Kobe Bryant and Tupac Shakur were more alike than they were different. They were both young Black men who achieved the height of success in their chosen fields. Both men changed their respective games and left legacies that will far outlive them, and tragically, both left this world way too soon.
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Both Kobe and Tupac made their marks in Los Angeles, though they came from wildly different backgrounds. Kobe grew up abroad in Italy. His dad, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, was a professional basketball player. Tupac was born and raised in Harlem and grew up in poverty.
E.D.I. Mean was once a member of Outlawz with Tupac, and on his recent appearance on Byron Scott’s Fast Break, he spoke about something Tupac’s mom once told him.
“Rest in peace to Tupac’s mother,” he said. “One day we were sitting down watching the Lakers, I think it was during the playoffs, and Kobe was doing what he do, going off, and she sat back there, and I’ll never forget this, she said, ‘That boy reminds me of my son.'”
“I didn’t see it at the time,” he admitted. “I didn’t know where she was going with it. Even though I loved Kobe, I just thought Kobe and Pac were very different. Their backgrounds were like night and day, so I didn’t see the comparison. But as time goes on and continues to go on, she was so spot-on.”
It wasn’t an accident that Kobe and Tupac became all-time greats
If there’s one quality that uber-successful people share, it’s a relentless work ethic. That’s what Afeni Shakur saw that made her compare her son to the Laker great. E.D.I. continued, “They were very alike. Pac demanded the best out of you. He wanted the best out of us, especially … He brought the best out of the people around him too [because] of his work ethic.”
“[Tupac] led by example. Like, ‘I’m gonna be the hardest-working person in here. So if y’all not working as hard as me, you’re gonna pale in comparison,'” E.D.I. concluded. Lakers fans, does that sound like anyone you know? Kobe won five rings; three with Shaquille O’Neal, and when people whispered that he couldn’t win without the big fella, he went out and won two more.
Kobe was known as an all-time gym rat, the kind of guy who would be the first one in the building and the last one to leave. Judging by the reverence E.D.I. has for Tupac, it sounds like he was the same way.
Kobe played his first NBA game less than two months after Tupac was shot and killed. It’s a shame that the two legends didn’t overlap (though they did supposedly meet one time); otherwise, we surely would have had a “Mamba Mentality” shout-out in a song. There’s no doubt these two would have had a lot to say as L.A.’s two favorite sons.
