after a game against the Sixers, I asked him, you know? Did you ever consider ending your career in Philadelphia, yeah, I always thought about that in high school and there's always that question with him, that kind of mystery at the heart of him is whether he's saying this because it's what he really believes or what he's saying. this because that's what he thinks you want to hear or that's what's advantageous to him, you know, and that's a topic that you can really explore throughout your mba career, you know, in any number of things. related to his life, you know, it seems to me.

He was managing his career from the age of five versus six, yeah, right, yeah, I think that's 100% true, he knew what he wanted to do in a way that's very rare among anyone, whether you want to be an athlete or you want to be a musician. a writer, you know, God, a construction worker, whatever, it doesn't matter, he knew it and he was going to do whatever it took to get there and that's what informs everything that informs this whole story, those are your northern stars. that he was going to be the best basketball player on the planet, do whatever it took to get there and, you know, stay out of my way in some ways, could he have done that if he'd grown up in West Philadelphia or North Philadelphia?

Philadelphia or what would you think if I didn't have a family. It seems to me that where he lived he had a very strong family, uh, and they opened up ways for him to meet other people that you would know because his father had been a basketball player, yes, no, so I think he learned from them, yes, Ashley Howard, who is now the Lasalle men's basketball coach, was a childhood friend of Kobe, he's a couple years younger than me, he told me you know, no. Don't forget that he was prepared for this, and you're right, the environment matters, you know, beyond the basketball court, the fact that he lived in Italy and the fact that he grew up in Lower Marion, in some ways, prepared him better for me.

I don't know, sitting down with someone like you or me to talk to us in an interview, you know, being around a kind of diverse student body in a diverse community where it's not just homogeneous in one way or another from the point of view socioeconomic, racial, religious, any of those things, you know. I think that had a lot to do with his behavior and the way he carried himself and I think you're right, I think there are a lot of advantages to him coming along the way he did, he was almost unique in that sense.

You know you want to say well, I want to be like Kobe Bryant. Okay, are you traveling back? You will have a father who played in the NBA and it didn't work out the way you would have wanted and you are going to travel. back and forth between Italy and you're going to settle in a very diverse and comfortable area in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you're going to have all these experiences and people, etcetera, etcetera, you couldn't replicate it and and you have to give him credit, although it was very controlled when I was, you know, I was stunned, uh, at the party there was talk about him not really going to a party until it was like a scene, well, I think he would almost graduate, yeah, he had.

I almost graduated, it was what a teenager would do, yeah, but that's the way I looked at the things that were coming, it was almost like um, I felt like I didn't need that part of childhood, if that makes sense and I really am. . I'm stepping on the precipice of having the Dr. fill it in here and I don't want to do that, um, but yeah, I mean, I came to think of Kobe almost like a kaleidoscope or a diamond, like every time I tried to look at him and Spin the diamond. you could see something new, you know, or by turning the kaleidoscope you could see something new and their social life is one of them.

He's invited to a house party in Delaware County and it's the first time he's been to one of these things. and he has a great night and he has fun, but it's not like he makes a habit of it, okay, I did it, now I can play ball again, but at the same time he saw himself as a star, somehow way he ends up hanging. Dating boys and men, yeah, they were huge in their day and then they hooked it up with brandy right for the prom, yeah, you know, I mean, it's fascinating, it really is, I mean, in essence, it was a kind of advertising, not friendly.

It was a publicity stunt, sort of orchestrated by thisthat kind of thing and when they passed each other in the hallways they spoke in Italian because that was the most natural language at that time for them in school and numbers. Two, they could understand what they said about each other and no one else would, so they had their own little click for lack of a better way to say it, and in fact, Shea lived with Kobe, Joe, and Pam for his first year or so. two. In the NBA he bought a house in Palisades in California and everyone lived there, so yeah, very close, very close to his sisters, are they close now?

Do you think I mean that the sisters have not spoken again, have not spoken publicly? I approached both. of them um, but no, they were, I'm sure they were devastated by Islam and very close to it, I think from what I'm not quoted on this, I think Vanessa Kobe's widow is in some contact with either Sheree o Shaya, did you ever interview Kobe before getting involved with the book? Did you have a relationship with him? You clearly had a perception about him. How much did that change if you met him or interviewed him with everyone? the research you did with the book and what were some of the most surprising things that came out.

I didn't have a relationship with him. I interviewed him and covered him. I covered the 2001 finals when he cut. the hearts of the sixers and their fans and pretty much any time the lakers came to town uh, I would go to that game, you know, and if I didn't write directly about kobe, you know, I would at least listen to the interviews and, like I said At the end of the book in 2007, when he was still on his image rehabilitation tour, both because of the Aurora Colorado situation and other basketball-related things, I spent some time with him and asked him about the possibility of him returning to Philadelphia. um, I knew I knew people who knew him and were close to him, so my perception of him was quite, I thought I was pretty well informed and in the course of researching the book, I don't know if it changed as much as It intensified, in a way it was revalidated and then some everyone thought about Kobe, everyone perceived Kobe as someone very intense and motivated.

I really had no idea how intense and driven until I started delving into what he was like as a kid and you. I know what he was like when he was a teenager and I heard some of his stories, so this one is fun. This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book and I had no idea about this so I had a friend named Matt Matkov who I met. in the eighth grade and matt koff wasn't nearly the basketball player that kobe was, but he held on to him and said, "you know, he was the biggest kobe cheerleader among his peers, so come senior year and the lowest of Marion." to compete for a state championship, the team is really good, I mean, Kobe is by far the best player, but now they have enough depth to be able to compete for a state championship and they are going through tests in the first part of the season and Greg.

Depressingly, the head coach tells one of his assistant coaches, Mike Egan, you know, Matt, cough, we just can't use him, we're going to have to cut this kid, but I don't want to cut him because he's Kobe, but Kobe is the better. friend and Mike Egan, the assistant coach tells him look, cut it, Kobe won't notice for two weeks, so it turns out Madkoff decided not to play basketball. You don't want to say that he left it, but he decided not to play and, indeed. Two weeks go by and one day Kobe turns around at practice and looks around and says where is Matkov, that's how intense it was and I don't think I really understood it to the extent that I thought before I started doing the deep dive. about the research on him, Hi Mike, I'd be interested to hear a little bit about the process of writing the book compared to writing your columns and previously as a reporter.

I imagine there are some challenges, but both opportunities involve working on a longer project and some of the scope of this, I think you mentioned about 100 interviews and any thoughts you have on the effort as a whole here, well, this might be it. worse than I say tonight, the pandemic was great, the pandemic helped. I couldn't go anywhere, but no one else could either, so they couldn't run away from me, so sports are stopping in March 2020. I'm not going to any Sixers games. I'm not going into the NBA bubble in Orlando, I'm not going to go to any shuttle games or Big Five games or Eagles practices or anything like that, and in fact, the investigator kicked me out of the position. sports columnist for a while and put me in more of a feature writing position, why did they do that?

I don't know about that, but I'm grateful because suddenly I wasn't writing three columns a week without sports, I was writing a story every three weeks and I could fill my hours at my home office or at the Lower Marion Historical Society or on the back porch of Greg Downer's house socially distanced doing the research and the reporting and I can, when you write an 800 to a thousand word column, you better get to the point real quick, you got it. You have to have something to say and you have to go in and out and you have to make sure that you are, you know it's boom boom, make your point and you are very conscious of choosing your words in a way to stick to that limit, the book you can write as much as you want and in some ways that's very liberating okay it was a lot easier to write a thousand words in a day for the book than writing a thousand words for a column is a lot easier um and part of it was because I knew that no one was going to see it for a year, I could write it down, annotate it, I was going to send it to the editor and the editor was going to get kicked.

They would give it back to me, if they didn't like it, they would tell me to cut it, that kind of thing. , so in some ways there was less pressure to do that and I just stuck to what I mapped out at the beginning of the process. I need to get to a hundred thousand words by this date, if I average 325 a day for the next 10 months, sorry, I'll get there that easy, so there would be days where I would write 1500 and that's okay, I can take a couple of days free or I finish a chapter.

I reward myself. I have to write for a couple of days. I see Keith smiling because you've written a book and I'm sure you did something similar. You know, that's what you have. do it one way um the way to eat the elephant is one bite at a time another question and the hostile part is um they told me Kobe was supposedly at a party at the house I live in now is that right? it's in relation to the party that you talked about we'll look into well okay so yeah there was a party the night they won the day they won the state championship in Hershey, Pennsylvania and this is in the book. the team takes the bus back and they all head to the cheerleader house for the big party to celebrate the state championship and Kobe comes and stays an hour and goes home so again he tells you a little bit about who he was back then.

In your book, do you talk about Kobe's early days and in the NBA because there's a big difference between being 18 and 22 and that kind of stuff and what it was like to relate to other players because he's basically a kid and the other people with what is it? playing with grown men, you know what I mean, yeah, I didn't get into the real, um, I guess you'd call it the physiology or the physics of him taking on older men. What was interesting about that period for me was the way I looked at it, even at 18 he was cheating on his coach, Del Harris, because Del Harris was taking him out of the game, uh, because Kobe was dribbling too much.

Harris yelled at him from the bench, this is not high. in school you can't do that you can't dribble that much and then kobe would eventually go back to jeremy's treatment and say that blank, blank, he's trying to hold me down, he doesn't want to do blah blah blah that thought and like a guy 18 years old, in the end he likes being 18 and not starting for the team and throwing four aerial balls in the last game of the playoff season that your team loses because you shot the four aerial balls, he didn't like humiliating him. everything was like he had to work harder um one of my favorite anecdotes in the book, I love it, he's talking about Kobe before the season starts, he ended up with the Lakers, they drafted him, they made the trade for him, he goes a plays with the lakers and his agent arn telum native of philadelphia lower marion native is talking to him about nba players and mentions john stockton now john stockton was the point guard of the dream team this is 1996. he is about to lead the Utah Jazz to consecutive NBA finals where they lose to Michael Jordan in the Bulls.

Probably the team twice as good as him has lost hasn't won a championship. Stockton is one of the top three point guards in NBA history, but he's six-foot-two. in white and when telum asks him what are you going to do with john stockton, kobe says that i faced a lot of guys like him in the philadelphia catholic league like he just reduced the best point guard in the nba to a cultural stereotype like that and he had 18 years old, but that's how he thought and maybe not, maybe he needed to think that way to become the athlete and the player that he was, but yeah, you can look at it from a purely statistical point of view.

He can look at himself and see that he needed to grow up, look at him at that moment when he is 18 years old. You know that he needs to grow, he needs to mature physically and that is reflected in his performance that season, his second year as a player. All-Star Even though he's not actually a starter for the Lakers, he wins the dunk contest. His rookie year comes back the next year and he's an All-Star, but if any of you saw the last dance, he's absolutely abused by Michael Jordan. in that all-star game and make it clear that we're going to go after that kid and it was at Madison Square Garden and he just destroyed Kobe at least when Kobe was on defense anyway, yeah, and yet, everyone was, anyone was . at his funeral and it was resolved well, yeah, I mean, you know again, I think a lot of it goes back to the man's accounts and apparently it was becoming by the time he died, you know, it had somehow been become a kind of guru. um I've been doing in addition to the book, there's a podcast that goes along with it as a complement to the book and in that podcast you can listen to these tapes of Kobe um, these interviews that Kobe did when he was 18 17 18 19. and I just For the most Recently I just interviewed Seth Curry and Tobias Harris of the Sixers because I wanted NBA contemporaries and current players to talk about this and Tobias Harris really spoke very well about how there was something about him that that internal drive was so total. the commitment to being cool the idea that when you're at home he's working the idea that when you're 12 and you're playing and then you go home after you finish the game, he's there icing his knees like there's seen his dad and all that His dad's teammates do it and he wears knee pads during the game and you know, he watches videos and he does all these things to get better because he wants that advantage over you and Tobias said that's why people He admires him so much.

Well, Mike. I think we'll all be looking forward to your next book on Kobe. We'll see that one is enough for now. Excellent discussion. Thank you so much. Thank you all.