Kobe Bryant was lauded for his outlook on basketball, which transcended sports and entered a realm that can almost be called spirituality. However, there are many sides to a person, and one side that Kobe was notorious for was his intolerance for basketball players he considered average.
Enter Smush Parker, a Brooklyn, New York, guard who made it to the NBA during the Mamba era. The journeyman played with Bryant for two seasons, but no love was gained or lost between them. Parker revealed how Bryant would not allow Parker the opportunity to befriend him, even with their lockers side by side, simply because he didn’t respect his game.
Smushed
“I shared a story about how I did try to talk to him,” Parker said on the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast about a 2007 interview that apparently started the bad blood. “I’m like, ‘I’m the starting point guard with him in the backcourt. Let me just try to talk to him.’
“I said, ‘Did you happen to catch the football game last night?’ And he looked at me, honestly, and said, ‘You can’t talk to me. You need more accolades under your belt before you come talk to me.’ And he was dead serious,” Parker said.
Ouch.
However, Parker had it coming, since, in a 2007 interview after leaving the Lakers, he told an interviewer in New York City that playing with Bryant “Was an overrated experience.”
Bryant is famed for what people call the “Mamba Mentality.” It has spawned reverence from virtually every basketball player or fan. It was Drake’s opus to women coming for the Black Mamba’s riches when he opined, “You wasn’t with me shooting in the gym.”
Bryant himself explained what the term meant before his untimely passing.
Mamba Mentality
“I came up with it during one of our tours,” Bryant reportedly explained during his 2016 Mamba Mentality Tour, which aimed to challenge and inspire the upcoming generation of young athletes. “Because I put the kids through so many drills and clinics and I just thought to myself ‘mamba mentality.’ I actually said it. This is what embodies the brand of what we stand for.”
“To sum up what Mamba mentality is, it means to be able to constantly try to be the best version of yourself,” added Bryant, who did just that during his 20 seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers. “That is what the mentality is. It’s a constant quest to try to better today than you were yesterday.”
That lofty standard was unachievable for Parker, but Bryant was not the type of player to give a hall pass to mediocrity.
Whether the Mamba mentality should be considered the gold standard for preparation and challenging yourself to be great is an open question, but it was uncompromising for sure, and Smush Parker felt the tail end of a passion that was so deep it had no time for compassion.
“As players who played with him, we have our own conversations and our own stories, and we share the same experiences. But when we get on this right here (microphone),” Parker continued on the podcast. “When we get in front of the cameras, they say something different. Or they don’t speak on it at all. I’ve been the only one.”
