s_knight8

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-...tory?coll=la-h
eadlines-sports

Fans have come down from the stands, pressing against metal barricades.
Their shouts swell through the tunnel.

"Kobe! Kobe!"

"Shaq! Hey, Shaq!"

Bryant stops for a moment to sign autographs. O'Neal moves past and pauses a
little ahead of Bryant, taking scorecards and pieces of paper in his huge
hands, scrawling his name. Bryant drifts ahead of O'Neal. He poses for
pictures with VIP guests in the tunnel. O'Neal goes ahead again, his gaze
aloft, ambling toward an open area where he spends a few moments with a
young boy in a wheelchair.

Not once do O'Neal and Bryant look at each other. Not once do they exchange
a quip or casual remark. It is as if each journeys alone, treading through
parallel realities. It's the same at arenas in Atlanta and Minneapolis, in
hotel lobbies in Oakland and Boston, after wins and losses alike. Teammates
and Laker employees, who see the two stars in places where the public and
the media do not, insist that they do find occasions to talk, that they
often joke and laugh like old buddies, but after eight years they share no
real friendship.

Neither takes time from the routines of the road to sit down together over
dinner, for example. At Staples Center, the Lakers' home court, Bryant's
cubicle is in a corner opposite O'Neal's; they could be prizefighters
staring across the ring, except there is no eye contact at all, never even a
glance. Nothing of the casual repartee or tacit acknowledgments of men at
peace with each other.

Their war of wills - a standoff that threatens to shatter one of the most
talented basketball teams ever assembled - is most evident in the spaces of
what is not said, the cold silences that make it clear something is amiss.
No one can fix it. Few dare try. The fissure runs too deep between these
gifted, headstrong men, who suggest the best and worst of American
professional sports.

Under the gloss and smokescreens lie fearsome competitors, titans of
marketing and popular culture, who crave more than the glory of winning
championships - who seek the acclaim of individual greatness, a glory that
outshines all of their riches and awards and titles. One thing Bryant and
O'Neal have in common - one of the few things - is an acute awareness of the
legacies they are shaping; and underscoring their rival campaigns, like a
line drawn in the sand, is a persistent and prickly issue:

Is this Shaq's team?

Or is it Kobe's team?

"When you have two dominant athletes, with egos, who want to be the best,
and they're so competitive, you're going to have friction," said Laker
forward Horace Grant, who remembers Bryant and O'Neal clashing over control
of the team three seasons ago. "In every walk of life you're going to have
some egos. That's no different with Kobe and Shaq.. I think it's about who
gets the limelight."

"We can't ever count on next year," said Payton, who has voiced frustration
over his own reduced playing time and might also leave. "We don't know
what's going to happen."

"The concept of the team, which makes this opportunity [to win a
championship] so special, is often pushed to the background with the
individual agendas that are out there," said Hall of Fame center Bill
Walton, whose son Luke is a Laker rookie.

Laker assistant coach Jim Cleamons, himself a former player, added:
"Obviously, Shaquille and Kobe, growing up in their era, their perception of
the game is, 'All right, just give me the basketball and I'll score points
for you.' . Everybody wants their shots. The reality is, in a 48-minute
basketball game, how many touches do you really get?"

O'Neal grouses to writers regularly covering the team about the stagnation
of the offense and the need to get the ball inside. Sometimes, when Bryant
scores well and O'Neal doesn't get his shots, O'Neal does not even face the
media, despite league rules that say he should. Instead, he lingers in the
training room or leaves through a rear door.

greg brown

This story actually appeared on the front page of the paper, not the front
page of the sports section, but the "hard" news front page.

I don't get it. This guy's point seems to be that the Lakers are down 0-2
because Shaq and Kobe aren't friends. Of course that might be somewhat of a
surprise to the Spurs who think they had something to do with it. I would
share the Spurs' surprise.

Making an issue of Shaq and Kobe's lack of friendship might also make a lot
more sense if they had not already won 3 straight championships too. All won
with Shaq and Kobe NOT being friends.

This guy ought to stick to baseball, or whatever sport it is he may know
about. He is only scratching the surface here and not making much of a mark.

Greg

tim brown

Kobe and Shaqs relationship has nothing to do with the Laker performance.
Shaq still scores and rebounds and sets picks for Kobe. Kobe still passes
to Shaq.

bring out da brooms, da lamers is goin down

On 08 May 2004 13:54:20 EDT, "s_knight8" <s_knight8nospam@hotmail.com> blurted:

Props to anyone who said before the season started that there's only one live
basketball per possession, and that's the Lamers' biggest problem this season.

It's nothing new about Shaq and Kobe's friendship. But it hits new
low this season that Kobe doesn't seem to care anymore. It is almost
as if he doesn't care to win another championship for Shaq, GP or
Malone for that matter.

mike fletcher

It's Phil Jackson's team... well, it is if anyone wants to win.

--
MF

See L.A. for class
On March 21 in Los Angeles, former Celtics great (who broke the hearts
of many Lakers fans) Bill Russell had his picture on the scoreboard.
The fans gave him a long ovation.
The previous night, when it was announced that Shaq O'Neal scored his
20,000th point, the fans in Sacramento booed. Then, to make matters
worse, a the game ball was defaced, presumably by a Sacramento fan.

Clinton E. Parish
Sacramento

Rest in Peace, Francis Dayle "Chick" Hearn : 1916 - 2002

miguel

If Kobe decides to stay, it's a team in transition. The Lakers can no
longer win championships as "Shaq's team", since his physical dominance
is no longer what it once was, and his weaknesses have become glaring.
In the 1980s, the Lakers went from being "Kareem's team" to "Magic's
team" in 1986, after losing to the Houston Rockets. What do you do when
you're a contender and you fall short of your goal? You go back and
retool. Some of it takes the form of personnel, but in the case of
those Lakers (as should be the case with this team), where they had a
young star who had more or less been serving his apprenticeship for
several seasons under the veteran star, they also changed the focus of
the team with the personnel they already had. Kareem accepted his role
graciously, and the following season, Johnson became more a focus of the
team's offense.
This team's transition is going on two years now. I had always looked
back on that 80s team when looking ahead to how things might play out
with this team (how many championships, etc). I always expected they'd
run off a few in a row behind O'Neal (I did expect it to be more than
three), they'd lose one year, and they'd come back behind a Kobe Bryant
entering his prime.
Last season, Bryant showed his readiness to assume leadership of the
team. Unfortunately, in my opinion O'Neal has shown he has no intention
of supporting his team as enthusiastically as his team supported him,
and no intention of supporting a teammate's stardom as graciously as
Abdul-Jabbar did.
This is a team in transition. If they keep Kobe (it's up to him), they
will be "Kobe's team" without a doubt, and they can remain legitimate
championship contenders, if not favorites. If Kobe goes, they will
remain "Shaq's team" and they will be contenders in name only, because
they won't win another championship in O'Neal's career.
In the end, this may serve as a useful experiment. These are very
likely the two most talented teammates in the history of basketball,
with consideration to the stages of their respective careers and the
proximity to their respective primes. For the reasons given in the
above quoted paragraph, this should serve as proof positive that playres
as talented as a Michael Jordan and a Wilt Chamberlain could never be
teammates... and moreso if you believe as most do that those were better
players than these two.
They all have this in common. As written above, they are "fearsome
competitors..... who crave more than the glory of winning
championships." Maybe players who "seek the acclaim of individual
greatness" and who possess that "acute awareness of the legacies they
are shaping" just can not remain teammates for long.


By the way, I don't think a team player is defined purely by how often
you pass the ball. As with all things in life, the real definition lies
in what's in one's heart, moreso than the lip service one pays to the
concept. And people often reveal what's in their heart in subtle but
very clear ways. Question: What kind of "team player" mopes when his
team wins because he didn't get enough shots? When his team wins!

sports fan

In article <109r205cbgn0jf0@corp.supernews.com>


Not according to Fletch. :-)

miguel

Based on game performance, I'd say Kobe cares more about winning than
least Shaq and GP combined.

Base on what, his 1 shot 1st half regular season game against the
Kings, or his couple shot 1st half 2nd playoff game against the Spurs
after Shaq's stepdad called him a ballhog?