Kobe Bryant
speaker
640 appearances
14 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 8 Jul
Kobe Bryant’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Yeah, so about my fourth year in the league. Okay. And so I go up to his room, and this is when there were no – iPads, anything like that, right? So when you're on the road, you have to call down to the front desk and have to bring up the TV with the whole, you know, the rolly thing and the VHS and the cassette tape and pop it in. And I thought we were going to watch what we call touches.
So watch all your touches when you have the ball, all the decisions you make, good ones and bad. No, we're watching the start of the game to the end of the game. And not like the TV feed. We're watching the in-arena feed, the layup line, the timeouts. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Rewinding, stopping, fast forward, rewinding, slow motion, every little thing, every game of that season with the 82-year-old Yoda. Oh, my gosh. Who is as brutally honest as you can get. What did that teach you that season? It taught me to look at detail. Look at things that they're smallest. Look at body language. Look at the energy between players, our team and the other team. Right.
Look at the tactics, look at the overall strategy and look at how tactically things are manifesting themselves. And because I watched so much film, then it gave me the ability to see game in real time as if I was watching film. Wow. I can see because a lot of times the game starts moving really fast.
But if you train yourself to watch hours and hours of film, the game's not moving that fast anymore. You can really recognize who's doing what and why you can position guys in the right places in real time.
You gotta, you gotta go. I don't know.
I mean, Beyonce is the same thing. Really? After a performance, she's immediately on her laptop re-watching the performance. No way. Yes. Seeing how to do things better. What could we have done differently? Right? I mean, it's just an obsessiveness, right? that comes along with it. You want things to be as perfect as they can be.
Understanding that nothing is ever perfect, but the challenge is trying to get them as perfect as they can be. And what can you do? It's in your control. So control what you can. I can watch film all day long. It's going to help me get better. Yes. Yes.
No, you can't push somebody to do that. Right. But what you can do is is alter behavior and also change the vernacular of how they speak about the game. So on team buses, team planes and a locker room after practice, I would look at the film, I'd pull Powell, Lamar, D. Fish, pull them aside and say, let's look at this. We probably should have done this, that, and the other.
Yeah, and then you speak to them in executional terms. It's never, come on, guys, we can do better. Come on, guys, we can do better. That's rah-rah stuff. A leader must give very tactical things that we can do, adjustments. Okay, the defense is doing this, that, and the other. That means we should probably do this, this, this, that, and the other.
By midway through the season, through that behavior, you start seeing them communicating the same way back to you. Right? And it's like, okay, Colb, they're doing this, that, and the other to you. Maybe we should do this and that. Okay, yeah. Awesome. Great.
Not now, no. Well, when I was playing. When you were playing. Yeah. So when I was playing, what I would do is study the film, but study our younger players.
and see what areas do they need to develop in and how can I help them develop? I mean, that was the big challenge is you move from, you know, being the single dominant player to understanding, okay, I have to help these other guys.
The challenge for me was always... compassion and empathy. Cause you're like, guys, let's go get results. Shut up. Don't complain. Right. I want to hear your whining. I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me how rough the water is. Just bring the boat in. You know, I don't, I don't want to hear it, you know? And it's, it's understanding like, okay, these guys have lives outside of here.
They have other things happening to them that may be affecting the way that they're practicing or the way that they're performing. And it was hard for me to understand that because nothing bothered me. Anything personal, you know, never fazed me when I played. You compartmentalized it. Very well. So I couldn't understand how my teammates couldn't do that either.
So I had to really work on that aspect of it. That's hard. Yeah, it is.
Yeah, so I think about 2009, things started changing for me. I started... really making a conscious effort to better understand. And that doesn't mean you have compassion and empathy, so you go soft on them. It's more like you put yourself to the side and you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're feeling.
And then you have to make certain decisions of, okay, what buttons do I need to push for this player to get them to the next level? So it's never, it's not sit around and it's all happy-go-lucky type of thing. Your leader, your job is to get the best out of them. even if they may not like it at that time.
Honestly, it sounds... May sound a little shallow, but I got to say beating the Celtics in game seven. That's what I'm most proud of. Why? Because it was the hardest. You know, you're playing with Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen. And, you know, there's myself, Powell, and players that other teams didn't want. And, you know, how do we figure out as a group what to do?
And the reason why I love that series so much is that we went down three games to two against Boston. And now you got two games coming home. I remember sitting in the locker room and they beat the crap out of us to that game. So we're sitting in the locker room and it's really, really quiet. I'm sitting there looking around and we just lost the Celtics in 08. So this is like revenge. Right.
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