My 1 Hour With Kobe Bryant

I would love to know what Kobe Bryant was like when the cameras weren't on. Man, I literally get there at 6 a.m. The interview starts at 8. And one of the glass windows, I see a figure sitting in the corner as we pass by. I say to the assistant, Is that Kobe in there? And she goes, yeah, he's been here for like the last hour. He's in the office alone. The computer wasn't on, his phone wasn't on. It was just him, like, looking up. What's he doing? She was like, oh, he was up at 4 working out with his daughter. And he likes to be the first one here to really prepare himself for the day. And just that right there, I was like, this guy's another level. set up and the publicist coming to me, there's maybe 20 minutes until the interview and they give me a list of like everything you can't talk about. You have 15 minutes. I was like, oh geez, I just knew my energy had to be on point in order to make this great. Right away I said Kobe, I just want to acknowledge you because I have a lot of Olympic friends who say that you are the kindest, most generous guy at every Olympics. And he goes, Man, the Olympics were like my dream. I love being the Olympic Village. I love hanging out with the athletes. And I said, I play a sport called team handball, and it's always been my dream to go to the Olympics. And he stops me. He goes, what, you play team handball? I played that in Italy when I was playing basketball. I loved playing that sport. It was amazing over there. Now we're sitting down. It's like mic'd up, shake hands, all that. Oh, you got all that while he's standing up? Yeah, yeah, sitting down. So you're just great at this job, huh? Let's go. Sitting down. And then I said, I've also just heard so many great things about you from some mutual friends of ours. The publicist says, who's your mutual friend? Kind of like seeing if I'm a BS-er. And I go, well, I just had Novak Djokovic on recently and he talked about how you're like his brother. He goes, that guy is the man. He is my brother. And he's like a killer on the court. And then I have these pieces of paper on my lap and the publicists are all there. They're like, okay, go, go, go. And I go, I have all this information here of all the things I'm not supposed to say. Is there anything else off limits? And he just grabs my leg and looks at me and says, ask me anything you want and take as long as you need. I get the chills just thinking about it. I get the chills just thinking about it. Right afterwards, he followed me on Instagram, DM'd me, said, I'd love to do this again sometime. We are planning to do another one, but then the accident happened.