Consider the following hypothetical situation. Let’s say you are playing for your high school basketball team and have persuaded one of the team’s benchwarmers to stay afterward to play one-on-one. Let’s also stipulate that you are much, much better than this benchwarmer, who, for our purposes, we shall call Rob.
Now let’s say the two of you are playing a game to 100 points, with each basket worth one point, winner’s outs after a made shot, and you are having your way with poor Rob, backing him down and driving by him and pulling up for jumpers. Pretty soon you’ve built an almost embarrassing lead — say, 40 baskets to none. Now, in this situation, do you:
a) begin to feel bad for Rob, who is, after all, doing you a favor by staying late, and perhaps ease up a bit so he can at least score a few baskets?
b) continue playing hard but maybe start taking only outside jumpers, so that Rob might have a fighting chance, thus making it more competitive?
c) never let up for a second, hounding Rob on defense and punishing him on offense, because the only way to win is to do so absolutely and completely, and only the weak relent, even for a moment?
If you answered “c,” congratulations. You share a mind-set with Kobe Bryant, the most competitive life-form on the planet.
Bryant, in fact, lived the above scenario while at Lower Merion High in Pennsylvania — and did so more than once. Only Bryant didn’t just get up 40–0. Sometimes he would take an 80–0 lead on Rob Schwartz, a good-natured, if undersized, junior guard. Think about that: 80 baskets to none. Can you imagine the focus, the ruthlessness, required to score 80 times on someone before they score once? Kobe can. To Kobe, this is just what you do. It is how you play.
“You’d think he’d have a tendency to ease back, but he doesn’t have that in him,” remembers Schwartz, who now works as a strength-and-conditioning coach near Philadelphia. “I think the best I ever did was to lose 100–12.” Naturally, Bryant doesn’t want to concede that Schwartz had even that much success. “I think he’s lying about that,” Bryant says when I tell him of Schwartz’s recollection. “I told Rob that too. We were talking about it, and I said, ‘You never got 12. I never let you get double digits. Most you got was five.’” Bryant is smiling when he says this, but it’s a forced grin. He really does want to set the record straight. Because God forbid any of us think for a moment that this Schwartz kid got double digits on Kobe Bryant.
