“Gerald Wallace, I bet you $500,000 I’ll make this b*tch”: When Kobe Bryant stared down Nets star at charity stripe and put half a million dollars on his free throws

Kobe Bryant once bet Gerald Wallace that he would make a free throw in crunch time, putting $500,000 on the line. 

The fact that the entirety of the All-Star Game’s participants in 1998 could not stop talking about a sophomore Kobe Bryant says a lot about how he was from the get-go. ‘That little Lakers boy’ was yearning to be mentored by Michael Jordan and to this day the Bulls legend describes his relationship with Bryant as competitive and brotherly. 

Playing with fully-fledged adults while not even having entered his teens back in Italy, Kobe Bryant had to be the toughest on the court at all times. His mentality needed to revolve around winning or else he simply would not get better. 

Making it to the greatest basketball league in the world is enough motivation to want to dominate in said league. That is exactly what he did as he established himself as the most potent offensive wing in the NBA before ever entering his mid-20s.

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For him to work on his game and be confident in his abilities on the court, Kobe developed a stone-cold mentality that has now become mythologized. 

Kobe Bryant bet half a million dollars on a free throw. 

Seems as though all the Wallaces were trash-talkers as Gerald Wallace, who was on the Brooklyn Nets at the time, tried to hit Kobe Bryant with a few demotivating quips at the charity stripe. This game between the Nets and the Lakers took place on November 20th, 2012.

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It went down to the wire and with the Lakers up 2 with less than 5 seconds remaining, Kobe took to the free throw line. While attempting the shot, he started to chat up Wallace. It doesn’t take a proficient lip-reader to decipher what the ‘Black Mamba’ said. What he said is detailed in the video below. 

Of course, the 5x champ drained the free throw and Wallace now owed Kobe $500,000. It’s unclear if even a fraction of that amount ever came Bryant’s way but the action is a testament to how confident he was in his abilities to ice a game right there on the spot. 

Lakers ended up winning the bout 95-90 that night as Kobe Bryant would drain two more FTs to seal it for the purple and gold.