Kobe Bryant was one of a kind, and his ‘Mamba Mentality’ proved that.
The late basketball star, who played with the Los Angeles Lakers for two decades, lit it up every time he stepped foot on the court and is regarded as one of the best shooters in NBA history.
Bryant had talent in abundance, and retired from the NBA with five championship rings and a string of records that may never be touched.
With all that talent came confidence, too.
You can’t be the best without backing yourself, and Kobe knew that.
In fact, he once made a crazy $5,000 bet with a Lakers teammate – just to hammer home a point about LeBron James.
During the 2012-13 season, when LA were already past their championship window, Chris Duhon decided to have a little fun with an ageing Kobe.
He showed the NBA legend one of LeBron’s stat sheets and noted that he had put up a triple-double during a game.
“I was sitting next to him at the time… and I was like ‘S***, you ain’t never gonna get one of them because your a** don’t pass,'” Duhon recalled during an appearance on the KarterKast podcast in 2021.
But he probably wasn’t expecting the response that he got from Kobe.
“He started laughing and he was like, ‘Alright, I’ll bet you $5,000 I get a triple-double the next game’. And I’m like, ‘Bet it,'” Duhon continued.
“Sure enough, I think he was one assist and one rebound shy at halftime. And every time he was doing it, he was just looking at me and winking.
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“We talked after the game and he was like, ‘If I wanted to I could get a triple double every game. But my team needs me to score. And I want to take the hearts out of anyone that’s guarding me and the other team, knowing that they can’t stop me.'”
Duhon’s story perfectly sums up Bryant’s ‘Mamba Mentality’.
And while Kobe went some way to proving that he could do what LeBron does, it’s unlikely he actually recorded a triple-double in the game that Duhon is referencing.
Bryant only had two triple-doubles that season, and neither came in a game after LeBron had one.
So he may have actually lost the bet, perhaps to really hammer home his point.
Although the Lakers made the playoffs that season as the seventh seed in the Western Conference, getting to the postseason was a struggle and Bryant had to do the heavy lifting.
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He averaged at least ten more points per game than anyone else on the squad, proving that the Lakers really did need him to score.
