In the early 2000s, two players that had NBA fans excited thanks to their elite scoring ability were Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant. The duo entered the league a year apart from one another and while they would go on to have different careers in terms of longevity and success, T-Mac and Kobe were more or less on the same level in the early days in terms of hype as well as ability.
One thing that made Bryant unique throughout his career in the NBA was the fact that Kobe’s desire to win was greater than almost any other player in the league. He was single-minded in his search for where the next victory would come from and while that meant improving himself, it would also work if his competition were caught lacking in certain departments.
It’s no surprise then, that Kobe once tried to stop McGrady from working out during the offseason, presumably to get some sort of advantage over him. In a 2019 interview that two of them did with ESPN, T-Mac shared the brilliant story of how Kobe convinced him that he didn’t need to work out before ending up in the gym himself hours later.
“I told him, I said I’m about to go work out. And he was like, ‘what do you gotta go work out for? You know, offseason, you don’t gotta work out’. And I’m looking at him like, and I was like, ‘Uhm, okay’. So I go to my room, chill for a minute. I go to the weight room, who’s in there? This dude (points at Kobe).”
McGrady was mighty impressive during his career with the Orlando Magic as well as the Houston Rockets, a prolific scorer whose career ended too soon due to injuries. Bryant won 5 championships and saw his name enter the conversations for the greatest of all time, and stories like this provide excellent insight into exactly how he managed to achieve all the incredible things that he did.
