chosen_one6
02-17-2015, 02:29 PM
[QUOTE]Why do you think Jackson would write such negative things about you? Was he trying to psychologically motivate you, or is he just kind of a weird, arrogant person?
Well, most successful people are a little arrogant.... I was very stubborn. I was like a wild horse that had the potential to become Secretariat, but who was just too ****ing wild. So part of that was him trying to tame me. He's also very intelligent, and he understood the dynamic he had to deal with between me and Shaq. So he would take shots at me in the press, and I understood he was doing that in order to ingratiate himself to Shaq. And since I knew what he was doing, I felt like that was an insult to my intelligence. I mean, I knew what he was doing. Why not just come to me and tell me that? Another thing was that I would go to him in confidence and talk about certain things, and he would then use those things to manipulate the media against me. And from that standpoint, I finally said, "No way. I'm not gonna deal with that anymore." This was during our first run, during those first three championships. So when he'd come out in the press and say those things about me, I was finally like, "**** it. I'm done with this guy. I'll play for him and win championships, but I will have no interaction with him." Yet at the same time, it drove me at a maniacal pace. Because either consciously or unconsciously, he put a tremendous amount of pressure on me to be efficient, and to be great, and to be great now.
When this was happening, did you actively dislike him?
Yeah. (pause) Yeah. I was like, "**** him. I'm out here busting my ass. I'm killing myself." And it became insulting. Because I chose to extend my deal with the Lakers to play with Shaquille O' Neal and win championships. I knew what I could have done individually. I could have gone to another team and averaged 35 points a game. I could have gone anywhere and destroyed people. I gave that up to win championships. So it was infuriating to hear people say I was selfish. It was very, very maddening.
Do you feel like Shaq was publicly rewarded for not working hard? Somehow, the fact that he was a little lazy always came across as charming....That's why Shaq and I still have a good relationship: He knows I have zero fear of him. I would tell him what he was doing and what he wasn't doing. And vice versa. There were times when we absolutely could not stand each other. We could not be in the same room together. But we challenged the shit out of each other.
So would you say the perception of him being lazy was inaccurate?
He had years where he was lazy. But during those three championships we won? To say he was a beast would be an understatement. To say I didn't learn things from him that I still use to this day would be a disservice....
...
It has become popular to suggest that his ego—and his two-year, $48.5 million contract—are now actively hurting the franchise. The perception has become so universal that ESPN The Magazine published a story suggesting the Lakers cannot sign top-flight free agents as long as Bryant controls the system. Most of the story's sources were anonymous and Bryant claims he didn't read the article. But he also said he has been asked about it enough to "grasp what it was conceptually," and he certainly doesn't dispute the takeaway.
"Does my nature make me less enjoyable to play with? Of course," he says. "Of course it does. Is it possible that some top players in the league are intimidated by that? Yes. But do I want to play with those players? Does the Laker organization want those specific players? No. Magic. Jordan. Bird. We all would have been phenomenal teammates. This organization wants players who will carry this franchise to another five or six championships. The player who does that has to be cut from the same cloth. And if they're not cut from that cloth, they don't belong here."
This self-perpetuating image of Bryant as an unyielding workaholic has become so integral to his ethos that it reflexively informs every other detail about his life. He has become The Last Hard Man, the realest of the real, the lone remnant from a Precambrian NBA era when players still hated each other and the only people who cared about AAU basketball were actual eighth graders. Yet people forget that this was not always the case. As crazy as it now seems, there was a long stretch in the '90s when the principle knock on Bryant was his alleged insincerity. He smiled constantly, spoke Italian, and took Brandy to the prom. He adopted a "plain vanilla" persona modeled after Julius Erving, despite a transparent aspiration to embody the most conventional definition of urban cool; it often came across like Grant Hill trying to impersonate Allen Iverson.
"It wasn't that people thought I was soft," he says, slightly wincing at the implications of the word. "It was more of a street credibility thing: 'He grew up in Italy. He's not one of us.' But what I came to understand, coming out of Colorado, is that I had to be me, in the place where I was at that moment."
Which brings us to the hinge-point in the career of Kobe Bryant: the week he checked into a Colorado hotel room, had sex with a woman who worked there, and was subsequently arrested on a sexual-assault charge. A year later, the charges were dropped and Bryant apologized. But the incident will (obviously) never go away. When Bryant dies, the accusation will probably appear in the second paragraph of his obituary. And he knows this.
"I started to consider the mortality of what I was doing," he says. At the time, he was 24. "What's important? What's not important? What does it mean when everybody loves you, and then everybody hates your guts for something they think you did? So that's when I decided that—if people were going to like me or not like me—it was going to be for who I actually was. To hell with all that plain vanilla shit, just to get endorsement deals. Those are superficial, anyway. I don't enjoy doing them, anyway. I'll just show people who I actually am.... The [loss of the] endorsements were really the least of my concerns. Was I afraid of going to jail? Yes. It was twenty-five to life, man. I was terrified. The one thing that really helped me during that process—I'm Catholic, I grew up Catholic, my kids are Catholic—was talking to a priest. It was actually kind of funny: He looks at me and says, 'Did you do it?' And I say, 'Of course not.' Then he asks, 'Do you have a good lawyer?' And I'm like, 'Uh, yeah, he's phenomenal.' So then he just said, 'Let it go. Move on. God's not going to give you anything you can't handle, and it's in his hands now. This is something you can't control. So let it go.' And that was the turning point."
Well, most successful people are a little arrogant.... I was very stubborn. I was like a wild horse that had the potential to become Secretariat, but who was just too ****ing wild. So part of that was him trying to tame me. He's also very intelligent, and he understood the dynamic he had to deal with between me and Shaq. So he would take shots at me in the press, and I understood he was doing that in order to ingratiate himself to Shaq. And since I knew what he was doing, I felt like that was an insult to my intelligence. I mean, I knew what he was doing. Why not just come to me and tell me that? Another thing was that I would go to him in confidence and talk about certain things, and he would then use those things to manipulate the media against me. And from that standpoint, I finally said, "No way. I'm not gonna deal with that anymore." This was during our first run, during those first three championships. So when he'd come out in the press and say those things about me, I was finally like, "**** it. I'm done with this guy. I'll play for him and win championships, but I will have no interaction with him." Yet at the same time, it drove me at a maniacal pace. Because either consciously or unconsciously, he put a tremendous amount of pressure on me to be efficient, and to be great, and to be great now.
When this was happening, did you actively dislike him?
Yeah. (pause) Yeah. I was like, "**** him. I'm out here busting my ass. I'm killing myself." And it became insulting. Because I chose to extend my deal with the Lakers to play with Shaquille O' Neal and win championships. I knew what I could have done individually. I could have gone to another team and averaged 35 points a game. I could have gone anywhere and destroyed people. I gave that up to win championships. So it was infuriating to hear people say I was selfish. It was very, very maddening.
Do you feel like Shaq was publicly rewarded for not working hard? Somehow, the fact that he was a little lazy always came across as charming....That's why Shaq and I still have a good relationship: He knows I have zero fear of him. I would tell him what he was doing and what he wasn't doing. And vice versa. There were times when we absolutely could not stand each other. We could not be in the same room together. But we challenged the shit out of each other.
So would you say the perception of him being lazy was inaccurate?
He had years where he was lazy. But during those three championships we won? To say he was a beast would be an understatement. To say I didn't learn things from him that I still use to this day would be a disservice....
...
It has become popular to suggest that his ego—and his two-year, $48.5 million contract—are now actively hurting the franchise. The perception has become so universal that ESPN The Magazine published a story suggesting the Lakers cannot sign top-flight free agents as long as Bryant controls the system. Most of the story's sources were anonymous and Bryant claims he didn't read the article. But he also said he has been asked about it enough to "grasp what it was conceptually," and he certainly doesn't dispute the takeaway.
"Does my nature make me less enjoyable to play with? Of course," he says. "Of course it does. Is it possible that some top players in the league are intimidated by that? Yes. But do I want to play with those players? Does the Laker organization want those specific players? No. Magic. Jordan. Bird. We all would have been phenomenal teammates. This organization wants players who will carry this franchise to another five or six championships. The player who does that has to be cut from the same cloth. And if they're not cut from that cloth, they don't belong here."
This self-perpetuating image of Bryant as an unyielding workaholic has become so integral to his ethos that it reflexively informs every other detail about his life. He has become The Last Hard Man, the realest of the real, the lone remnant from a Precambrian NBA era when players still hated each other and the only people who cared about AAU basketball were actual eighth graders. Yet people forget that this was not always the case. As crazy as it now seems, there was a long stretch in the '90s when the principle knock on Bryant was his alleged insincerity. He smiled constantly, spoke Italian, and took Brandy to the prom. He adopted a "plain vanilla" persona modeled after Julius Erving, despite a transparent aspiration to embody the most conventional definition of urban cool; it often came across like Grant Hill trying to impersonate Allen Iverson.
"It wasn't that people thought I was soft," he says, slightly wincing at the implications of the word. "It was more of a street credibility thing: 'He grew up in Italy. He's not one of us.' But what I came to understand, coming out of Colorado, is that I had to be me, in the place where I was at that moment."
Which brings us to the hinge-point in the career of Kobe Bryant: the week he checked into a Colorado hotel room, had sex with a woman who worked there, and was subsequently arrested on a sexual-assault charge. A year later, the charges were dropped and Bryant apologized. But the incident will (obviously) never go away. When Bryant dies, the accusation will probably appear in the second paragraph of his obituary. And he knows this.
"I started to consider the mortality of what I was doing," he says. At the time, he was 24. "What's important? What's not important? What does it mean when everybody loves you, and then everybody hates your guts for something they think you did? So that's when I decided that—if people were going to like me or not like me—it was going to be for who I actually was. To hell with all that plain vanilla shit, just to get endorsement deals. Those are superficial, anyway. I don't enjoy doing them, anyway. I'll just show people who I actually am.... The [loss of the] endorsements were really the least of my concerns. Was I afraid of going to jail? Yes. It was twenty-five to life, man. I was terrified. The one thing that really helped me during that process—I'm Catholic, I grew up Catholic, my kids are Catholic—was talking to a priest. It was actually kind of funny: He looks at me and says, 'Did you do it?' And I say, 'Of course not.' Then he asks, 'Do you have a good lawyer?' And I'm like, 'Uh, yeah, he's phenomenal.' So then he just said, 'Let it go. Move on. God's not going to give you anything you can't handle, and it's in his hands now. This is something you can't control. So let it go.' And that was the turning point."