Lakers Dynasty Quotes

The hullabaloo passed, but days later an even bigger bombshell hit the Staples Center: Kobe Bryant was engaged. To be married. To another person. With a pulse. Really.

O’Neal bit his tongue and said little. Years later, however, he admitted that the anger was real. “Do I hold a grudge about that? Yeah—I do,” he said. “Some fucking dickhead kept me from being the first unanimous MVP. Some asshole who doesn’t know shit gives his vote to Iverson and fucks up history. I never forgot that.

Riley had Ron Carter—the former Laker now back in camp with the team—playing point against Johnson during drills. In the midst of a particularly physical exchange, Johnson slapped Carter across the face. Carter, a graduate of the Virginia Military Academy, screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” and pushed back. Johnson threw a punch, and Carter pinned him to the ground—“It took me five seconds,” Carter said. The players were separated, and as he rose, Johnson waved toward Carter, smiled and said, “Bye-bye.

Roland Lazenby in his Bryant biography: “In the third quarter

But Cleveland sucks,” Fox said—referring to both the team (which went 42-40 in 1996–97) and the city (once ranked among America’s most dangerous metropolises by CBS News). “It’s a lot of money,” Strickland replied. “Bill,” Fox said, “tell them if they wanna pay me $42 million I’ll go to Cleveland. Otherwise I’m joining the Lakers.” Rick Fox joined the Lakers.

Defending a title is exhausting. Defending two titles is excruciating. Defending three titles - when the world is sick of your existence and people everywhere seek your demise and the hunger you once possessed has been satiated by caviar and lobster - is nearly impossible. You stop wanting it the way you once wanted it. Someone punches you, and you don't have the energy to duck. You're Mike Tyson against Buster Douglas. The upstart possesses the edge, because the upstart is edgy. The endless praise softens you. The free meals fatten you.

If there is a beauty to the three-ring dynasty that was the 1996-2004 Lakers, it's that (with rare exceptions) members of the organization love looking back, love recalling, love sharing memories of a blissful span. I also found one other thing: minimal sadness that the ride hadn't lasted longer.

Johnson commenced his heroic second act as a Los Angeles Laker on January 30, 1996, with the visiting Golden State Warriors in town and tickets being scalped outside the Forum for All-Star Game prices.

When Hoggard’s piece on the poll came out, O’Neal’s Olympic teammates—NBA veterans who knew the importance of getting paid—teed off. In particular Charles Barkley, the Phoenix Suns forward and resident trash talker, refused to hold back. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he told O’Neal. “You bring glory to this redneck, one-horse town, and this is what they think of you? Get out as soon as you can. Fuck these people.” It was harsh. But it was also correct.

Yo, I’m Kobe. Kobe Bryant. I’m from PA—went to Lower Merion High School, dominated everything.” (Pause.) “I just want y’all to know, nobody’s gonna punk me. I’m not gonna let anyone in the NBA punk me. So be warned.” Awwwwkward. “It was like ‘Yo, Kobe, relax,’ ” recalled David Booth, who landed a camp invite off of a strong summer league showing. “He was trying to establish himself, which I understand. But it didn’t play very well.” “Not the best way to start things,” said Blount. “But you have to remember, he was a child.

Plus, guards did not jump straight from prep hoops to the NBA. It just wasn’t something to be done. In the history of basketball, five other high schoolers had gone direct to the Association, and all five were forwards or centers. The last one to make the move, a Farragut Career Academy senior named Kevin Garnett, stood 6-foot-11 and was a rebounding and shot-blocking machine. Even with his size and strength, he joined the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1995 and averaged but 10.4 points per game. “It was,” he later said, “really hard.

If Bryant knew, it was something of a secret to those hoping otherwise. The college recruiting letters arrived by the boatload—from Duke and North Carolina, from UCLA and USC, from Delaware and Drexel and Villanova and Temple. This was the fall of 1995, and at the time Joe Bryant was in his second year as an assistant at nearby La Salle University, his alma mater. He had been hired in 1993 by Speedy Morris, the head coach, and while the official reasoning was that the program needed a replacement for the recently departed Randy Monroe, the reality was different. “Did I think it’d help us get Kobe?” Morris said decades later. “Yes. Of course. Joe was not a good assistant coach. He didn’t work hard, he didn’t actually know that much. Nice guy. But he was there so we’d get his son.

The Orlando Magic didn’t know their assholes from a hole in the wall.

Inside the Lakers’ locker room, the reaction was subdued euphoria. Ceballos was an obnoxious brat who played no defense and went AWOL. Horry, on the other hand, was a 6-foot-9 outside gunner (he was a lifetime 34 percent three-point shooter) and low-post defender joining an operation in need of long-range shooting and low-post defense. It was a trade that, by NBA standards, generated little attention. It was a trade that changed everything. Suddenly, instead of being a towel-throwing pain on an 11-24 team going nowhere fast, Horry was a coveted piece of a first-place club that sat 17 games over .500. During his first four NBA seasons, all with the Rockets, Horry had learned how to play with Hakeem Olajuwon, the 7-foot, 255-pound Nigerian center. He knew his job was to feed off the big man, and that a box score where Olajuwon scored 30 and Horry scored 12 usually meant Houston won. Now, with the Lakers, he was more than happy to acknowledge O’Neal’s place as the center of the basketball universe.

The Los Angeles coach and his assistants were befuddled by the Buss family’s willingness to kneel before a child. Around the same time as he was being accused of sexual assault, Bryant started behaving in curious ways. There were the new tattoos scrolling down his right arm—a crown, his wife Vanessa’s name, a halo and angel wings above Psalm XXVII.

Regardless, the growing chorus of Laker fans who wanted more Kobe and less Eddie was confounding, because the third-year guard was playing the best ball of his lifetime. But Bryant was on the verge of legitimate greatness—a greatness that Jones (talent be damned) would never touch.

The mythology began here. On the day. At the moment. Only nobody knew it. As the years passed and the legend grew, it became an increasingly daunting challenge to separate fact from fiction; giant from gnat. That’s what happens when we anoint our heroes with nicknames and expectations and an unusual largeness generally reserved for skyscrapers and grand canyons.

In the aftermath of his sizzling four-game summer league run, Bryant expected to join the team and immediately emerge as a superstar. Only, well, he did something extraordinarily stupid. Because Bryant was young and dumb and a 24/7 hoops junkie, on the afternoon of September 2 he visited the famed pickup courts of Venice Beach to get in a few runs. After leaping at the hoop to tip-dunk the ball, he fell toward the pavement and tried to catch himself with his left wrist. His 200-pound body landed atop his arms, and moments later he saw three knots bulging below his hand. The wrist was broken—and Jerry West was dumbfounded. He greeted the news of the malady with stunned silence, responding to Gary Vitti, the team’s trainer, with a blank stare. “He was doing what?” West asked. “Playing basketball at Venice,” Vitti explained. “Wait,” West said. “Wait, wait. Wait. What?” It would be one of the last times the Lakers didn’t include a NO PICKUP BASKETBALL clause in the contract of a rookie signee.

The Lakers regained possession with 11.3 seconds left and the score knotted at 89. During a time-out, Harris looked around the huddle and decided that the man to have the basketball in his hands would be the untested, undeserving, untrustworthy Kobe Bryant.

Here was this high school kid, and he came out dressed as if he were a member of the Rat Pack,” recalled ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap, who was present. “What the heck was going on? He wore sunglasses. Sunglasses! And they may well have been drugstore shades, but they looked Armani on him. It was hard to accept the total lack of humility and the sort of Hollywood quality to it. I’d been around Michael Jordan, I’d been around Charles Barkley, but I’d never seen anything so show-offish.

College? Who needed college. Kobe Bryant had decided to take his talents to the NBA.

The most noteworthy knock-Shaq-on-his-rear addition took place on June 26, 2002, when the Houston Rockets used the first pick in the NBA draft to select Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6, 310-pound center who had recently averaged 38.9 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in the playoffs with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association. Though he was just 21 and unfamiliar with high-caliber competition, Yao’s arrival was considered a direct challenge to O’Neal’s reign as the NBA’s mightiest big man. Sure, Shaq was tall. But he wasn’t this tall. Within weeks, a song titled simply “Yao Ming” was being played on Houston radio stations, and Steve Francis, the Rockets’ superstar guard, was being introduced to audiences as “Yao Ming’s teammate.” There was talk—only half in jest—of a Ming dynasty. Put simply, the NBA’s 28 other franchises were doing their all to shove the Lakers off their perch. If that meant copying elements of the triangle offense (as many teams attempted to do), so be it. If that meant adding Mutombo or Clark, so be it. If that meant importing China’s greatest center, so be it. And if that meant throwing punches—well, let’s go.

Basketball is a young man’s game, unkind to ancient legs.

He was asked whether he would have been willing to continue to play alongside O’Neal. The answer was no. He had said no to Jackson, no to Kupchak, no to Jerry Buss. No—he would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again play with Shaquille O’Neal. Never, ever, ever. Or . . . “That I had something to do with Shaquille leaving, that’s something I laugh at,” he said. “It upsets me. It angers me. If he’d re-signed for whatever, I’d still be here today. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out that way.” Watching from his home, O’Neal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Watching from his home, Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Had Jerry Buss extended O’Neal’s contract, Kobe Bryant would be holding up his new Los Angeles Clippers jersey at this very moment. O’Neal knew it. Jackson knew it.

That’s why, when West was asked during his team’s playoff loss to San Antonio about the possibility of hiring Jackson, he said, curtly, “Fuck Phil Jackson.” Yes, Fuck Phil Jackson.

The Lakers wrapped the season with an NBA-best 67-15 record, and while O’Neal (29.7 points per game), Bryant (22.5 points per game), and Rice (15.9 points per game) stood out on the statistical sheets, the key was Jackson. The veteran coach somehow kept a roster overflowing with egos and arrogance in one piece; somehow convinced O’Neal to ignore Bryant’s cockiness; and somehow convinced Bryant to accept life in the shadow of a larger-than-life big man. He used Rice wisely, leaned on veterans like John Salley and Ron Harper to keep the locker room happy, forbade the hazing of rookies.

You had to clearly choose. Shaq was jealous of Kobe. Kobe wasn’t jealous of Shaq. Kobe just wanted to kick everybody’s ass.

In his defense (sort of), Bryant looked around the league and saw peers firing away from all angles. The uber-athletic Vince Carter had the green light in Toronto, as did Allen Iverson in Philadelphia, Tracy McGrady in Orlando, Paul Pierce in Boston. There was an understandable sense of jealousy from Bryant, who aspired to not merely lead the league in scoring but fulfill an image he couldn’t possibly live up to. “There was a game against Toronto when Kobe decided he needed to go one-on-one against Vince,” Jackson recalled. “He had no space to operate, and he kept going right at him. Nothing kills team spirit like that.

Kobe just wasn’t cool,” said Elizabeth Kaye, the Laker biographer. “There’s no coolness to him at all.” His Adidas shoes, first the EQT Elevation, then the KB8, then the KB8 II, never sold particularly well, in part because Bryant had 0.00 percent street cred and in part because the brand wasn’t Nike or And1. (“The second Kobe shoe looked like a toaster,” said Russ Bengtson, who covered footwear for Slam. “Nobody wants to play basketball in toasters.”) One model of “the Kobe” had a depiction of Kobe’s profile on a gold coin gracing the inner lining. It was preposterous.

His level of sophistication didn’t jive with Slam,” said Tony Gervino, the magazine’s editor. “He wasn’t particularly cool; he was very polished. Slam was never polished. We were the opposite of polished.

Brian Shaw, the veteran point guard who was respected by O’Neal and Bryant, tried explaining to the kid that his words were unwise. Fox, also respected by both, did the same. It mattered not. Jackson was furious, and in a closed-door meeting he told the Lakers he had erred in giving them too much freedom. “I tried to let you guys figure it out,” he said. “Now I’m going to have to instill more discipline. You don’t get the respect of being champions.” But what did that mean? Would Jackson change anything? Would the approach shift? Answer: Not really.

O’Neal, meanwhile, was told of the article’s contents and decided he was done turning the other cheek. He would always take care of guys like Fox and Horry and Penberthy and Madsen. They were his people. But Kobe? Fuck Kobe. As the media gathered around after a practice, O’Neal spoke intentionally loudly with Jerome Crawford, his bodyguard. “Did you know they pay more taxes in Canada?” he said. “Like in Vancouver?” Crawford replied. “Hmm, Vancouver,” O’Neal said. “Isn’t that where Kobe’s gonna get traded to?

On the surface, nothing about Bryant’s move felt logical. He was a B student with a 1080 SAT score. He was being recruited by everyone, with Duke considered the most probable landing spot. He had yet to work out for a single NBA scout, many of whom had never actually heard of him. “He’s kidding himself,” Marty Blake, the NBA’s scouting director, told the Los Angeles Times. “Sure he’d like to come out. I’d like to be a movie star. He’s not ready.” “You watch Kobe Bryant and you don’t see special,” said Rob Babcock, Minnesota’s director of player personnel. “His game doesn’t say, ‘I’m a very special talent.’ ” “I think it’s a total mistake,” said Jon Jennings, the Boston Celtics’ director of basketball development. “Kevin Garnett was the best high school player I ever saw, and I wouldn’t have advised him to jump. And Kobe is no Kevin Garnett.

O’Neal, however, didn’t take care of himself—and everyone knew it. With each Laker season he seemed a bit slower, a bit less athletic, a bit more injury prone—still otherworldly 85 percent of the time, but not 100 percent of the time, as once had been the case.

Jackson hung the piece of paper in O’Neal’s locker without uttering a peep. When the Los Angeles big man saw it, he smiled widely. He had recently given himself a new nickname—“the Big Deporter”—for his treatment of foreign-born centers like Divac. Now he spun and told a reporter standing nearby, “I hear and see everything. I’m the police.” Translation: It’s on.

Because sports and mythology often intertwine, the Game 6 narrative has often been one that evokes the best of a cheesy feel-good Hollywood production. Not only did Johnson take the jump ball, he won it, dribbled down the court, did a 360-degree midair flip and dunked over Julius Erving—blindfolded while eating a slice of cheesecake. Not quite.

I come from parents who are big on respect and also who are big on treating everyone with love. No race, no religion, no culture—none of that matters. You’re a person: you deserve respect. I was in a position to make people feel good and welcome and loved. Why wouldn’t I act on that?