BBL legend Tuck recalls his most memorable Kobe moments and picks his favourite Bryant game
Thursday 30 January 2020 13:38, UK
NBA analyst Mike Tuck reflects on Kobe Bryant's career and cites a peerless dedication to the game and relentless competitive drive as the NBA legend's greatest traits.
I was at home on Sunday evening when I first heard the news about Kobe Bryant. I got a message through on the Sheffield Sharks player's group chat, 'did you hear about Kobe?'. At first I thought it was spam or fake news but it became a reality quite quickly.
It was a complete shock. With Kobe, I always think of the word 'icon' when I hear his name and with people like that, in a sense, you think of them as invincible. Sunday was a tough day.
There are so many things that come to mind when I think of him. The first thing is all his accolades - the 18 All-Star appearances, the five championships, the Finals MVPs, the league MVP and the two Olympic gold medals.
Then there are all the plays he made: the alley-oop to Shaq in Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals, not flinching on defense when Matt Barnes faked to throw the ball in his face at point-blank range, the story of him hitting a clutch free throw with his eyes closed after Gerald Wallace bet him he couldn't.
My favourite Kobe game was the 81-point performance against the Raptors. I was at university in American at the time and I can still remember being in the locker room and watching the playback the morning after that game. We were all in there. I was sitting in with a team-mate, another Toronto kid, and one of our other team-mates was a diehard Kobe fan and he was in there screaming his head off and laughing at us because the Raptors couldn't stop Kobe from scoring all those points.
Kobe was such a fierce competitor and you had to respect him. On any given night he could give you 40, 50, 60 points or, one that one occasion against Toronto, 81. He was the type of guy who loved to watch but you hated it when your team was playing against him.
On the court, Kobe had a fairytale NBA career. He came into the league at 17 and we kind of grew up with him. I can still remember when he took the singer Brandy to his High School prom. Next thing, he was in the NBA and you didn't know if he would be able to hack it, a boy playing against men.
Quite quickly we found out he was something special. From the three-peat with Shaq to the two titles in 2009 and 2010, we watched him turn from boy to man to veteran. Towards the end of his career we watched him struggle with injuries. I'll never forget him tearing his Achilles and getting back up to make two free throws - what an amazing moment.
And to finish it all off, Shaq challenged him to score 50 in his final game and he turned around and put 60 instead. An absolutely insane, storied career.
Since his retirement, we had also come to know him as a father, a husband, an Academy Award winner. He was so much more than a basketball player and he will be missed by so, so many.
There has been talk that, at the All-Star Game, one team will all wear No 24 and the other team No 8. I think that sounds like a great idea. Dribbling the eight- and 24-second clocks out to start that showpiece game in Kobe's honour will be great as well.
For me, when I was just a kid, Michael Jordan was the main guy when I first started playing basketball. But by my late High School years and the time I got to university, Kobe was the guy. The torch had been passed to him. He had a lot of similar traits to Jordan, most notably the fierce competitive streak.
He was relentless, intense, demanding of himself and others - he probably wasn't an easy guy to play with and there were multiple flare-ups with team-mates, including the famous beef with Shaq.
But he was dedicated and that was his greatest trait. He was dedicated to the grind, dedicated to getting better and dedicated to the game of basketball. He was the game of basketball and he is now forever ingrained in that culture. Anytime someone throws a balled-up piece of paper at a bin, they'll call his name.
It was the relentless drive - the 'Mamba Mentality' he coined - that separated him from everybody else. In his later career, in the 2009 and 2010 playoffs, the look he would have on his face in those games where he'd have his teeth out - the 'Kobe underbite' - is the Kobe I will always remember: an intense, fierce, gritty competitor.
