“Michael Jordan learned ballet so I learned to tap dance”: Kobe Bryant became obsessed with finding a correlation between sport and dance

Kobe Bryant learned to tap dance both to protect his own ankles and because he learned that Michael Jordan dabbled in ballet. 

Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are cut from the same maniacally competitive cloth and so stories displaying their competitiveness feel more like fables than actual retellings of what happened. Bryant looked up to ‘His Airness’ and rightfully so, eventually doing a lot of what MJ did and even surpassing him in some aspects of his game. 

The competitive drive that fueled Michael Jordan to do things like practice table tennis for days just to beat Christian Laettner or wake up Chuck Daly to go for a round of golf early morning is the same drive that fuel the ‘Black Mamba’.

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Kobe’s stories in a way are even wilder than Jordan’s. Perhaps the strangest thing he did back in his early days in the league was that he studied the way sharks moved to get a grip on how Allen Iverson was so shifty. 

During these same years, Kobe Bryant would eventually get into the world of dance for the sake of having longevity. 

Kobe Bryant learned to tap dance because Michael Jordan learned ballet. 

Back in 1998, Kobe Bryant approached Jason Berkowitz to help him learn how to tap dance. Jason was an aspiring dancer himself and never tap-danced but teaching someone of Bryant’s caliber was an opportunity he could not refuse. 

“I asked him point blank why he wanted to learn tap and he told me that he knew Michael Jordan took ballet and as one of his heroes, he wanted to do something similar to learn rhythm, balance, and coordination,” said Jason about Kobe. 

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Kobe would on Jimmy Kimmel Live and admit a slightly different reason for why he took up tap dancing. While he did explain that he did this to better learn to balance himself out and help him stray away from ankle injuries, he didn’t mention anything about Michael Jordan being the inspiration behind it all.