Kobe Bryant was 18 years old and brand new to the Los Angeles Lakers. He’d skipped college and gone straight from high school to the NBA, and not everyone liked what they saw.
People said he was too quiet. They said he took basketball way too seriously for a kid his age. Kobe heard all of it.
Then one day he was lifting weights at the gym when his phone rang.
“Somebody’s playing a practical joke,” Kobe remembered thinking years later, when he told the story in a TV interview.
It was no joke. The voice on the other end really was Michael Jackson.
Michael loved basketball, and he’d been paying attention to the young Laker. He’d heard what people were saying about him, and he wanted to talk.
That call was the start of a real friendship. Kobe later said Michael opened up his whole world to him. “When I was 18, he introduced me to his muses,” Kobe told The Hollywood Reporter. He said he wanted to know how Michael sold 50 million albums, and Michael walked him through all of it, including how he prepared, how he trained and how he wrote.
“He would teach me what he did,” Kobe told a sports writer in 2010. “How to make a ‘Thriller’ album, a ‘Bad’ album.”
Not every lesson took. Kobe once laughed that Michael tried to get him to meditate. Michael could reportedly sit still for seven hours. Kobe said he couldn’t make it 20 minutes.
But the big lesson stuck for good. Kobe went on to win five championships, and when people asked where his famous drive came from, his answer surprised a lot of them.
“It’s not from Jordan,” he said. “It’s not from other athletes. It’s from Michael Jackson.”
So what did Michael actually tell that quiet 18-year-old? Kobe sat down with Jimmy Kimmel and explained it himself. Listen closely to how he describes Michael’s way of working.
Kobe tells what Michael taught him
Kobe never forgot that call. The critics wanted a different Kobe, and Michael, of all people, had phoned to tell him something very different. Kobe spent the next 20 seasons proving the advice right.
For a teenager who’d been told he cared too much, it meant everything to hear it from someone who’d been working on his own craft since he was a little boy in Gary, Indiana.