Phil Jackson

big-time player at the endgame situation and has made really good decisions in competitive, real competitive nature of games.

And he's had a big influence on this generation that has followed.

Big influence.

Well, he's very sensitive and that he does not take criticism lightly.

That he did not want to be compared to Michael, even though his game emulated Michael, down to the fact that he even did a number of physical movements.

that could only have been influenced by watching Come Fly With Me, which was an important videotape of Michael Jordan's heroics that came out in, like, 1990 or 89, sometime right around there.

And, you know, it just was a huge influence on a kid like Kobe who was, you know, probably 10, 11, 12 years of age where boys are...

gravitating towards what they can do well.

And this is something that he knew he could do really well.

So his game was to compete on a level that was comparable to Michael Jordan's.

And when he first came into playing for the Lakers when I was coaching him,

It was not the role I was going to perhaps give him.

I gave him a lead guard role, which meant he had to set up the floor, he had to be able to feed Shaq, who was the primary focus of the game, and he had to take the leftovers as part of...

game as it came to him and a lot of times he felt left out of like I need to explore my own part of the game so that's where initially we had to be juggling things a little bit between each other so you know he had to kind of face that and figured it out and figured out how to do it and eventually I moved him into a role that was very similar to Michael Jordan's which

gave him much more latitude in the game as we became adapted to using a guy named Lamar Odom, a guard, a 6-9 forward that became a lead guard or an off guard.

We had a two-guard front.

So, yeah, there was room for him to grow and for me to accommodate.

Well, I'd curried him about the statement that he wanted to be captain of the team.

He was 22.

And I was like, well, you don't go out with the players.