Merry Christmas from Los Angeles.
The forecast high today is 71 degrees.
It's a great day to be outside.
But for 19,000 very lucky ticket holders,
they can't wait to get inside.
About an hour and a half ago,
the team bus for the Miami Heat pulled up,
and into the building came Shaquille O'Neal.
And about ten minutes later, driving up from his home
in Orange County came Kobe Bryant.
Kobe and Shaq-
no last names necessary-
made beautiful music together for eight years
as teammates, three championships,
tremendous success.
But off court, a lot of discordant notes,
which of course led to the departure of O'Neal,
which led to the great breakup.
And thus today, for the first time ever,
the two face each other.
At center, number 32,
13th year out of LSU,
Shaquille O'Neal.
Number eight, from Lower Merion High School,
Kobe Bryant.
The head coach, Rudy Tomjanovich.
Kobe and Shaq had just broken up.
There's no Phil Jackson anymore.
But now Shaq was on a way better team.
And Kobe was on this team with the guys
that had been traded for Shaq.
But they weren't expected to contend for anything,
whereas Miami was immediately a championship contender.
For Kobe, there was no agony of defeat.
It was gonna be a win for him either way.
If the Lakers won the game, it was a win.
If the Lakers lost and someone out-dueled him,
it was a win because he knew that would be his motivation
to fuel the next challenge.
And Kobe reaches-
He already gave it to 'em.
He gave them the timeout
with 9.2 now in the game.
That's right.
It's coming down to the last play.
Timeout's called.
Kobe's running the huddle.
We had a new coach, Rudy Tomjanovich.
And Kobe says, we're gonna run the "what the F" play.
So I called Phil.
He was in New Zealand.
And I said, you won't believe it,
but, like, Kobe called the "what the F" play.
- It's an expression for a play
that we run at the end of the game.
But does Rudy have that play?
Kobe doesn't trust what's going on there.
It's too bad.
He doesn't have anything to go to to help him out.
Jumaine Jones to inbound.
Bryant gets doubled.
Kobe Bryant.
Amazing, but it didn't go in...
I went, oh, my gosh, Kobe misses Phil.
Like, he liked the way Phil coached the team.
There he is. His first shot as an owner.
You think he likes it?
At this moment, I can't believe it.
What's the future?
Want to replace your father at the top?
Yeah.
Between my daughters and my sons,
there are certainly enough sports teams to go around.
Are you and the rest of the family,
are you guys all on the same page?
The Lakers caught in the middle
of a family power struggle.
I think I've really left them with something.
Part of me always wanted to feel
what it was like to be a Laker.
But, you know, my manifestation, I guess,
came true.
I was in the Shaq trade.
I mean, I was excited 'cause I was like,
I get to be Scottie Pippen, you know?
And, of course, Kobe would have been Michael Jordan.
But I was surprised that Phil left.
So who was your coach?
Yeah, who was our first coach?
I think it was Rudy T.
Yeah.
Rudy T is awesome.
What an amazing man Rudy T is.
His energy, like, his passion-
it was a lot of fun to be around Rudy T.
But that year was destined to fail,
no matter who took over, right?
I mean, you're coming in to fill the shoes
of Phil Jackson and Shaq-Kobe dynasty?
It's just not gonna happen.
Where he was and where Kobe was trying to go
was just two different mindsets.
When my dad and Jimmy hired Rudy,
they did so together.
When Phil was being hired the first time,
Jimmy wasn't part of the process at all.
So now this was definitely Jimmy's
becoming more assertive in the basketball side of things.
My dad wanted to empower Jimmy in that position.
And he did that for me when I started in the business
in team tennis, when he said, I want you to have the success,
or I want you to feel the failure of, you know,
what you decide, and so kind of felt that
that's what he wanted Jimmy to do.
What's important is that organizations
hire the right coaches.
And Rudy Tomjanovich was a championship coach.
So there's a lot of rationale
that would make that make sense.
But Jim didn't really understand the business
of sports and basketball.
So I thought the contract for Rudy was too much money.
That wasn't my decision
of how much Rudy was paid.
It was my dad's decision.
But statistically, Rudy is fantastic.
He had won a championship.
It made sense.
Players-we've always felt that not every player can play
in New York or play in Los Angeles
when you have these exorbitant expectations on you.
And you can't coach there either,
'cause there's a lot of pressure that's involved
and a lot of media scrutiny in those two cities.
So you've got to be able to handle all of that.
Halfway through the season, he just came to me and said,
Mitch, I can't do it anymore.
I couldn't shut it off
when I was away from the arena.
I can't remember exactly how I was before.
It was bad, and it was kind of just
like everyone was in shock.
No one knew what was going on.
It was no good.
Phil Jackson is coming back
to coach the Los Angeles Lakers.
It wasn't about the money.
It was about the intrigue of this situation.
And it's a tremendous story.
It's a tremendous opportunity.
It's a story of reconciliation, redemption.
It's a story of reuniting.
It's a lot of things in this that make for, you know,
really a wonderful opportunity for the team
and for the Lakers and myself.
Phil Jackson coming back to the Lakers
is one of the most surprising things
I've ever seen in covering the team.
I just couldn't believe that Kobe would want him back.
But that's what losing does. It humbles you.
Here's my question to you, Kobe.
How many times have I asked you,
"How's things going with Phil Jackson,"
you got a smile on your face,
you say, "Everything's going well.
I'm happy the fact that Phil is back."
How can you be happy that that man is back?
- You know what?
Life is short, OK?
And you can't go around life carrying baggage.
Did you ever want him to apologize-
the "uncoachable" comment, and I think him at one point
wanted you traded from the Lakers,
at least that's what he said in the book.
Nah, I didn't need an-
I didn't need an apology from him.
No? You know, just him
coming back to the Lakers-
Was enough? Was enough.
Nobody's uncoachable.
Was he hard to coach?
Yeah, he was hard to coach.
You know, when you reach a certain status,
you begin to flex a little bit,
and you voice your opinion.
And maybe you don't always agree with the coach.
Or maybe you say to yourself, I can do it better.
Kobe's a very competitive
and "win at all costs" type of guy.
But I think with a year apart, kind of realized, like, dang,
it really was-
uh, it really was something special.
And thankfully they did,
because it allowed Phil and Kobe to reunite.
Kobe came to understand, that is the genius of Phil,
being able to take controversy,
or to take disharmony,
or to take a moment of tension
and have that become glue
for a better and deeper relationship.
Kobe knew that, deep down,
what mattered most to Phil was winning rings.
And that's the only thing that mattered to Kobe.
So to that extent, they were always 100% on the same page.
I sat and talked to Kobe before I took the job.
Kobe had made a choice to go it alone.
And we had to talk about that.
And I said to Kobe, you know, are you willing to come back
and be a coachable player?
"Yeah."
You know that it's gonna take a while
for us to get back and win?
"Yeah, I know."
The relationship that we've always had
when it came to the game was we knew, you know,
what we needed to do to get the job done, period.
You know, now that relationship has gone beyond
just, you know, strategies and schematics
of the game of basketball.
It's just a deeper respect
that goes beyond our profession.
I had every belief that the team could rebound.
I thought that Kobe's talent was significant enough
for him to be a winner.
There's been some suggestion that Jimmy is now
kind of the one who's your number one advisor.
Is that accurate?
That is accurate.
When I came back to the job again with the Lakers,
I felt like Jim was more involved in basketball
than his dad was.
- My dad wanted Jimmy to feel,
you know, this is- this is your show.
My dad had confidence in Jeanie and myself
to keep the ball rolling,
you know, keep the business moving.
Jimmy wanted to, uh, prove himself,
just like anybody wants to prove themselves in business.
Jimmy looked at the game differently.
He relied on data, analytics
to help him make decisions about players.
The way I was brought up, everything's numbers.
Everything that goes on
in a basketball game has an effect.
How much does a missed free throw hurt a team?
What is the impact of the player?
When I was basically running the team with my dad and Mitch,
that's where the numbers really came in.
But Jimmy was also the kind of guy
that always thought, you know,
I'm gonna hit that lotto.
I'm gonna go to Vegas and make $100,000,
it's just a matter of luck and timing.
With the tenth pick in the 2005 NBA Draft,
the Los Angeles Lakers select
Andrew Bynum...
From St. Joseph's High School.
And rare to see the Lakers draft
a high school player. Remember, Charlotte took
Kobe Bryant when it was the Charlotte Hornets...
He didn't have any statistics, you know?
He-it was basically high school, and that was it.
This was, you know, the eye test.
We were at the combines, which were so much fun to go to.
You see all the new talent, all the players
you scouted throughout the year.
Here's Bynum trailing.
And he's fouled.
And here's this guy, Andrew Bynum, 17.
He's a 7-footer.
His moves were so sweet.
Had the Kareem skyhook already.
I was in love with him five minutes after the game.
And Bynum is there with the big...
I went to my dad first.
I said, we need to get this guy.
You know? The-
I don't care what he looks like right now.
He had the talent to be the best center in the league.
He was 17.
He was just a kid.
We asked Andrew when he started playing,
and he said he was, like, 15 or something.
That's very late.
And he only played, I think, like,
ten games in high school or something
because he had an elbow problem.
- Phil was not a fan.
I mean, he saw the same things we saw,
you know, great hands and-
but he wanted us to get a four-year college player,
not a 17-year-old.
Bynum had not been as successful in high school
as Kobe was, but there was the sense,
it's just an intriguing prospect.
And Jim Buss had not established himself
in any meaningful way as an executive yet.
And so it just felt like he was gonna draft
some high school kid that he believed in,
and if it worked out, it was gonna be his guy.
It was gonna be his claim to fame.
Jimmy made sure that everybody in the world knew
that Andrew Bynum was his draft pick.
Jimmy wanted Andrew to be successful
because it would make Jimmy's name in basketball.
Andrew had only played really
one season of high school basketball.
I knew that it would be tough on him to come
from no attention to Laker spotlight.
Wow, that's something
for anybody to really be worried about.
But he wanted to learn.
And he figured that he could learn best from me.
So the Lakers gave me the opportunity to coach him.
I just tried to appeal to his work ethic
and just see if I could get him to do a few fundamental things
and get him to understand the game.
Now Bynum.
Turned away by Kenyon Martin.
A real experience for Andrew Bynum-
I was thinking the same thing.
Matched up against Kenyon Martin.
The fact was he didn't understand the game,
how to win,
what that was all about.
And he had to learn teamwork.
Phil saw Andrew as a 17-year-old
who doesn't know how to be a professional,
needs to be taught how to be a professional.
And that takes time.
And you have to earn that.
And Jimmy wanted it faster.
I sided with Phil,
because Phil had been doing it for so long,
and understanding what he went through with his body-
two knee replacements, a hip replacement, a spinal fusion-
all those things that you can attribute
to playing the game of basketball.
And what kind of life would Andrew have as, you know,
somebody over 7 feet tall, and the wear and tear
that you're putting on this young body?
That's what I wanted to see was, like,
the slow and steady raising
of a professional basketball player.
And you have to develop them the right way,
because if you don't, then their careers
don't ever meet their potential.
We actually flunked Andrew Bynum
on the physical exam.
The kid had a bad skeleton.
They told us, he's gonna get bigger.
And every time he lands, the load,
because of the way his feet are and his knees are,
it's going to limit the amount of time
that he's gonna be able to play the game-
just physically, it's gonna happen.
Even in high school, he'd already had
several knee surgeries at 17 years old.
Andrew, his knees kind of, like,
bent in like that.
That's why when he jumped and came down,
it was like, oh, shit, is he gonna be all right?
Because every jump looked like it'd be his last time landing.
The ownership was aware of that before they drafted him.
But Jimmy was really high on him.
They drafted him anyway.
But down the line, he had his own team
of physicians and physical therapists.
And his own personal team was allowed in the locker room,
in the weight room, on the court.
When Phil tried to address Andrew's team
and say, look, during our practice times
you can't be in the locker room,
you can't be in the weight room,
you can't be on the court, nothing changed.
The guy was back in there doing what he was doing.
Jimmy Buss told him, don't worry about
what Phil is telling you.
I'm the owner of the team.
He's my guy.
And so do what you need to do.
You know, I always dreamed as a kid that,
you know, it was possible to score 80 or 90 or 100.
What do you say we play a little basketball
here at Staples Center?
The Raptors and the Lakers.
You know, like, sometimes you lay down in bed,
and you visualize things.
That's at least how I would go to sleep.
I'd lay down, and I'd imagine playing for the Lakers.
And I would imagine what the uniforms looked like.
I would imagine where we'd be playing, and, you know,
the smell of the arena and all this other stuff.
And I would see myself, you know, getting hot.
Now to Kobe.
Still six and a half to play in the third.
He pulls up for a 3-yes!
Kobe again!
But in a dream, like,
why would you ever interrupt that?
Like, you're not gonna have a dream and be like,
OK, and then he misses his next six.
Like, it's not gonna happen.
So you just keep dreaming and dreaming and dreaming.
And before I go to sleep, I'm, like, at 120 points, you know?
And so when you grow up downloading that
into your brain over and over and over,
then that becomes possible.
We think he gonna do something special
every night because that's how he play.
But to be there actually seeing it,
see the ball drop in, hearing the squeaking of the shoes,
the way they really sticking him hard.
Because sometimes on TV it don't look
like they playing defense.
You got to really be there to see
how intense this is and how he's really getting them
off of him with his moves and his fakes
and the shot that he's taking and the degree of difficulty
with this man all in his face,
and how he's still making the shot.
Kobe Bryant.
Scored 20 in that quarter.
Oh, he scored 20 in this quarter.
Damn, he scored another 20.
It's like, you know, you've seen him do it,
but to see him do it four quarters in a row,
you just sit back and say, how amazing is this dude?
It's just mind-blowing.
And an 81-point game.
All he was doing was just chasing greatness,
and I was just hoping that some of that greatness
would just sprinkle off on me.
Do you think you'll ultimately
be measured by championships?
The thing that I'm afraid of is, uh,
not winning another championship.
You know, and that's why I play the game because,
you know, winning is the ultimate goal.
But it's a team game,
and you can only do so much.
After Shaq left,
it became an opportunity for Kobe to really show,
who's the main guy in this winning all the championships?
It wasn't Shaq. It was me.
We're talking about the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Clippers had a better record than y'all.
You still aching for a title, Kobe?
Because a lot of people look at you right now.
You're taking it game to game, season to season.
I know you've been talking about that.
People look at Kobe Bryant and they say, when his-
when is his championship coming?
Kobe went beyond
what any of us thought he could do.
I mean, he scored 81 points in a game.
And it was like, every night he was dropping 50 on people.
And he had a belief in himself
that he could just get anybody to win with him,
that he was good enough to rise to that level.
He didn't have the team around him.
Listen, two pit bulls are better than one.
He had some puppies with him.
Miami Heat- they've done it!
They win their first championship
in franchise history!
Shaq goes out and wins a ring without Kobe.
Kobe saw everything.
That lit a fire under Kobe's *.
Like, all right, Shaq got a ring without me first?
I can't let that stand.
But for Kobe, there was not a championship team around him.
- This is a trip.
Been signing for, like, ten years, dude.
This is crazy.
- What?
When Kobe changed his number from 8 to 24,
I just said, what's the main driving factor of the change?
And he said, carpe diem-
24 hours in a day.
There's 24 seconds on the shot clock.
Every second of your day matters.
And that's what this number represents.
Now, we're talking with number 8
or, uh, number 24.
And I've seen where that you've talked
about a number change as a new chapter in your life.
I'm not an old man. But, you know,
you start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel's
much brighter than the one at the beginning of the tunnel.
So it's really about appreciating every day
as it comes, you know, every game, every win,
every loss, every practice.
It's just soaking every day in.
Inside for Kobe Bryant...
He's got it!
Silences the crowd!
The Mamba is loose.
Somebody has to put him back in the cage.
How much do you have left, Mamba?
At the top of the clock, Mamba style.
And there is the Mamba
hitting the patented-
There's a difference between who you are
and what you are.
And what I am when I step on that court is-
I become that, you know, I am-
I am that killer snake.
It's OK to be a nice guy off the court.
We want you to be nice and do different things.
But on the court, you got to be a prick.
I mean, you really do,
'cause everybody's trying to take what you have
away from you- your opportunities
to win a championship, your contracts, your money.
You don't get to play this for 50 years.
You get a very limited time to play this.
So if you're not a prick out there
trying to elevate yourself,
elevate your team to get to the levels
that you want 'em to get at,
you ain't gonna make it. You're not gonna make it.
And to me, he was just lethal out there.
He was willing to rip your heart out
in order to achieve his goals.
That's what I got out of Mamba Mentality.
It was impossible to keep Kobe down.
If you shoot him between the eyes with a .45 Magnum,
he'd catch the bullet back here
and throw it back at you, you know.
The Mamba Mentality simply means
trying to be the best version of yourself.
Every day, you know, you're trying to become better.
And it's a constant quest.
It's an infinite quest.
OK, let's talk about your game face.
A lot of people talking about the Kobe Bryant-
we have a picture here, and you can-
This face-
I got the impression that you would take that face home
at night and eat ice cream with that face, you know?
When you play, like, all your emotions
just pour out in that face.
The face has it, you know what I mean?
Good face.
- Come on.
Come on, come on. Whoo.
- Not tonight. Not tonight.
Might be game six, might be game seven.
We'll see.
Not tonight, God damn it.
The Lakers told Kobe
that they wanted to win now.
But some of the actions that they were doing,
specifically Andrew Bynum,
looked more like they were building for the future
instead of trying to surround Kobe with the talent
that he needed immediately to win.
So this is a tall task
for this Laker team down 3-1.
But for Kobe, once again,
he's got to feel out the game, gather whatever is there,
whatever his team needs.
He's gonna try and bring that tonight.
Those kind of lean years,
where it was really kind of just him,
opened his perspective a little bit
on how difficult it is to win, even, you know,
as frustrating as it could be playing with Shaq,
not having Shaq as a teammate.
Kobe was not interested
in leading the league in scoring or, you know,
putting up 81 all the time.
Kobe, in order to justify the decision to go it alone,
to be without Shaq,
to prove himself, he needed to win.
And our second round is set
in the Western Conference Semifinals.
Phoenix has eliminated Los Angeles
and Phil Jackson four games to one.
The Lakers weren't going in the right direction.
They were just middling and throwing away
the best years of his career.
How do you describe this end
to this kind of season?
- Um, well, you know, it's-
it's always tough losing,
very tough, very frustrating, extremely frustrating.
How do you guys get this turned around?
And what do you hope that the management can do
to get it going in a better direction
than what it is right now?
Um, do something, and do it now.
There were some conversations
around a willingness to trade Andrew Bynum.
So for Kobe, it was, I need to put this out there,
because it's gonna engage everything Laker
to get this thing back on the right page.
There was never a thought of moving Andrew Bynum,
never even a thought.
But there was a huge cloud over there
that Kobe wanted to, you know, accelerate this.
Maybe it's a combination of ego
and being stubborn, or just Jimmy planting his flag
and saying, Andrew's gonna be my contribution
and my impact that I'm having
on building of the next era of Laker championship teams.
And so I have to be behind him and support him
and my decision to take him, and it has to work.
Yeah, I would like to be traded.
And as tough as it is to say that,
as tough as it is to come to that conclusion,
I just don't see that there's a chance to build that trust.
My phone starts ringing off the hook.
You know, Mitch, I know you're not gonna trade him.
But just in case, you know, we have interest.
OK.
You know, it was quite a firestorm.
He was not bluffing at all.
I was like, what the- we're *-
we're building something here.
What are we talking about?
And then it turned into, you know,
naive phone calls between me and other teammates.
We don't need him anyway.
You know, we'd kind of be, like, laughing,
like, well, we kind of do need him,
but if he doesn't want to be here, * him.
- Is he gonna stay in LA?
Are they gonna trade him?
And what do you make of this whole thing?
Well, first of all, uh, it's a mess, basically.
It concerned me, yeah. Well, I texted him,
and I'm like, Kobe, what's up, you know what I mean?
And he's like, look, there's some things
that aren't sitting right with me.
But, you know, when it comes right down to it,
uh, if you're offered something better
than what you have, you-
most people would take it.
But I can't imagine anybody giving enough
to compensate for Kobe.
We had several meetings.
And we decided,
Kobe, if you want us to explore a trade,
we'll do it.
And just so you know,
we feel you are the best player in the world.
Any team we talk to,
we're gonna want their best player.
But we reached out to all the teams.
Sometimes, you know,
teams will just hypothetically throw something out.
And then the other team will say, sure, I'll do it.
And then you'll start working through some of the details,
and then somebody will back out.
And that's what I just expected to happen with this deal.
But then I talked to Jerry, and usually,
when two owners talk, it's gonna be a done deal.
That's kind of the cementing the deal, right,
owner to owner, not GM to GM,
saying, OK, you know, we've got a deal.
And, bam, this is going to happen.
We never had a deal with Dallas.
Yeah, you can't always believe Mark, OK?
And you can tell him I said so.
We had a meeting at Dr. Buss's house.
It was myself and Kobe and Mitch
and Jimmy and Dr. Buss sitting around,
talking everything through.
Yeah, we kind of, like, went around the room,
and, well, did you contact this team?
Yeah, we did.
And, well, they wouldn't give us all we wanted, Kobe.
He says, well, if they gave you everything that you asked for,
then I would be the only guy on that team.
And we said, that's true.
He said, well, that team would be no better than the Lakers.
And we said, yes, that's true.
And the team will remain nameless,
but we found a team that wouldn't give us equal value,
but they gave us everything.
They had said, hey, we've got a framework
for a potential trade to the Pistons.
And that was not something Kobe was interested in doing.
Because I wasn't going
to move to Detroit.
Why's that?
I'm a Cali girl. I-you know, I-
everyone- like, my family's here.
It's just one of those things.
Before Kobe and I got married,
I had told him I wasn't going to move.
I used to joke with him and say, like,
you can move, but I'm not gonna move.
He loved LA.
So I remember calling Rob Pelinka, Kobe's agent.
And I asked him if there was any possible way
that we could find a loophole to keep Kobe in LA.
And he says, there's something called a no-trade clause.
And I said, I need Kobe to have that in his contract.
And I made sure that we put that in there.
You made sure? Yeah.
Only LA?
- Only LA-the sunshine.
I agree with you.
I don't think Kobe ever wanted
to be anywhere else.
He wanted to be a Laker for life.
But he needed my dad and my dad's vision
and his commitment to put this franchise back on top.
In a swift and bold move,
the Lakers front office acquired one of the best
big men in the game.
Simply the biggest NBA in-season trade
so far this year, as the Lakers acquire talented big man,
Pau Gasol, from the Grizzlies.
Who would have ever thought that the Lakers could
come up with this kind of a player?
When Mitch Kupchak came to you and said something like,
I can get you Pau Gasol for Kwame Brown,
what did you say back?
No, you can't.
But-
We made the trade a day or two later,
and nobody knew.
I think the night before, I told Phil.
Like, really? That's good.
Right, and then walked in the locker room.
I think, had that trade leaked out,
there would have been another team that would have
offered more or would have convinced Memphis
not to make the Lakers better.
It was one of those game changers,
bringing a talent like Pau to join Kobe Bryant.
I was not happy.
There are certain trades where you think,
OK, thank God they made that trade.
And there are certain trades where you go,
aw, shit, this is not good.
I was in shock. I couldn't process it.
It was, um, something that I didn't really expect
at that time, but it happened.
And a whole new world opened up.
Bryant is spinning in the lane.
Back for Gasol-a pretty pass!
And it's back to a 3-point game.
As soon as I landed in Washington,
he said, Pau, let me know when you land.
When you get to the hotel, I want to come see you.
I said, OK, are you sure?
You got a game tomorrow at noon.
He's like, no, no, I'm coming to see you.
And Kobe comes, and again, it's past 1:00 a. m.
And he's like, Pau, welcome to the team.
I can tell you, like, I'm super happy that you're here.
But now, let's go win a championship.
We're not gonna wait for next season.
We're gonna go for it right now.
And he was dead serious.
The Lakers got Pau Gasol,
and I was just over the moon.
There's nothing that can stop us.
We're gonna win.
We're gonna win the championship.
And just his basketball, like, his passing,
you know, his ability to handle the ball at that size,
his synergy already with Kobe-
because Kobe's such a high basketball IQ player,
that it didn't really take too long
for them to learn how to play together.
Right off the bat, everything clicked.
I just saw my teammates were moving.
They were screening for each other
when I had the ball in the post.
We were playing pick and roll,
whether it was on the side or on the top of the floor.
Kobe Bryant handling the ball,
attracting my defender, and getting me open.
It was just a matter of making reads and plays.
He was a perfect number two,
a perfect Robin to a Batman.
And that's kind of when I was like, OK,
this could be one of those special teams.
I have to tip my hat off to Buss and Mitch for-
you know, for going forward with this.
And, you know, now it's on us to go out there and work hard.
This is a move that puts the Lakers
right among the leaders in the West,
and puts them in position to contend
not just for the Western crown but, uh, for the NBA title.
Kobe, you guys are 32 and 7 now
since Pau Gasol has been wearing that uniform.
- That's a pretty good trade. - Yeah, it's not bad.
I don't think anybody could have ever imagined
us being here right now.
And the Lakers win by 8
and win the series four games to one.
Los Angeles on to the NBA Finals.
The buzz is back in Boston.
Celtics fans have waited 21 years
for this moment, a chance to play
for their 17th championship.
This is the NBA's marquee matchup
between the two most successful franchises
in NBA history.
Yeah, I mean, it's Lakers-Celtics.
That's a classic, and you hadn't seen that
since the '80s.
Rajon Rondo!
Being in Boston, they hadn't won a championship
in 21 or 22 years at the time.
So me being 20 years old,
I didn't care about Magic or Bird.
I just wanted to win.
Celtics were supposed to win.
They just made this huge trade for Kevin Garnett.
They had Paul Pierce.
They had traded for Ray Allen.
This was the team to beat all year long.
Beat LA! Beat LA! Beat LA!
The worst feeling of all the feelings
you get in basketball is if you lose in the Finals.
Beat LA! Beat LA!
The Lakers are in a world of hurt.
Any time you play for the Lakers
and you lose to the Celtics,
it's a terrible thing.
But the loss to the Celtics in '08 felt gut-wrenching.
Boston's blowing out LA right now.
You have to kind of start to ask yourself,
hey, is this meant to be again, or is that it?
Game, set, match, season, championship.
Knowing the history of the game, well,
I know that teams that make it to the Finals and lose,
the next year, they don't go back.
They don't go back.
I'm going in my mind, like,
you're not gonna have any more chances.
Like, you blew this.
This was your chance to win without Shaq.
Now he's laughing because, you know,
everybody's saying that you can't win without him.
You can't get it done.
Check it, you know how I be
Last week, Kobe couldn't do without me
You know how I be
Last week, Kobe couldn't do without me
Now stop, think about that
It ain't about that
It's about B-I-G, AKA Big Shaq
Now, that's the difference between first and last place
Kobe, you, tell me how my * tastes
OK, Kobe, tell me how my * tastes
Shaq's allowed to say that now.
He won, and Kobe didn't.
Like, you're allowed to.
And if you know Kobe the way that we all know Kobe,
Kobe's like, * you, I'm gonna show you.
- He wanted it bad.
And he wanted all his teammates to want it as bad as he did,
because he understood that he needed his teammates
in order to win.
Being great is a lonely place.
And that's why he didn't really have too many friends.
But he had a one-track mind.
And when it was time to work, it was time to work-
just work, work, work, work
till the wheels fall off.
And he just said, yo, Lamar, don't be afraid to be great.
It really was like a team going into that season.
Like, we were on each other every day
about the only thing that matters is the championship.
And I had a conversation with him at the end
of the year about how the team was gonna change,
and about how to do it.
But he kind of figured it out.
He made it plain to everybody,
this is my agenda I'm working towards.
Coming back that next year,
from a leadership standpoint,
he just was a more balanced, calm, relaxed dude.
Like, he still wanted to win and obsessed about winning,
but he started to process and understand
just human interaction and relationship
in a different way.
I thought that made for a better leader.
There was definitely desire to like, OK,
let's figure out how to get back
to the top of this mountain.
That year, I took the girls to go visit Kobe.
And Natalia and Gianna were Girl Scouts.
So we came up with an idea of hitting up the rookies
to buy some Girl Scout cookies.
So Kobe walked us downstairs.
He bangs on the door, and in walks Kobe.
So they're all shocked.
And one of the newbies bought a $4 box of cookies.
I looked at Kobe. Kobe looks at me.
We're like, yeah, that's not gonna work.
So I grab the order form.
And I went to the guys,
and I was like, I need you to show him
how badly you want to be here next year.
And they bought a shit ton of cookies.
So many cookies
that Natalia was the highest-selling Girl Scout
in Orange County.
That's gangster.
- Hey, this is Jeanie.
And it is Sunday, April 19th.
It's the start of the Playoffs.
Here we are finally,
what we've been waiting for all year.
It's a beautiful day.
Let's hear what Phil has to say.
Oh, honey, you sound like you're in a rush.
No, well, I'm just excited, I guess.
It's early morning. It's-
it's like, you know, the timing is just different.
- Yeah, it is. Different.
How do you think your team will
react to such an early game?
Well, it's always hard, you know, to-
what do you do, have a breakfast at 9 o'clock,
and then you start playing the game,
and by, you know, noon, you're hungry as a bear?
You know, do you have steak at 10:00, you know,
and, uh, you know, have a big meal to start out your day
so you can sustain, you know, whatever?
I would do whatever Kobe does
because Kobe always has good games.
Really? In early morning games.
Yes. - Is that so?
Yes. - I can count on it, OK.
Yes.
Let's go, man. It's dance time.
Make it today now. Make it today.
It's dance time. Let's go!
Been the best damn team all year long.
Let's get it, team!
Let's cap this shit off the right way.
Let's go out there and take what's ours, man.
Let's go get this *.
What time is it? Game time, ooh!
Fisher, off the dribble, putts it in.
There he is-!
Bryant gets inside.
Wow! Fires from Kobe Bryant!
Congratulations, Coach.
You won Game 1 of the first round.
How do you feel?
Well, I'm happy we won that game.
That's a-you know, just to get a game in.
And Fish looking for 3. Yes!
Gasol with the left-hand-
You know, there's a stat on the stat sheet
that said, you know, tonight Phil Jackson tied
for the most Playoff games ever coached in the NBA.
- And-you know, I had no idea.
I mean, I have no idea what that even means.
It means you've coached
a lot of games. - Yeah.
Lamar- From Fish!
And the foul.
On to the Western Conference Semifinals
as the Lakers eliminate the Utah Jazz...
Time to see what's on Phil's mind.
Phil? - Oh, what a night
Kobe scooping,
driving, and putting it in!
How in the world did he do that?
Lamar shot. Packs it in.
Odom is picking up steam.
A dominant blowout victory
here in Game 7.
As we said, Lakers now advance
to the Western Conference Finals.
Gets away from that.
Floats it up and in.
Fisher with the save.
Farmar, inside.
Nice move.
As the LA Lakers
are Western Conference Champions.
They win the series in six games.
Would this championship be special or just the same,
doing it without Shaquille?
You know, a lot of people make a lot out of that.
Yeah. - People that don't know
what they talking about make a lot out of that.
And the truth is, he never would have won without me.
And we would never would have won without Fisher,
Robert, or Phil, and everybody else.
I mean, that's just the truth of the matter.
So to be back in this position now,
to try to redeem a finish, you know,
what we started last season, would be extremely special.
And for us to get back to that mountaintop
would just be an amazing feeling.
Playing against that Lakers team
in the Finals, it just seemed like everything
was going right for 'em.
Wow! Bryant banks it in.
Off-balance, falling down.
- Kobe drove down the lane.
And I jumped up to try to block his shot.
And he went up between my arms,
came back down, went over,
and shot it off the glass.
There's no way he had this much hangtime.
And I was like, man, it must be-
it must be their time.
And there's the final seconds.
As the buzzer sounds, it's official.
The Lakers are NBA Champions once again.
LA wins the 2009...
Rings!
All that mother* hard work,
all that hard work.
The locker room felt different
than other years.
Like, the first three when we won,
you almost felt like if you had Shaq on the team,
like, you can't have the biggest dude on the block
and not figure out how to win.
But after losing to the Pistons in '04,
losing to the Celtics in '08,
and then at that time, like,
understanding what Kobe's legacy meant
around winning championships without Shaq,
what does basketball really mean?
Like, winning the title in '09 just kind of...
like, it just-it felt right.
Like, it felt like, OK, this is where I belong.
It was really special, man, like, really special.
And Kobe and I were sitting on,
like, kind of a wooden, like, bleacher thing,
like, in the locker room.
and we were just kind of sitting there.
And-remember LL Cool J had the song
"Mama Said Knock You Out."
And there's a verse in the song where he says-
Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years
I'm rocking the-
And I'm like, literally,
Kobe and I are just sitting there for a second
in the locker room in Orlando.
And I just-I broke into this LL Cool J verse.
And we both died and started laughing,
and just, like, in that moment recognizing, um,
like, we're back where we belong.
Back where we belong.