I am a team player - and that is what you need to be an effective point guard. You gotta see the court, you gotta set up the play, and you gotta let others execute for the most part. I don't throw elbows for the sake of throwing elbows, but if somebody throws one at me and it's necessary to respond in kind, I suppose I can if I have to.
Even in practice, me and Kobe get into it every day. I do my best to challenge him. He's still going to be Kobe, talking trash.
If everyone had a superpower, Kobe would be the Hulk. Kobe could take on a whole team by himself and he's willing to do that. So, Kobe is like I'll go 5-1, I don't care. I'm still going to win. I put in more work than all five of you guys.
I want to be me - and people know it's me. I don't want: 'He's trying to act like Kobe' or 'His answers are like something Kobe would've said.' Nah. If it's me, I'm going to say it.
The thing is I'm with Nike and I don't want to wear any other player's shoe. No Giannis or LeBron - I'm not going to wear those, and it narrows what you can wear. But with the Kobe's, who cares because Kobe is Kobe. You can wear his shoe because it's Kobe. They look great, the feel great and it represents something.
At the end of the day, the only person to have a better Kobe sneaker game than me is Kobe himself.
The call that always seemed the toughest to me was the slide and tag play at second. You can see it coming, but you don't know which way the runner is going to slide, where the throw is going to be, and how the fielder is going to take the throw.
Think about what happens on Earth when you throw up. You throw up and you have a bag of something horrible and then you throw it away, but if I have this bag, what am I going to do with it? This bag is going to stay with me in space for months, so we want a really good barf bag.
I'm the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they're going to throw rocks at me, they're going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.
The Kobe craze really annoyed me. Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing it and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger. It's completely pointless.
I had the Kobe jersey. I would do the Kobe walk. I would walk around the house doing the Kobe stare-down face. Anything you can name, I was idolizing him, trying to be like him.
Me, growing up, I was a Kobe fan, Kobe fanatic, and just getting, just being able to just wear his shoes, it's my favorite shoe to play in.
That Stash Kobe 1, that is probably my number 1 shoe I have ever worn on the court. To wear it against Kobe in his last game against the Suns it was real fun, and for him to say something to me about them it is crazy. He is signed them up for me and personalized it. It was pretty dope.
When you're Kobe Bryant, you've got every little young guy coming at you every night, and it's you who's still got to carry the team. When he tore his Achilles... I just felt bad. I knew he was going to come back and be Kobe Bryant.
If someone's going to throw me in, I'm not gong to try and hit a ground ball to third, you know? I'm going to try and hit it in the air. If someone's going to throw me away, I'm not going to try and hit a ground ball to second, I'm going to drive it to right-center.
You have 15-20 years of work for that one throw, that one moment. And I was like, 'Okay, Lord, this is it - you told me I had the victory. So this is the time to show me'. And I'm going to give it all I have because this is my last throw in the Olympics.