Across several months of late-night emails thick with scouting reports and statistical analysis, with thoughts complex and simple, Kobe Bryant(notes) had come to trust a most improbable basketball sage. They weren’t deep into this partnership, when a grown man called Sweet Chuck felt obligated to make a confession.
“You know that you’re getting your information from a guy who scored four varsity points and looks like Uncle Fester, right?” Mike Procopio emailed Bryant.
As Procopio remembers, this was 3:30 a.m., in his Chicago apartment, and Bryant had asked him to get to work on studying San Antonio. Bryant had devoured the research that Procopio had done on the Houston Rockets in mid-March and enjoyed one of his most efficient games. Now, he wanted Procopio, an assistant to Bryant’s trainer, Tim Grover, at Attack Athletics, to go back to the tape for him.
There had been a long New York Times magazine story on the Rockets and how their general manager, Daryl Morey, uses a Moneyball-esque formula in basketball. They had statistical theories on how to defend Bryant, how to best limit him and Procopio wanted to make sure Bryant read the story.
Bryant already had. He misses nothing. Bryant wanted Procopio to dig up everything he could on the ways opposing coaches and scouts – in Houston and beyond – believed Bryant could be vulnerable.
“If these people think this stuff works, then I want to see what they’re looking at and make my adjustments accordingly, if this is how they decide they want to play me,” Bryant told Yahoo! Sports in a private moment last week. “I’ll willingly accept that, to see if I can’t shut that down. I wanted him to take a look at the research and see if there’s anything that’s anything worth me preparing over or studying.”
Bryant’s physical dedication is unparalleled. Grover made his reputation as Michael Jordan’s trainer and somehow elevated it with Bryant and Dwyane Wade(notes). This season, Grover traveled city to city to work with Bryant. After Kobe scored 61 points at Madison Square Garden in February and spent his late hours doing the voice-over for a documentary with Spike Lee, he met Grover in the hotel gym at 5 a.m. the next morning. After Game 4 of the NBA Finals, they were back at work at the crack of dawn.
What had been far less public was Bryant’s reliance on the reports that Procopio shipped him for every regular-season game past mid-March and through the clinching game of the Finals. As Bryant hits his 30s, he’s stayed true to the Jordan blueprint of working as hard on his mental preparation as his physical.
“To have someone as dedicated to the game as [Procopio], it was great for me,” Bryant said. “He could see things from the outside looking in that sometimes get a little cloudy when you’re in the moment of the battle.”
“All the time he would send me things that I hadn’t thought about.”
