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Kobe Bryant was so young when he entered the NBA that his parents had to co-sign his contract. His youth and inexperience as a teenager were the main reasons it was a different experience for him to try to fit in with everyone.
In that 1996-97 Los Angeles Lakers roster, for instance, the two guys closest to him in age were four years older. Five were in their 30s, and a couple were almost twice his age. Bryant was really walking into a locker room full of grown men. Many of his teammates were established veterans with lives and responsibilities that were vastly different from those of an 18-year-old kid.
The age gap was impossible to ignore, making Kobe's transition to the pros as much a social challenge as anything else.
Kobe isolated himself from the rest of the Lakers
With goals of becoming the greatest, patching up the age disparity was the least of Showboat's worries. Most 18-year-olds would probably try to fit in, but Kobe was not "most" 18-year-olds. He seemed perfectly fine doing his own thing, which left little room for the usual teammate bonding.
As former Lakers equipment manager Rudy Garciduenas witnessed, that approach created a gap between Bryant and his teammates. The Purple and Gold icon eventually had to figure things out as he grew older, but early in his career, fitting in was a struggle.
"When he started with the team, he was extremely standoffish. He was not social. He did not really know what to do with his teammates," Garciduenas recalled on "Byron Scott's Fast Break." "He would isolate himself. He would literally spend time on the road in his room watching tape. And he didn't understand the fact that his teammates wanted him to socialize, needed to experience outside time with Kobe."
But as Rudy remembered, Kobe deciphering the code, so to speak, with his teammates was a joy to behold. He became more of a social leader when the Lakers gave him the keys to the franchise, leading to sustained success from 2008 to 2010.
"To see Kobe learn that whole thing and go through that process, to me, was just an amazing thing," he added.
Kobe didn't know how to lead early in his career
The Black Mamba became a better leader, all right, but it took considerable effort and insight before everything fell into place from a leadership standpoint.
As Garciduenas noted, Bryant learned that leadership wasn't just about yelling and chastising, but also about nurturing. Kobe recalled someone imploring him to be a teammate, saying that he wanted to feel that Bryant needed him. Bean brushed it off at first, but later realized the message he had been missing all along.
Bryant later confessed that he had no idea his teammates perceived him as distant. He maintained that if it wasn't for a reporter pointing those things out, he would still have been in the dark.
"The aloofness thing, honestly, I didn't really hear about it until later," Bryant told Mike Sager of Esquire. "A lot of it was just naive, because I didn't read the papers. I didn't watch, like, the news. I had no clue what was going on, what people were saying about me. It sounds silly to say, but it's true. And I think because of that, a lot of people looked at it like, 'Woah, he must be arrogant.' But I didn't know what the hell was going on. I had a reporter one day come up to me and ask me about it, you know, 'People think you're arrogant, what's up with that?'"
"And it absolutely just seemed to come out of left field," he stated.
Perhaps that was the real takeaway about Kobe's early years. The process of becoming a great basketball player came naturally to him. But becoming a great teammate and socializing with others? Not so much. It took a while longer for him to develop the qualities that proved detrimental to the Lakers' success.
