AFTER NBA, KOBE HAD LOTS OF IDEAS AND PLANS
HE WANTED TO TELL STORIES, BE WITH HIS FAMILY AND COACH HIS DAUGHTER IN THE GAME THEY LOVED
LOS ANGELES — The interview will not go away. I replay it in my head. I hear it on the airwaves. I see it on the TV screen. About 10 days before Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash, the former Lakers star talked with me in what became his final sit-down interview.
Bryant talked about his ambitions after his NBA career. He explained what inspired him to oversee a storytelling production company (Granity). He detailed what his Mamba Sports Academy, an athletic training center, offers. Bryant complimented LeBron James days before he passed Bryant on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.
On how those around Bryant thought he would handle his post-NBA life.
“‘I don’t know what you want to do when you retire.’ ‘You’re going to go through a state of depression.’ ‘You’re going to have an identity crisis.’ These are all things that were said to me because people were genuinely concerned. And so to be able to transition and be able to do these sorts of things is, it’s at the top of the list.”
On what’s next on his bucket list.
“Our challenge now is taking books and making them into films, feature films — some of which will be animated, some of which will be live action. So it’s figuring out how to do that while understanding that owning the intellectual property is absolutely essential. And so that’s our challenge, and it’s fun to figure out the journey but also extremely frustrating because things don’t move as fast as you want them to. But that’s OK.”
On why he has resisted staying involved with the Lakers or the NBA.
“It’s important to do what you have serious interest in doing. What I’m saying is you got to do what you love to do. I love telling stories. I love inspiring kids or providing them with tools that are going to help them.”
What his takeaways were seeing Gianna going to Lakers games and watching NBA games on League Pass.
“She really enjoyed the speed of the game and the aggressiveness of the game, and that’s one thing that she really enjoyed watching it. It’s one thing for her to see it on TV, but it’s another thing to actually be sitting right there and see how fast players have to read the game. I mean, that was her biggest takeaway. Is this the speed of the game?”
On his approach coaching Gianna and other young girls on the AAU circuit.
“What’s more important than the game itself is how you understand that their confidence as young women grows tremendously through playing a sport. You have to be very mindful of that. That’s why I think coaching youth sports is so important to take that very seriously because you’re helping the emotional [growth] of young kids. So understanding not to be over-critical and understanding that there are going to be mistakes that are made. You just kind of let them go because you’ll focus on one thing and say today we’re focusing on passing with the left hand. Passing with our weak hand. And that’s all you focus on. When you start out, they may travel, they may do all these other things, but you don’t point those out because if you start over-criticizing them, then it affects their self-esteem. It’s just doing it piece by piece. It’s been beautiful watching them grow.”
On why it’s not bittersweet that LeBron James was about to pass him on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.
“It’s such a juvenile thing. You play and you have a great career. I don’t understand why. I don’t know if people want that or want to have this kind of contentious thing where you don’t want records to be broken or people there to surpass you. You should be happy for the person that comes after you to be able to surpass things that you’ve done. It’s kind of juvenile to think or to behave any other way.”
On what retired life is like
“It’s been great, man. I got a chance to, you know, spend so much time with my family and really largely control my own schedule. So I get the chance to see them a lot. You just have more time with family, and then as far as work goes, the biggest challenge now is finding creatives that want to come in and add to the world that we’re building. So the goal was always to get the first few stories up on their feet. So it requires me to outline them quite a bit because it was hard for creatives [to] really grasp what it is that we’re trying to build. But now that they see it, it’s about finding creatives out there that say, ‘Oh, I have an idea for this particular story,’ or ‘I have an idea for this world.’ ’’ ✶