Now that his Hall-of-Fame basketball career is over, Pau Gasol is an avid golfer and part-time player in celebrity golf events. He became a member this week Subpar podcast to talk about his game, how he got into it and more, but he also shared some stories about his time in the NBA, and some specifically about his Lakers teammate, the late Kobe Bryant.
Gasol was asked if he had a Kobe memory that stood out, and while he said their relationship was good, it didn’t actually improve until after his time with the Lakers.
“It was hard for us to let our guard down when we were teammates,” Gasol said on the podcast. “Once I decided to move on and sign with the Bulls, we were able to relax a lot more and connect on a deeper level, so go to more dinners and go to more lunches and talk about things other than basketball. Because when you’re in it and you’re in a position to win and you recognize that you have that unique window to actually win championships, then you have to be fully in it, and with a certain edge that you have to maintain.”
He then discussed a viral moment from Netflix’s “The Redeem Team,” a documentary set to air in 2022 that chronicled the U.S. men’s basketball team’s journey to win gold at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In one episode, as the US prepared to play Gasol and Spain in a preliminary round match, Bryant told his fellow Team USA members about a strategy he wanted to implement to set the tone for the match. Bryant told teammates that he knew which play Spain would play to open the game, and he knew Gasol would be the one to set the final screen. Bryant said in a cleaned-up version, “I’m going to go through it.”
“He tried to get right through me to send a message,” Gasol said on Netflix. “Not just to me, but to his teammates to say, ‘Hey, this could be my brother, I’m playing with him, we’re close, but I don’t care about anything other than winning.’”
Gasol said Bryant was “very intentional and determined” in everything he did, more so than anyone he had ever met. That includes those same Olympics when Gasol said Bryant came to visit him in the Olympic Village prior to the aforementioned game. Someone told Gasol that Kobe was looking for him and he replied, “Oh s….”
“I always felt like he was softening me up, pumping me up,” Gasol said, “but on the court he said to his teammates: I’ll just go through his damn chest And I’m going to send a message And this is what I’m here for and this is the mindset we all need to have.”
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