Kobe Bryant hates to lose. It’s probably one of the reasons he has decided to call it quits after this season. Yes, it’s also because his body is breaking down on him, but all of the losing that he has done so far this season has to be killing him. The guy hates losing so much.
To illustrate just how much he hates it, USA Today High School Sports caught up with Gregg Downer, who coached Kobe at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pa. back in the 1990s, and asked him to talk about the craziest thing he ever saw Kobe do after losing in high school. And believe it or not—we definitely believe it—he talked about the time Kobe tried to “kill” one of his teammates after he lost in a practice (yes, practice!) drill.
“He lost a practice drill one time,” Downer said, “and we had a 5-foot-7 guard named Rob Schwartz and he thought Rob had the costly turnover that cost his team the drill and proceeded to chase him throughout the hallways as the players were on water breaks. This wasn’t just, ‘I’m gonna chase you and scold you.’ To me, it looked like, ‘I’m gonna chase you and I’m gonna kill you.’”
Schwartz himself actually talked about this happening for a Los Angeles Daily News feature on Kobe that ran early last year:
Bryant unleashed his intensity out on high school teammates long before he did so with his current ones. He chewed out a benchwarmer in practice for taking a last-second shot in a three-on-three drill instead of passing Bryant the ball, a sequence that cost his team the game.
Bryant never caught Schwartz that day (thankfully!), but he apparently did find a way to get revenge on him. According to Chris Ballard’s 2009 book, The Art of a Beautiful Game: The Thinking Fan’s Tour of the NBA, Ballard wrote about how Kobe used to ask Schwartz to stay after practice to play 1-on-1—and then score as many as 80 straight baskets on him before giving up a single point.
You can read the rest of the USA Today HSS interview with Downer here. You can also check out some footage of Kobe playing in high school here.
These kinds of Kobe stories will never get old, and there will likely be plenty more of them to come over the next six months.
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[via USA Today HSS]
