Phil Jackson

The players tell me you stay in the room all the time.

You watch tape of the game last night that you played.

You're not interested in the conversations that they're having.

If you want to be a leader, you need to really rub shoulders with your teammates.

And he was like, well, they're into hubcaps and their cars and the girls and clubs and rap music.

Those aren't the passions that I have right now.

Basketball is my focus.

So I could see that.

So I started giving him books like the leadership books, the leadership of Winnie the Pooh and the Tao of Leadership and some books that were kind of like just talking about

growing into the role that he was going to play.

And one of the things about basketball that's happened is in the days when players matriculated out of college or their college class matriculated into the NBA, players played three, four years in NCAA in college.

And as they went through their college years, they grew into a leadership role.

And suddenly the NBA started getting players that were either before they went to college as a result of Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett and some other players that came in the game prior to even going to college.

And so they never assumed or grew into a role of leadership.

And that was one of the things I was concerned about with Kobe.

But he became a really good leader and took it to heart.

We talked about the good times.

We talked about some of the things about basketball.

Talked about his kids that he was coaching, coaching a girls' team in basketball where Gigi was part and really a dominant player in that world of that league.

Talked about his traversing from Orange County up into the Valley, into Westlake, and...