With basketball at the core of BSTN’s DNA and many passionate hoops fans on our team, we’ve polled different people around the office for their favorite Kobe Bryant stories ahead of the upcoming Mamba Day weekend. Enjoy two of our favorites – one from the #8 era and one from the #24 chapter – below!
Right place, wrong time
as recounted by Sanja, Senior Buyer
I’d briefly met Kobe the year before at the same adidas-sponsored streetball event in Milan, but in 1999, I actually got to play against him. That year, the World Streetball Final was in Paris so as the back-to-back German national champion, my team and I were headed to La Défense.
As a special honor, four players from the women’s rosters were picked to play in an exhibition game at center court with two young NBA phenoms that adidas had brought to Paris for the event. A fellow Team Germany player and I made the cut, so the organizers paired me with the two other girls and her with … Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant! What kind of Nico Harrison GM move was that!?
Our Senior Buyer Sanja about to pump-fake young Bean
Granted, neither one of the guys had reached the pinnacle of their respecitve career yet by that point, but experiencing that level of athleticism as well as that speed and agility in players 6-6 or taller first hand was mighty impressive.
Playing against those two guys is not just a memory I’ll treasure forever but also produced my all-time grail photo. Hearing T-Mac yelling from behind me, I made sure to pump-fake, thinking that I’d let Kobe fly by before going for the layup … you can judge by the photo how that plan worked out, haha. I don’t remember the exact score of the game, but I know for a fact that this specific layup attempt ended in the fifth row.
Wrong place, right time
as recounted by Christian, Senior Content Manager
The press conferences at All Star Weekend are essentially the NBA equivalent of a mosh pit. 12 tables in a ball room of a fancy hotel, one for each All Star, and tens (or hundreds) of people in front of each one – journalists elbowing one another for the best position, camera operators trying to get their shot and every reporter yelling as loud as they can, just to get their question in.
In Toronto in 2016, I thought I’d pick my battles wisely: Post up at Chris Paul’s table by the entrance with just a few journalists rather than join hundreds of people and ESPN cameras on the other side of the room at Kobe’s. When the Black Mamba entered the ball room – judging from the ‘Oh hell no!’ expression on his face – he thought the exact same thing.
Chief Content Manager Christian at another, less crowded, Kobe interview
He simply plopped down into CP3’s chair and flashed a grin.1 Kobe was ready to go, the media was stunned, and plans were thrown out of windows. Before anyone else reacted, I asked him a question and the man behind the ‘Chris Paul’ sign answered. So, I quickly asked him another one, inconspicuously crumbling my notes with my other hand. Getting a third uninterrupted question in was unheard of for a lowly non-ESPN writer like me, but here we were. By question four, I could only match Mamba’s cheeky smile, hearing the camera crews behind me, disassembling their setups and hauling ass from the other side of the room to get to Kobe.
With the interview over, I called my editor in chief back home at 3 am, getting him to clear six pages for the Kobe story we hadn’t planned for. A few weeks later, the two German basketball magazines released their All Star issues: Ours included a short column about how this partially exclusive interview came to be … and our rival’s had a column by their furious editor in chief, who had been unsuccessfully waiting in Kobe’s line. (Sorry not sorry, Dre! Nothing but love for you, bud.)
Join us in celebrating Mamba Day (this Sunday, 08/24) or Kobe’s birthday (tomorrow) by reminiscing about your own memories over on Instagram or by browsing his signature shoes, officially licensed jerseys, and memorabilia here.
1. When a baffled Chris Paul showed up a few minutes later, there was nothing he could do about the situation. It was Kobe’s last All Star Game and the Mamba was already holding court. The only thing left to do for CP was to head across the room to a table with a horizontal paper sign on it that said ‘Kobe Bryant’. ↩
