Karl became Mamba fan after some fallout
Kobe Bryant never forgave. George Karl never forgot. “Kobe thought I kept him on the bench because I wanted Michael (Jordan) to win the MVP,” the former Nuggets coach recalled Monday.
The bench in question was at Madison Square Garden, in the 1998 NBA All-Star Game. The Black Mamba was only 19 then, making his first all-star appearance, and had 18 points through three quarters for Karl’s West squad. Jordan finished with 23 for the victorious East and was selected as the game’s MVP.
“And that was the game where I think Kobe, he was telling guys to get out of the way, he wanted to go oneon-one and isolate,” Karl said of Bryant,
the 41-year-old basketball icon who perished, along with his 13-yearold daughter and seven others, in a helicopter crash Sunday. “And a couple players came to me and said, ‘I don’t want to play.’ David Robinson was older at that time, Karl Malone was older at that time.”
Malone took umbrage to the teenage phenom waving off his screens, but Kobe smelled a conspiracy afoot.
The wound never healed. Last Sep
tember, during an appearance on the “Knuckleheads” podcast with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, Bryant said that the decision made by Karl, who would later steer Denver to nine straight playoff berths from 2005-13, never stopped eating at him.
“Later in years (that) became my motivation against Denver, to never let them win a playoff series because he didn’t play me the whole fourth quarter of that game,” Bryant said in 2019. “So when we played the Denver Nuggets in the playoffs, it was like, ‘Hold on — you’re never, you will never, beat me in the playoffs.’ ”
And they didn’t. Bryant’s Lakers eliminated Karl and the Nuggets three times during that eight-season run — in 2008, 2009 and 2012. The 2009 tussle in the Western conference finals, which Bryant’s Lakers won in six games, still stings.
“Some of them weren’t fair,” Karl said of the matchups. “The one in 2008-09, if (our) coach would’ve drawn up a play to get the ball inbounds a couple times, we might’ve won that series.”
Karl, now 68, didn’t know the Mamba well — not nearly as well as Jordan, his fellow North Carolina Tar Heel. But in the last dozen years, their respective circles, and families, intertwined. Karl’s son Coby played with Bryant on the Lakers in 200708 and is in his fourth season coaching that franchise’s D-League club.
Which made the news of Sunday’s crash, and the nine lives it cut tragically short, hit even closer to home.
“It’s helped to talk about it,” Karl said.
“But I can’t deny that, when I found out about it, I was numb. And the haunting thing to me was, I have a 15-year-old daughter, and if that happened to me with my daughter — I would die for my daughter, but I don’t want her to die.”
Young Kobe, Madison Square Garden Kobe, was complex, impudent and driven like a ’73 Econoline. But what impressed Karl in retrospect — even more than his talents, grit, grind and utter ruthlessness in the clutch — was Bryant’s growth, on and off the court.
The way the lessons, even the painful ones, stuck.
“In every aspect of his life, he evolved into a better person because of it,” Karl said. “And I think he was turning into a mentor for a lot of players. And a lot of women’s players, I think, he went out of his way to be (a mentor to). And I admired him for all that stuff.
“After 36 hours of thinking about it, the kindest thing I’d say about him is he made the game better. I’ve always said of players, I love basketball players who made other players better. In the end, the game is better because he played 20 years of basketball at a very high level.”