Kid Jay Recalls How 4am Fishing Trip With Kobe Bryant Turned Into a Shark Hunt

It’s not surprising to hear yet another person revealing Kobe Bryant’s early morning shenanigans. The Black Mamba loved to get up at the crack of dawn and get his day started before anyone else. Perhaps one of the few leisurely activities he would indulge in was fishing, something Jason “Kid Jay” Wagers spoke about recently. That was until he realized what Kobe liked fishing for.

The famed musician revealed that Bryant went on trips every summer, and on one occasion, he invited Jay to join him. Naturally, Jay assumed it would be just another fishing outing and agreed almost instantly. But when the Los Angeles Lakers legend told him to show up at his door at 4 AM, Jay started to feel there was something a little fishy.

Jay complied, reached Newport on time, and then drove for nearly two hours to go deep-sea fishing, something he had never done before. At 5:30 AM, with the sky still pitch dark, they boarded a yacht and just kept going into the open ocean. Soon, Jay realized that Bryant was not just looking for any ordinary fish.

“Two, two and a half hours into the trip, and we finally park,” Jay said on Byron Scott‘s podcast. “There are a good six or seven of us on the boat, including a professional. The reason I found out that they took us to that particular location was because Kobe only wanted to fish for sharks.” 

If this had been anyone else, it would have been baffling. But since it was Bryant, it felt both believable and understandable. On the court, he always pushed himself to go above and beyond, striving to be better than everyone else. Out in the ocean, it was no different. He didn’t want to do what ordinary men did on a regular fishing trip. He wanted to shark-hunt.

Scott hilariously added, “The ultimate predator vs. the ultimate predator,” which was a fitting way to describe Bryant’s desire to hunt for one of nature’s most ferocious beasts. Jay, meanwhile, candidly admitted that he didn’t catch anything other than a couple of small fish they threw back in the ocean that day, but Bryant’s brother-in-law Sergio got a rather heavy catch on his pole.

“He can’t reel it in by himself, so he and Kobe were sitting there trying to reel this thing in, and it was so far out, it literally took them like an hour, they were going around the boat… trying to get this thing in,” Jay continued.

Sadly for Bryant, they didn’t catch a shark that day, but it still turned out to be a memorable experience for Jay. He even revealed that they climbed to the top of the boat and jumped into the water, which Scott fittingly described as “crazy.”

Kobe used to swim with sharks

Kobe Bryant swam with sharks. Quite literally. So it’s no surprise that he chose to jump into the ocean in an area that was supposedly full of them.

Cory Maggette, Bryant’s former teammate, once revealed in an interview that the five-time NBA champion would prepare for the new season by swimming with Great White Sharks, which are arguably the most dangerous and largest in the world.

“So, Rob Pelinka and Kobe, they would go in the summer before the season, or in the spring, to swim with Great White Sharks,” Maggette said. “It is still clueless to me. Great White Sharks… a school of sharks. In the cage, and they would throw blood on top so they could go.”

Yes, they were swimming inside a cage, where they were relatively safer, but it’s still daunting to imagine a school of 15-foot, bloodthirsty fish circling you. As Maggette revealed, it helped Kobe conquer his fear because once he did that, he wasn’t afraid of anything. “Kobe was just like, ‘Man, you gotta do it. I have no fear, you have to break that fear.’”

Bryant didn’t flinch while swimming with sharks. Did we really expect him to when Matt Barnes tried to scare him by faking a pass at his face?