Kobe Bryant was a man who thrived under pressure. The bigger the stakes, the more he looked forward to the challenge. It was a mentality that turned him into one of the most feared players ever. But just how scary was Kobe really? Gary Vitti has an idea.
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The famed Los Angeles Lakers athletic trainer, who was with the purple and gold for three decades, was the latest guest on Byron Scott’s Fastbreak podcast, where he shared stories about the Black Mamba. He even recalled, hilariously, when Bryant handed him a DVD copy of the hit horror film Saw.
Why? Because Kobe felt he could endure it.
“You know the movie Saw? I had never heard of it. He’s got the disk and he comes running back to my seat and he gives it to me and goes, ‘I can do it. I know I can do it.’ And he handed it to me and walked away. That was it. I had no idea what he was talking about,” began Vitti.
Vitti went into the gruesome details of the Saw franchise, particularly how the killer Jigsaw made his victims suffer. He mentioned the iconic reverse beartrap setup, which involved someone cutting out their own eye to escape. That, he said, was what Kobe claimed he could do if he absolutely had to.
“I’m watching this sick a** movie and I’m sure everybody knows what it is by now. He looked me straight in the eye and tell me he can do it. And you know what? I believed him.”
Honestly, this tracks. There are very few people Jigsaw probably wouldn’t want to mess with, and Kobe is right at the top of that list. His legendary teammate Shaquille O’Neal is a different story, though. The Diesel actually ended up as one of Jigsaw’s victims, at least in Scary Movie 4, which parodied Saw.
This prompted Vitti to speak about the Mamba’s competitive edge. “He was an enigma, but he had to win. He had to at all costs. If you play one of my little daughters in a game of tiddlywinks, you would beat him. You would make it a point to be a little girl at a game of tiddlywinks.”
Vitti then compared Bryant to how Michelangelo sculpted art. “I don’t think that’s learned behavior. That’s something that’s there. He had these instincts and had these characteristics that were inside there. Through experiences and people around him, when they needed to come out, they came out.”
This was the essence of Kobe. The instincts, the edge, the refusal to bend even an inch when it came to competition. Stories like Vitti’s weren’t exaggerations; they were snapshots of how the Mamba truly operated.
Kobe approached everything with the same intensity, whether it was Game 7 or a random challenge no one else took seriously. And that is why his legend keeps growing. Kobe never needed the moment to be big to treat it like it was.
