The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 383 - 4 Trip to Italy
Throughout Kobe’s professional career, he always placed great emphasis on studying game videos, a task usually reserved for assistant coaches.
After becoming an NBA player, he would spend several hours each day meticulously breaking down his own and his opponents’ performances, putting in far more effort than other players.
In Italy, he would pause the footage and use the slow-motion feature to replay scenes, with his father often pointing out the key points beside him.
When Joe wasn’t around, Kobe would study on his own. He would completely memorize a series of shots, especially those that revealed the tendencies of the players.
By the age of 9, he had edited his first scout video, providing a detailed analysis of John Battelle, a relatively unknown Hawks guard.
Those were the years when NBA stars began to shine, and the league entered its golden age with Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan delivering spectacular performances on the court.
But among all the players, his favorite was the Portland giant Ah Gan, who began his dominance of the league starting from 1986,
"I want to watch Ah Gan play," he recalled, "just to see his passion for the game. You can tell he just purely loves to play. His hook shots and extraordinary power were enchanting. I even thought about switching to center to train my low-post footwork."
Kobe would replay Ah Gan’s game highlights on his home TV over and over, and only later did commentators understand why Kobe had such beautiful low-post moves.
Although Joe also brought his son footage of his own younger days, Kobe didn’t need those.
The real thing was right in front of him, ready for a personal challenge, and when free, Joe would join him for a few one-on-one games.
But with the Italian team’s daily intensive training schedule, his father, being only human, couldn’t possibly play with him to his heart’s content, so they had to make do with what little time they had.
So Kobe practiced alone, imagining he was playing against himself.
"Shadow basketball," he called those solo training sessions, "me against my shadow."
However, in the summer of 1986, Ah Gan visited Italy, near Trieste close to Slovenia in Northern Italy.
Kobe got the news from his father, and Joe Bryant decided to take his son on a trip to Trieste before returning to America for a vacation.
He also wanted to see how Michael Jordan played the game.
————Published in 2017, excerpt from Kobe Bryant’s biography "Showboat," written by Roland Lazenby.
In early July, Gan Guoyang and Wang Fuxi, accompanied by Gan Guohui and Quentin Stephenson, came to Italy in Europe for his second overseas trip.
Joining them were Larry Fleisher and his son, Avia’s marketing director Tim Hanni, as well as a team of Avia staff.
Compared to last summer’s grand tour of China, this trip to Italy was much smaller in scale, with Gan Guoyang being the only player.
The reason for his solo participation was mainly due to considerations of cost-effectiveness and the degree of market development.
The 1985 trip to China was a comprehensive pioneering effort aimed at thoroughly opening up the untouched Chinese basketball market.
Therefore, Fleisher went through so much effort and put on such a grand show, accomplishing a sensational large-scale event.
The European basketball market, on the other hand, had been cultivated for many years, with Italy being an important overseas market for the NBA for a long time. In 1946, when the NBA was just established, an Italian player was drafted and played six games for the Toronto Huskies.
His name was Henry Biasatti, and he participated in the first game in NBA history, the BAA’s opening game, where the Huskies played against the Knicks.
Nowadays, many American players play basketball in Italy. During the 1985-1986 season, there were 27 American players in the Italian league.
Many who were drafted by the NBA but weren’t able to play right away or lacked good opportunities would go to Europe to play for a while to stay in shape.
For example, Bill Lambier, Mike D’Antoni, Joe Bryant, Joe Barry Carroll, and so on.
American players are very popular in Italy, receiving star treatment from fans, and the warm Mediterranean climate of Italy, Southern Europe’s passion for basketball, also holds great allure for the American players.
The Italian enthusiasm for the NBA, of course, cannot be separated from the promotion of exciting games. Before 1981, Italian fans might not have been completely unaware of the NBA’s existence, but they knew very little.
In January 1981, the Celtics with Bird took on the Lakers with Magic, engaging in a thrilling confrontation. The Celtics’ frontcourt trio vs the Lakers’ show-time made its first appearance.
The Celtics defeated the Lakers 98:96, and the live broadcast of this game was turned into a videotape, which arrived in Italy on January 31, Milan time—it was sent from Manhattan when Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, but by the time it arrived, Reagan had taken office.
This was the NBA’s first time sending their game footage overseas for delayed broadcasting, and throughout the early ’80s, this would become the NBA’s main weapon for global expansion.
Afterwards, a sports journalist named Gandolfi, through David Stern and Larry Fleisher, got in touch with CBS, which owned the rights to the NBA footage, and brought back a large number of game videos to Italy to be shown in cinemas big and small.
This caused a sensation in many parts of Italy, especially in those small towns lacking television coverage. Eager to see American basketball games in the cinemas, people didn’t hesitate to break the cinema’s glass because the queue outside trying to get in was simply too long.
