Have you ever watched a group of 8-year-old kids play a game of basketball? It’s usually not all that pretty. At 8, most kids are still learning how to dribble a ball properly, not putting up points.
Kobe Bryant insists that his youth basketball games were different, though. Most of the kids that he played against when he was 8 couldn’t dribble very well, but he could. So he used their weaknesses against them and, according to him, it helped him record the very first 60-point game of his basketball career.
“I scored my first 60-point game when I was 8,” he said in a bonus clip from the interview he did with HBO’s Real Sports recently. “I had 63 when I was 8. There was something very simple that I figured out when I was 8 years old. It was that other 8-year-olds couldn’t dribble with their left hand. It was something that simple for me. So when I was guarding the ball...I would always just let them have a couple dribbles with their right hand and then jump on their right hand and make them change it over to their left. They would bobble the ball, fumble the ball, and I would pick it up and go lay it up. I did this all game and wound up with 63.”
Damn. Even when he was just 8, Kobe was the same Kobe he was during his NBA career. Savage.
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