(4) Kobe Bryant Up Close Interview with Jimmy Kimmel [FULL INTERVIEW] – YouTube
This is Kobe back in 2013 with Jimmy Kimmel in the aftermath of the Achilles injury. For me—this is vintage Kobe. It’s a great interview if you ever have the time to watch it.
If for no other reason it for me has Kobe’s most prescient quote of all-time: ‘ If you see me wrestling with a grizzly bear…pray for the bear.’
That’s Kobe.
I was never a Lakers fanatic because as a kid the Sixers were my team and quite frankly I was miffed that Kobe being a Philly kid never played for the Sixers.
The irony is though that as a kid I adored Jerry West and it was Jerry West who made the deal which made Kobe a lifetime Laker. When I watched Jerry West describe his surrogate father relationship with Kobe it brought tears to my eyes.
Like most…I wondered what exactly transpired with Kobe and the young woman in Colorado. But as was the case in everything Kobe… he obviously learned a great deal from that setback experience in his life and blossomed into this incredibly interesting NBA icon who turned into this thing called the Girl Dad.
He’s by far the most interesting interview I can remember in sports. He would have made a helluva U.S. Senator representing California…and I’m fairly certain he would have won.
He talked Italian on the court to his favorite Laker teammate Pau Gasol. They were the only two who knew what the hell they were saying to one another.. So Kobe.
He talks on this interview about his only experience in being bullied as a skinny kid and winks as he describes the execution he gave this Philadelphia bully in a one on one game. Pray for the grizzly bear. See what I mean.
I know what Kobe meant…in the fourth grade a skinny little prick named Danny Warren dropped a racial slur on me on a recess break. I seethed. My mother told me to take the high road. No way. Next time I saw that miserable little prick Danny Warren… I dropped him in a pickup football game with a clothline tackle which would have drawn three targeting calls in today’s football world. Little Danny Warren never dropped another racial slur my way again. Just saying.
The moment I knew Kobe was different was during an interview when he started talking about every Quinton Tarantino movie ever made. He loved Tarantino movies. He even made a kid’s movie and for crying out loud and won an Oscar for the movie.
At each juncture of his life he grew as a human. He possessed this admirable sense of self-introspection I truly admire in a human being.
Kobe didn’t attend college even though North Carolina, Duke, and Kansas all came calling. Kobe revealed he would have attended North Carolina because Michael went there and he wanted Michael’s number, plus he wanted to get better by going against Vince Carter every day in practice. But in the end he passed on college because he wanted the best the pros had to offer Day 1. Kobe didn’t need a degree being he earned a PhD in life its ownself.
As we all saw he became this wonderful father to his girls and in the end Kobe transcended beyond just being an iconic basktball player to becoming an iconic human being.
Kobe never went to Harvard or Yale Law Schools like two dimwits in the news recently, but would have destroyed Donald Trump in a debate. The two people I feel most certain who would have destroyed Donald Trump in a debate woud have been Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Warren. The truth could very well be Kobe was a Republican… but he wouldn’t have tolerated the complete lack of empathy.
Michael, Wilt and Tiger were/are Republicans, but none of those guys transmitted the empathy to other humans like Kobe. It doesn’t matter what his politics were–it was just this sense he transmitted in his later years as grew up and became a man.
Kobe swore that if he and Shaq would have stayed together they would have won ten rings together because he never would have let up on Shaq’s work ethic.
In the end..I don’t know how anybody could not have fallen for Kobe to some varying degree at some point in his life.
But in the end beyond the smile and the Girl Dad personna…always remember Kobe’s Doctrine…’Pray for the bear.’