Now that his Hall-of-Fame basketball career is over, Pau Gasol is an avid golfer and part-time player in celebrity golf events. He joined this week’s Subpar podcast to talk about his game, how he got into it and more, but he also shared some stories about his time in the NBA, and some specifically about his Lakers teammate, the late Kobe Bryant.
Gasol was asked if he had any Kobe memory that stood out, and while he mentioned their relationship was good, it wasn’t until after his time with the Lakers when it actually improved.
“It was hard for us to let our guard down when we were teammates,” Gasol said on the podcast. “Once I decided to move on and sign with the Bulls we were kind of able to relax a lot more and connect on a deeper level, so go to more dinners and go to more lunches and talk about different stuff than basketball. Because when you are in it and you are in a position to win and you acknowledge you have that unique window to actually win championships, you have to be fully in it, and with a certain edge you need to maintain.”
He then discussed a viral moment from Netflix’s “The Redeem Team,” a documentary that aired in 2022 and covered the U.S. men’s basketball team’s journey to win gold at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. In one episode, when the U.S. was preparing to play against Gasol and Spain in a preliminary-round game, Bryant told his fellow Team USA members of a strategy he wanted to implement to set the tone for the game. Bryant told teammates he knew what play Spain would run to open the game, and he knew Gasol would be the one to set the last screen. Bryant said, in a cleaned-up version, “I’m going to run through him.”
“He tried to get right through me to send a message,” Gasol said on Netflix. “Not just to me but to his teammates to say, ‘Hey, this might be my brother, I play with him, we’re close, but I don’t care about anything else but winning.’”
Gasol said Bryant was “very intentional and determined” in everything he did, more than anyone he had ever met. That includes that same Olympics when Gasol said Bryant came to visit him at the Olympic Village prior to the aforementioned game. Someone told Gasol Kobe was looking for him and he responded, “Oh s—.”
“I always felt like he was softening me up, buttering me up,” Gasol said, “but on the court he was like telling his teammates, I’m just going through his f—– chest and I’m going to send a message and this is what I’m here to do and this is the mindset we all need to have.”
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