Kobe Bryant is now an Oscar-winning former NBA player, but his best stories are certainly about his playing days.
Brant appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night to talk about his winning an Oscar for his Dear Basketball film. While the shock of him winning an Oscar still hasn’t worn off, the now-retired Bryant has plenty of stories left to tell about his playing days.
On Thursday night, he told a story about how he and Shaq went at it with the fisticuffs at a Lakers practice when the two were scrimmaging. Bryant was very young at the time, but he told how he and Shaq went at it and had to be restrained by teammates.
https://youtu.be/goR0ki9OUts
The story comes at about the two minute mark of the video when Kimmel asked about the conversation he had with Shaq where they discussed the fight. Kimmel wanted to know, of course, who threw the first punch.
“He did,” Bryant said. “I couldn’t reach him.”
Bryant said he was “nuts” and then described looking at Shaq’s balled up fists.
“During the interview I pick up his hand and looking at the size of his hand and I’m going ‘I must have been the craziest 19-year-old in the world to fight this guy. But it just is what it is.”
It didn’t amount to a huge fight, but there were punches thrown.
“He threw a punch. I had to slip it. I threw one back,” Kobe said. “And then everybody jumped in and just broke it apart.”
Kimmel said he would not have jumped in an got involved if someone Shaq’s size was involved, but to Bryant that was the point of the fight. He wanted to show that he wasn’t going to “back down” no matter how big Shaq was.
“Listen at that point you either say you’ve got to beat the hell out of me but you’re going to know that I’m not going to back down. And we kept playing. Because it was a scrimmage. So we were playing pickup basketball. We kept playing.”
Kimmel asked if the two grew closer after the fight, which got a funny response from Bryant.
“Well no,” he said as the crowd laughed. “Because we were scrimmaging and his team was up 5-2 and the game goes to seven. So after the fight, I got really pissed and scored every point and we won the game. And I let him know about it. So that kind of soured any opportunity for us.”
It sounds like an extremely Kobe story, and Shaq’s characterization checks out here, too. But like Kimmel said, at least they seem friendly these days.
