Kobe Bryant was famous for his competitive fire and so it’s interesting to hear that he once told sports journalist Jemele Hill that, “If you play with the sense of I want to win, I want to win, then you have the fear of, what happens if you don’t?”
Kobe’s 2015 interview with Hill on her BET talk show, Genius Talks might have seemed shocking to people who thought his entire reason for being was simply to win. However, if you turned back the clock 18 years prior to that interview and watched Kobe’s reaction to an epic loss you might have picked up on a theme that he carried with him throughout his career.
In May of 1997, Kobe was a rookie at the end of a good inaugural season with the Los Angeles Lakers, but light years away from the legend he would become. The Lakers were in Utah playing the Jazz in a Western Conference semifinal playoff game and their backs were against the wall. Down 3-1 in the series, the Lakers needed a win to stay alive in the playoffs.
With ten seconds left, the game was tied and two of the Lakers key players were not available. Time to turn to the rookie. This was Kobe’s first big chance in his career to establish his greatness. However, greatness was far from what happened. In fact, his big moment ended shockingly bad. The ball came to him and he shot an airball. In overtime, Kobe incredibly shot three more airballs. The Lakers lost the game and were unceremoniously bounced out of the playoffs.
Epic failure, right?
Kobe didn’t seem to think so. His reaction in the locker room after the game gave a hint of what people who really paid attention would come to learn was his ethos. Bombarded by questions from journalists about the air balls, Kobe just shrugged and told them, “Shooters shoot.”
On Hill’s show, she asked Kobe how he became a person who didn’t seem to be afraid of failure. His response took her aback. He stated, “Failure, it doesn’t exist. It’s not existent.”
To mere mortals, shooting four airballs in the final minutes of a playoff game, that ended with your team done for the season, might be pretty good proof that failure does exist. However, what Kobe told Hill to explain his theory is something that every athlete (actually, every person) should carry with them in everything they do. He stated, “If you fail on Monday, the only way it’s a failure is if you decide not to progress from there.” He added, “If I fail today, okay, I’m going to learn something from that failure and I’m going to try again on Tuesday.”
Not allowing failure to exist because you try again when setbacks do occur are words to live by – and Kobe did.
On that May evening after losing to the Jazz, the Lakers flight from Utah returned late in the night and the players all scattered home to get some sleep. But Kobe did something different. He got out the keys he had to a local high school gym and went to work. His off-season training began in the wee hours after midnight, as he put up hundreds of shots before going home.
Kobe was insanely competitive, but the outcome on the scoreboard was not something he feared. Kobe had no fear of losing because his competitiveness was primarily focused on the simple pursuit of trying to get better every day at a craft that he deeply loved. It is why on the night that the Lakers retired his jerseys (8 and 24) that Kobe said, “Those times when you get up early and you work hard…that is the dream.”
