What I learned from reading Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant by Roland Lazenby.
In the midst of the chaos of his third season, Bryant was a very lost, lonely, frustrated 20 year old.
I just want to be the man, he told me, reaffirming his goal of making himself into the NBA's top player.
I don't know how I'm gonna get there.
I just have to find a way.
And he would, despite how unlikely such a goal seemed at that time.
As he closed in on the end of his career, Bryant could look back at the numbers he racked up in 20 seasons and declare that he had earned a seat at the table with the game's greatest players.
Though that night, he said he didn't know how he would get to the top, he had settled in on an answer that he had known all along.
He was going to grind his way there, implacably, relentlessly grind away at the challenges of the game, night after night, game after game, until he found a dominance born of his ability to outwork everyone else.
He is easily the most driven competitor in the history of the game, one who, over the seasons, quietly gained a reputation among the insiders of the sport as an absolute master of study and intense preparation, with a singular focus on detail that astonished those around him.
In turn, his life also proved to be a machine that churned out immense conflict, just about all of it the byproduct of his push to dominate the sport night after night, day after day, for two decades, through injury and turmoil, through the rupture of one key relationship after another, there would be no price he would not pay to have his greatness.
What follows in this book is my effort to capture his fascinating story in many ways a cautionary tale that was an excerpt from the book that we talked about today, which is this giant 600 page biography that I'm holding in my hand.
It's called Showboat the Life of Kobe Bryant and is written by Roland Lazenby.
So in addition to reading this book, I also watched and then took notes on this new documentary on the redeem team, which is the 2008 Olympic basketball team that Kobe was on.
And I think I'll quote some notes from the podcast, but I'm also going to put all the notes that I took while watching the documentary in the show notes.
So I want to start an introduction with a few themes that you and I have discussed a few times.
And the first thing is that belief comes before ability.
And I think most people mistakenly reverse the order.
And we see this demonstrated because way before he even gets to the NBA, Kobe believed that he was going to be one of the greatest basketball players to ever live.
From his teen years, Kobe Bryant had been shockingly bold in his prediction that he's going to make himself the greatest basketball player ever at every turn.
This is going to be a second theme that you and I have discussed over and over again.