S1E1: The Tapes

always been there. You probably know that voice. That was Kobe Bryant, basketball superstar for the Los Angeles Lakers, five time NBA champion, eighteen time All Star, Academy Award winning filmmaker, children's book author, husband, father, Sometimes a lightning rod for controversy and conflict, always a competitor beyond compare, a global icon. When Kobe, his daughter, Gianna, and seven other people died in a helicopter crash in January, Kobe was as famous

as recognizable as any athlete on the planet. Over his two decades with the Lakers, he scored thirty three thousand, six hundred and forty three points. That's more than Michael Jordan's scored, more than wil Chamberlain scored way more than Dr j or Shaquille O'Neil or Larry Bird scored. Kobe also won five championships in two Olympic gold medals. His nickname was the Black Mamba because he was so deadly

when the game mattered most. And you know what's funny about that nickname, Kobe gave it to himself, which kind of tells you everything you need to know about it. We're just gonna be the same person that I've been up to this point in high school basketball player with a lot of confidence that went out there and played well. I just wanted to win the basketball game, you know, And that's what I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be a

basketball player that just enjoys the player. But the tapes you're hearing aren't from the later years of his Lakers career, when Kobe was already a celebrity. There from just a few years after he and his family moved back to the United States. They've been living in Italy for eight years. Some of the tapes I want to play for you are from when Kobe was a senior at Lower Merion High School near Philadelphia. Some are from the weeks just after he graduated and some are from his first season

with the Lakers. All of them are from the time of his life when he was still just seventeen or eighteen years old, when he was just beginning his path to glory. Always played basketball. My family moved to Italy. I was raised over there. I think Matroy very well over there, fascinating anybody else here in American media, And when I came back, I had to addapt the lifestyle became the basketball because it was totally different, more and fast paid. Life was more upbeat playing a basketball for

it was more physical, had a baptis both frames. That was the thing about Kobe. He practically grew up before our eyes. We saw his greatest moments, like when he scored eighty one points in one game against the Toronto Raptors in two thousand six, or when he scored sixty points in his final game for the Lakers against the Utah Jazz ten years later, and we saw his worst moments, his arrest for sexual assault and the resulting scandal that

bled from two thousand three into two thousand four. At best, for his most devoted fans, it remained yeah but in fact about him for the rest of his life. At worst, it was an alleged act so reprehensible that to some people it turned him into a villain forever. No matter what your perspective is on Kobe, though, you have to admit that he was more than just famous. He was

a fascinating figure. And these tapes I'm going to play for you over the course of this series provide a glimpse of Kobe that few people had while he was alive. This is Kobe as he was, but more than that, this is Kobe as he was figuring out who he would be. I'm Mike Sealski and from Diversion podcasts, this is I am Kobe. I the right to create myself, create yourself, stay nice and go on, create yourself. You gotta learn from the great minds so we gain't sell them.

That's getting time Episode one. The tapes step between the court, the topic that just put out your problems sides black half a good time and you get home and try to work things out, trying to see what the problem is. But I probably the ton of gone. Yeah. Let it affect you as a first, the problem as you have the making weak, make you short, and you have to know where the channel. Little problems telling right, So where did these tapes come from? Well, to answer that, let's

introduce you to another important character in the story. I mean he absolutely new. Yeah. I mean if your expectations you're going to jump from HIG school NBA, and you yourself know you're different and you're special, and I think he knew that, and he knew his talents or amazing. That's Jeremy treatment. You probably haven't heard of him, not unless you've immersed yourself and all the details of Kobe's life story or in the history and culture of Philadelphia

area high school basketball. Jeremy has been a mover and shaker in that world for about a quarter century. These days, he has a company that arranges, organizes, promotes, and televises high school and college basketball tournaments. Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard, all of them played in games in high school that Jeremy set up. He founded a camp for teenagers who want to become play by play voices, and he gets some of the biggest names in the business

to speak to the kid. Adam Schefter, Tracy Wolfson, Charles Barkley. I'm gonna go with Scottie Barnes at a Florida State in the figure process. In this draft, Scottie Barnes is a six eight small authorities about He's absolutely a fletted demon and its upside the strigger route. But for the SBC radio show make sure you call us seven three to four, Jeremy is high intensive Martin. He'll admit to you he can come off a little bit neurotic at times.

That's how he's been able to build his career. And that career began back in the fall of when he was twenty six years old writing for the Philadelphia Inquiry and he met a fourteen year old kid named Kobe Bryant. Thank you, hey, we want to leave him in there for section I'm to tell you let me put him in. Christ Jeremy and I met up one afternoon in August one at his brother's house on Long Beach hild in New Jersey. Chucky, Jeremy's ten year old chocolate lab joined

us too. What you just heard is removing two large zip lock bags full of micro cassette tapes, tapes that I used to write a book about Kobe, tapes that you'll hear throughout this series. Tapes that Jeremy made Jeremy didn't just meet Kobe, he coached Kobe, and he became a confident onto Kobe. They were close friends, so close that the two of them roomed together during a trip to South Carolina when the Lower Marion Aces went down

there for a tournament. So close that when Kobe decided he was skipping college and going straight to the NBA, Jeremy was one of the first people he told. So close that during Kobe's senior year of high school and his first season with the Lakers, he and Jeremy began sitting down for long interviews and collaborating on a book. It was Jeremy who was the one asking Kobe questions on all those tapes, and there's a line in there and a little friend, Jeremy Japan was buying to write

a book on him. The book never got written, and as the years passed, their relationship changed. In some ways, they grew apart. In some ways, you could argue Jeremy wasn't really a part of Kobe's life anymore. They didn't stay in close contact. Kobe had become a global superstar and there were only so many people in his inner circle Jeremy really wasn't in Kobe's orbit anymore. When they did see each other and interact, there seemed a growing

distance between them. It was natural, really. Kobe was off in l a growing older, moving on from high school and Lower Marian winning NBA championships, becoming a star for the Lakers, becoming more famous than just about anyone had expected him to become, anyone except maybe Kobe himself. All the while, Jeremy stayed in the Philadelphia area working in the sports media industry, becoming a basketball promoter and entrepreneur. The two of them didn't see each other nearly as

much as they once did. They weren't nearly as close. Hey, okay, now, how do you feel about a lot of time. But Jeremy's loyalty to Kobe and the Bryant family never wavered. Whenever Kobe was in the news for one reason or another and CNN wanted to talk to someone about him, Jeremy was just a phone call away, happy to describe who Kobe was as a kid, and to explain how that young Kobe was connected to this grown up Kobe.

And think about it, if you were Jeremy treating why would you want that connection to Kobe to be severed. You were at the ground floor for one hell of a rocket ride. So we hand me He's uh. I was like, you know, there was a time I really was close to Kobe Bryant. This was the time, you know, this is the thirty tapes, just me and him sitting

there talking and nobody else before. And you get into the n B a while he was in high school, actually when it was in the NBA first two years and this is just company I think a four or five year period. Um, it was a special time, you know, to be like a small part of history of like one of the most iconic people ever live in his or her profession, in this case basketball, it's kind of an amazing thing. Hey, this is Mike Selsky, host and

writer of I Am Kobe. This podcast project came out of my work on a related book called The Rise Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality. If you want to explore other parts of Kobe's story, check out The Rise. It's not just a book version of the podcast. I dive deeper into some of the topics covered in this series, and even some that we don't cover at all. Kobe's upbringing, his family, his identity, his effect on his friends and teammates, his journey into the NBA, and his earliest days with

the Lakers. The Rise Kobe Bryant, It and the Pursuit of Immortality is out now. Just head over to the Rise of Kobe book dot com and you can buy it from any of your favorite retailers. That's the Rise of Kobe Book dot com. Thanks. My name is Mike Sealsky. I've covered sports in the Philadelphia area for more than twenty years, the last eight as a columnist for The

Philadelphia Inquiry. Philadelphia is as sports crazed as any city in the country, and as a columnist, I have the freedom to weigh in on the Eagles in the fall, the Sixers and Flyers in the winter, and the Phillies in the summer. It's the job I always wanted. My favorite part of it, though, is being able to tell a story, especially a human one, A story that's not really about sports, A story that has a new and unique angle on a person or a topic that has

already been covered a lot. A person, for instance, like Kobe Bryant. I covered Kobe sporadically throughout his twenty year career in the NBA, usually when the Lakers were in town. I was there in Philadelphia to cover the two thousand one NBA Finals when the Lakers faced the Sixers. During one press conference, Kobe told Sixers fans that he planned to cut their hearts out, and then he did. The Lakers won the series, Kobe's second championship in five games,

celebrating on the Sixers home court. I was there in the Lakers locker room in March two thousand seven. Things between Kobe and the team were rocky there, and he was still trying to cleanse himself of the stain of the sexual assault charges and scandal in Colorado a few years earlier. The Lakers lost to the Sixers that night in Philly, and I asked Kobe after that game if he had given any thought to finishing his career with his hometown team. He told me, it would be nice

to play here. In high school, It's all I thought about. And I was there in December for Kobe's final NBA game in Philadelphia. During a press conference before that game, he recalled his fondness for playing in his hometown before coming to this arena, there are some of the behind the scenes things that maybe people that you've known since you grew up here do for you, or or some

of the fun things that happened to open man. Every time I come here, there's there's fresh press sit at the top of while you played with a lot of great I knew Jeremy treatment too. I met him in when I was in college, just starting my writing career, not long after Kobe had finished high school, just after

one journey had ended and just before another began. Jeremy had tried to co author Kobe's memoir in the late nineteen nineties, and when that didn't work out, he approached me in two thousand mine about collaborating on a book. It would focus exclusively on Kobe's senior year in high school. Jeremy was crushed that he couldn't find the tapes of the interviews he conducted with Kobe all those years before,

but he did have transcripts of several of them. He had remained in close contact with many members of Lower Marian's state championship team, including Greg Downer, Kobe's coach. Of course, I had to ask, would Kobe help us? Not much, Jeremy told me, but we knew he returned to the Philadelphia area at least once a year and often visited Lower Merian when he was in town. Maybe we could catch him for a couple of minutes at his old high school or in the locker room after a game.

It would be enough. We could do this. Actually, no, we couldn't, at least not. In two thousand nine, I was offered and I accepted a new job in New York, and I had to relocate Jeremy and I scuttled the project. Kobe's death, though, gave his life a new, more intense residence. Writing about him as a columnist, I could go and had gone, only so deep. There was so much more there. It seems certain anecdotes about him had been repeated incessantly

over time, as if those memories alone explained it. But what about the forces and circumstances and people who had shaped him before he was even born. What kind of effected growing up when he did, where he did have on him, What people influenced him when he was younger, and how did he in turn influence them. There was so much of the man we still didn't know or had forgotten, especially from those all important formative years before

he was the Black Mamba. Here's Kobe speaking to Charlie Rose in a two thousand, one sixty minutes interview about how growing up in Italy influenced him. I learned Italianan started for his great over here in the Italian school. I was six with seven eight. What influence you think could had on you? I think it made me more mature. You know, we had to grow up a lot faster. I think it uh, it brought us closer together as a family, because that's moving out there into a whole

another world. We didn't speak the language, we didn't know anybody. We had to buy them with one another. More so than anything, Kobe entered the NBA when he was just seventeen years old, which made it seem as if he'd sprouted fully formed from a hill in Hollywood. People got to see his triumphs the Lakers have one back in the A Championship and their six game overall, and they

got to follow his controversies in the case. The whole country is watching new details and new questions about the accuser or of NBA star Kobe Bryant, and they saw him become a lightning rod and for many people. He remained one for the rest of his life. When Jack sits up there and says that Kobe didn't want to give him the ball during the final series that they lost the five games in Detroit, pistons, I'll be dead if he's lying. But I knew there was also a

compelling story about his life before the Lakers. It was a story worth telling with as much honesty and accuracy as possible. You can send Kobe's passion for basketball in this clip from NBC ten Philadelphia, when he was just a kid with aspirations to make it to the NBA.

But the superhero tonight was Kobe the Junior simply refused to lose as he took over the game in funch time, pouring in eighteen fourth quarter points, pouring the aces ahead every time lower Marian needed a bucket number thirty three? What deliver? So I started researching and writing my own book about Kobe, and I found that there were people who were eager to help me. Jeremy Treatment was one of those people. He gave me the transcripts of his

interviews with Kobe. They were terrific, really insightful, and I was trucking along with my manuscript. As Christmas approached, my book deadline less than two months away. Then Jeremy called me on December. He was about to move from his townhouse in Philadelphia, which he had owned for years, to poke a raton Florida. He'd been cleaning out his garage and loading up his car for the trick. I'm an extremely hard worker. Think that's done very well for myself.

But one of the things that I've never moved on is procrastinating. More procrastinators Mike Selski has found out. So when I decided to move, and I just kept looking at my garage, looking at my garage, I said, somebody's gotta get somebody's gotta do this. Who can I hire? Who can I get the diva? Like you know, there's only one person who can do this and go through seventy boxes in my garage, and that's Jeremy Treeman. I'm the only one who knows what to throw out, what

to do. So I had to make myself do it because I was out. I had a band coming to move the stuff, and so I went down to my crawl space. I said, I'm gonna look for these Kope tapes one more time. They're in that crawl space. I know I put him there because thats where I put my old tapes, all my games, my videos, all my articles are athlone, all these magazines I wrote for in the nineties and early two thousands. And I found all that stuff except the tapes. And I went down there again.

I risked smashing my head down there and could barely There's barely a light on, and I couldn't find it. I was frustrated, and then I, you know, I was. I was going through these boxes boxes. I was about a day a day and a half away from leaving, and I found a bunch of copy stuff, including the sign cards and the Magic Johnson. I knew where those were. The Magic Johnson signed covered those. I knew where they were.

I always had those a protective um. And then I was just moving things and I go, oh my god, micro cassettes, microssettes, shelf to back back wall, this is it. And I looked at once, said Kobe on it. Then I was like, no, it can't be. I was like yes, yes, And I was like we called we called Pam. Now I can't call it him. Alright, let me call Mike Selski. I'm still surprised I didn't drop the phone. Early the next morning, I drove forty five minutes from my home

to Jeremy's. Both of us massed against COVID. He reached into a cardboard box on a shelf and removed a plastic zip bag of micro cassettes, twenty of them at all, and the device he had used to record. The recorder didn't have batteries. It didn't even have a panel for the opening where you insert the batteries. Some of the cassettes had Kobe written on them in long faded ink,

one said Joe. Not all of them were interviews with Kobe, but enough of them were, and on these cassettes in the recordings I eventually spent hundreds of hours listening to, there were glimpses of the athlete and the man that Kobe became. Yeah, they realized that when the nightly basis, God come out and kill you, So you got to prepare yourself. Yeah, I think that. I know. I'm going to prepare myself if a god comes out and kill me, I'm not gonna sit back and kill everything. I can't stop.

And if you, even if he does like me up and have to look at the video team and see what did he do that That beat me every time. That's how I'm playing every move on. When he touched his nose, when he touches there, you know everything Kobe said that to Jeremy treatment It's difficult to comprehend how long ago that was. Bill Clinton had just been re elected president, but the news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal hadn't broken yet. The terrorist attacks of September eleventh, two

one were four years away. Email was still a new, exotic technology that most people did news, and Jeremy Treaton was tight with the kid who would become the best basketball player in the world. This podcast tells the story of a friend of Kobe Bryant's who had a front row seat for a wild ride few others have witnessed. A guy who was Kobe's closest confidante, who knew things about Kobe and saw sides of him that no one

else got to see. A guy who will help you see the great Kobe Bryant in an entirely new way. This series also tells the story of how Kobe Bryant prepared himself to become a unique athlete and a larger than life figure. You'll meet the Kobe who only so many people knew, The Kobe who was a teenager in nineties America. The Kobe who was unsure of himself when he started high school, who changed a high school basketball

program and an entire community. The Kobe who dared to believe he could become an NBA player without going to college at a time when believing such a thing was considered crazy. The Kobe who would go on to alter professional sports for everyone who followed him, and who transcended what it meant to be a professional athlete on the world stage. I want to tell you the story of the Young Mamba. I Am Kobe is a production of

The Version podcasts in association with I Heart Radio. This season is written and hosted by me Mike Sealsky, gets produced by Jacob Bronstein and directed by Mark Francis. Story editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editorial direction from Scott Waxman, Editing, mixing and sound design by Mark Francis. Stephen Tompkins is our production assistant. Our theme music is Create Yourself by Grover Brown featuring Justin Starling. Find Create Yourself where ever

you stream Music. Music supervisor is Scott Velaska's for Free Sons Sinking executive producers are Mark Francis and Scott Waxman. Join the conversation about I Am Kobe on social media on Twitter and Instagram. It's at Diversion Pods thanks to Rain Rosenbaum, Susan Canavan and Jeremy Treatment. I loved Ibries before the sun. They don't understand when I said to Brian is fun. Never clocked you out. Even when my

work is done. If they're trying to block me, I might hurt someone throw the blood sweat and says, we perseverit, stay tending in, let it, keep the horses. And then if they don't believe in themselves, jable Verte defend that at Sampa, says, so I'm telling them as my a. This the reason why I'm I'm working so damn different. So the negatives I can't listen to see me at the time, you can't listen where I'm anna vote to play like cashes see I pay my dudes because of

Texas gotta work. I thinking briand ahead of his time. If I'm saying that they made you, don't tell him you ain't yourself the best Finn watch us but this bad that time you gotta steak clock, then break clock break we create ourselves, watch me question, watch the create myself, sat Cli signs up, create yourself, stay nice, ain't go hard, create yourself. Gotta learn from the great minds. But we ain't lying. Tell them next any time this talent wasn't given,

it was made. If future, any time I could change, you better tell them that I made it back home. As I walked through the oars of the fame, I came from the valley of the shadow, with death waiting for usself. Spoons, don't hold your breath, sat Town sat Train. But I did it with less. I know one that the being. So there's nothing to guess. Yeah, there's nothing to guess. It's all times. So then we up next. We don't got any rerests. I did it with my

soul hands, and we never forgets my an. This the reason why my work so damn different to the negatives. I can't listen see me at the time. You can't listen for where rebuild, reach shape, give me your eye. You got to risk take do it now. When I'm saying while waves, I'm saying that they made. You don't tell them you create yourself the bess you finling. Watch us why it's bad that time you gotta steak clock, then break clock. Break. We create ourselves, watch me, watch me,

watch me create myself. Shack climbs. Times up and create yourself. Say nice and ain't no hard create yourself. You gotta learn from the great minds, so we ain't lying. Tell them that Game time diversion podcasts