Kobe Bryant‘s final game will go down in history as one of the greatest finales in NBA history, even for someone as competitive as Bryant himself.
A year later, Bryant looked back in an ESPN TrueHoop feature that chronicled the fatigue and emotion that highlighted Bryant’s 60-point outing in his last game as a Los Angeles Laker. Fittingly published on the last day of the NBA’s regular season, the piece looks at just how Bryant achieved that amazing statistical feat in his 21st and final season.
The first impression was clear: he had no idea he would be so involved. In fact, he just thought he should get through the game without a major injury. But once his teammates just kept passing him the ball and the crowd got on him to shoot, he knew it would be something much greater than that.
“After the first couple minutes, I was like, ‘Oh, s—,'” Bryant says. “It became apparent really, really quickly that this night was not going to go down with me just playing OK. It was either going to have to be an epic one or the worst one ever, because they were just going to keep throwing me the damn ball and the crowd wanted me to shoot every time — almost to the point where I felt bad for my teammates, because if they took a shot, the crowd was ready to boo. So it was like, ‘Oh, s—. I gotta go.'”
The piece also has a shot-by-shot recap of the epic night, where Brant himself outscored the Jazz 23-21 and led a stunning Lakers comeback win over Utah. But even in a game loaded with celebrities paying tribute to his career and a raucous crowd cheering him on, Bryant was often on the verge of exhaustion.
“I was tired as hell, man,” Bryant said.
He compares the sensation to finishing a grueling series of maximum-effort dead lifts, squats and lunges, and then finding that merely standing up is nearly impossible, thanks to legs that, fighting numbness, refuse basic commands from the nervous system. “That’s what you battle with,” he says. “Because when that point comes, I can’t get it back. It’s done.” So that was the mission in timeouts, or in stolen moments of rest on the court. He says it was about lungs helping legs, “trying to breathe life back into them, somehow.”
Yes, when the montages and messages from celebrities and former teammates aired throughout the game, Bryant sneaked an occasional peek, but on dead balls he says his focus was mostly on trying to find the energy to finish the game, especially as the Lakers started to rally from a 15-point hole.
All of that sounds kind of terrible and not fun at all, but Bryant is as competitive as anyone and tried hard to not let the fatigue show through. Bryant said there were shots he took where he couldn’t feel his legs, and he thought some of his shots simply didn’t have enough on them to fall. Somehow, miraculously, he just kept hitting shots.
The whole piece is great and definitely worth reading, especially to hear Bryant swear about basketball. There are some nice introspective moments about personal and physical growth in his career that are pretty interesting, too. The Black Mamba may be out when it comes to basketball, but he’s still got plenty to say.
