Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash nearly one month ago, is considered one of the best players in NBA history. However, for the people who followed the Los Angeles Lakers legend at a very young age, the greatness was already there. The Twitter account Mamba Insider recently shared a throwback video of Bryant talking to reporter Andrea Kremer about the time he scored 63 points when he was 8 years old.
Throwback to when Kobe said he scored 63 points when he was 8 years old 🐐 pic.twitter.com/qhXlSQSsfF
— Mamba Insider (@Mamba_Insider) February 19, 2020
“I scored my first 60-point game when I was 8,” he said in a bonus clip from the interview he did with HBO’s Real Sports back in 2016, “I had 63 when I was 8. There was something very simple that I figured out when I was 8 years old. It was that other 8 year olds couldn’t dribble with their left hand. It was something that simple for me. So when I was guarding the ball…I would always just let them have a couple dribbles with their right hand and then jump on their right hand and make them change it over to their left. They would bobble the ball, fumble the ball, and I would pick it up and go lay it up. I did this all game and wound up with 63.”
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What Bryant did at 8 led to him having a monster career in the NBA. One of his most notable games was when he scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors in 2006. It was the most points scored in a game by a single player since Wilt Chamberlain dropped 100 points in 1962.
“Not even in my dreams,” Bryant said at the time per NBA.com “That was something that just happened. It’s tough to explain. It’s just one of those things.
“It really hasn’t, like, set in for me. It’s about the ‘W,’ that’s why I turned it on. It turned into something special. To sit here and say I grasp what happened, that would be lying.”
Bryant finished his career with five NBA championships, an MVP award in 2008, two NBA Finals MVP trophies, 18 All-Star appearances and four All-Star MVP awards which ties for the most in league history. He will be remembered along with his 13-year old daughter Gianna, who also died in the helicopter crash, in a public memorial service at the Staples Center on Monday.
