Everyone looks at your watch and it represents who you are, your values and your personal style.
Everyting negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.
I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant.
I draw from the crowd a lot.
I played T-Mac. I cooked him. Roasted him. Wasn’t even close. Ask him, he’ll tell you. When I was about 20, we were in Germany doing some promotional stuff for that other sneaker company and we played basketball every day. We were in the gym all the time. We played three games of one-on-one to 11. I won all three games. One game I won 11-2. After the third game he said he had back spasms and couldn’t play anymore.
I’ll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it’s sitting on a bench waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.
I’m chasing perfection.
I’m not the most patient of people.
I’ve played with IVs before, during and after games. I’ve played with a broken hand, a sprained ankle, a torn shoulder, a fractured tooth, a severed lip, and a knee the size of a softball. I don’t miss 15 games because of a toe injury that everybody knows wasn’t that serious in the first place.
If I panic, everyone else panics.
It drives me. It gives me more fuel and more focus to have that support. They believe in me. I take that and I wear that as a badge of honor not to disappoint them.
It’s different from being 21 and you think there’s endless amount of opportunities. At 33, the ending is much, much closer.
LeBron is a terrific all-around, five-on-five basketball player who’s an all-time great. But I’d get him.
My parents are my backbone. Still are. They’re the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.
The Black Mamba collection of watches is me: It is my alter ego, so to speak. As I mentioned before, it is sharp, cutting edge and sleek which are characteristics I try to apply when I’m out there on the basketball court.
There’s been a lot of talk of me being a one-man show but that’s simply not the case. We win games when I score 40 points and we’ve won when I score 10.
These young guys are playing checkers. I’m out there playing chess.
We all know what flopping is when we see it. The stuff that you see is where guys aren’t really getting hit at all and are just flailing around like a fish out of water.
