The Mamba Mentality: How I Play

I grew up mostly in LA during the meat of Kobe’s tenure in the NBA and I love basketball, so watching him on the court was an unavoidable part of my childhood. My fascination with him, though, was always his work ethic, or at least the myth(s) that encircled it. Kobe is a dedicated strategist, and to see how he applied that type of analytical obsession to the confines of the game of basketball over the course of two decades was (I think) a once-in-a-lifetime athletic feat.

I was pleasantly surprised with this book. It could have been an unremarkable, stagnant PR play. But Kobe, quite transparently, goes into depth about areas of his thinking that, for a fan like myself as well as someone curious to study a world-class operator in their craft, was new and helpful information.

My personal favorite element of the book was Kobe’s relationship with the referees and NBA regulations — specifically, his honesty about subverting them to his advantage. He was always looking for an edge, whether it was placing his defensive off hand on a player’s hip to push him down, out of visual reach of the refs, or my personal favorite: Kobe reading the referee handbook front to back to know where the refs legally need to be placed on the court during specific times in a possession. Using that knowledge, he was able to deduce and manipulate the court’s blindspots.