EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — When Kawhi Leonard decided to return to the Los Angeles area to play for the LA Clippers, he turned to a mentor and friend in Kobe Bryant for advice.
Leonard says that conversation included asking Bryant about getting around. Bryant lived in Newport Beach and talked to Leonard about using a helicopter.
“I talked to him about it before our transition to playing in L.A.,” Leonard said Wednesday. “Just seeing how [he] got back and forth from Newport and he said he was doing it for about 17 years or so.”
Leonard, who has a residence near Staples Center but will stay at his home in San Diego when he can, said he had adopted that mode of transportation but hasn’t been able to think about whether the accident Sunday that left Bryant, his daughter and seven others dead had now given him pause.
“I feel like that … I mean … the things that you hear, you don’t know what’s real yet,” Leonard said when asked if he has any trepidation. “I can’t really speak on it. I don’t know. I don’t know yet. It’s a lot of thoughts in my head.”
Leonard, who grew up in Southern California in nearby Moreno Valley, knew Bryant personally for about seven years. They shared the same intensity and love for the details of basketball, shared friends in common and even the same helicopter pilot — Ara Zobayan.
“Yeah, same pilot, everything,” Leonard said, speaking after Clippers practice. “The whole situation, this whole program, the setup, how he was traveling back and forth was the same way I was getting here from San Diego.”
Leonard said he had flown with Zobayan many times.
“Great guy. Super nice. He was one of the best pilots,” Leonard said. “That is a guy who you ask for to fly you from city to city. It’s just surreal still. … He will drop me off and say he is about go pick up Kobe, [and] Kobe said hello. Or he’ll just be like, ‘I just dropped Kobe off and he said hello.’ Vice versa. So, it’s a crazy interaction. He’s a good dude and I’m sorry for everybody.”
Leonard worked out with Bryant just before the start of last season, thought about his friend “every game” as motivation during Toronto’s title run and celebrated with Bryant on the phone in the locker room after winning it all.
Leonard, like many, said he wants to believe this is all like a movie and not real.
“It’s sad every day,” Leonard said. “You know, you kind of feel like life isn’t real once you start seeing these little monuments or the pictures that people are putting up with his face and the year he was born and the year he died.
“It doesn’t seem real. It just seems like you’re in a movie or something. And you know, you just want to wake up. So it’s still surreal to me. It’s not all come together yet.”
Leonard said that he and Phil Handy, who was an assistant with Toronto last season before becoming an assistant with the Lakers this season, were close with Bryant. They worked out with Bryant just before heading to Toronto last season and the former Laker was one of the first they talked to in the moments after beating Golden State in the NBA Finals.
“Just the competitive drive, just wanting to do everything you can on and off the court to be a better player,” Leonard said of what he will take away the most from his talks with Bryant. “I mean it’s so much. It’s just hard to think of the conversation we had together right now, just summing up in a sentence. Just everything he did.”
“I’m a guy that talked to Kobe last year before the season and right after we won in the locker room,” Leonard added. “… He was the first probably, first or second guy we talked to other than our teammates and family after we won in the locker room. It’s just that motivation. I thought about him every game. He [was] a sense of a drive for me last year trying to get that championship.”
Like Leonard, Paul George grew up in Southern California not far from Los Angeles. Both Leonard and George visited Bryant at his camp in Thousand Oaks before the season even though they were both recovering from injuries and didn’t participate.
“We from here, it’s different when you talk about what guys thought of him from another state,” George said. “We grew up here, we saw him every day on TV. He’s the reason all of us played the game so it’s different, it hits different for us from Russ [Westbrook], DeMar [DeRozan], myself, Kawhi, just all the SoCal guys, it just hits different. He was our MJ. He was our hero. He was our GOAT. It’s just going to hit different for us.”
“If there was no Kobe Bryant, I don’t know who I would’ve looked at and idolized,” George later added.
The Clippers were supposed to play the Lakers on Tuesday before the NBA postponed the game. The Clippers agreed with the decision.
“I thought it would’ve been a horrendous game,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. “I wasn’t ready for it, the players weren’t ready for it. I can’t imagine the Lakers as an organization, forget their players, just the organization, there’s no way they would’ve been ready for it… If we played it, it would’ve been a game played, but I just thought it would’ve been a meaningless game in too many ways. And there’s times where emotion and grief have to give out to your job and in that case, I thought the league made the right choice.”
George grew up in nearby Palmdale and said the Lakers’ star was the reason why he picked up a basketball. Bryant was a driving source of motivation and inspiration to come back when George suffered a gruesome broken leg during an August scrimmage with Team USA in 2014.
“It was little brother-big brother,” he said of his relationship with Bryant. “I really got to know him I would say the last four years of my career. It’s just crazy how my relationship developed with him after having [Brian] Shaw as an assistant, telling me a bunch of [Lakers] stories.”
“It’s tough,” George added. “He helped me every step of the road. When I got injured he was one of the first phone calls that came in and he got me through that. It’s hard, man. It’s hard. I’m grateful and will forever cherish the relationship I did have with him.”
Clippers guard Lou Williams played one season with Bryant with the Lakers during the guard’s 20th and final season with the Lakers. Williams said he his emotions keep swinging from laughter to tears as his mind has been flooded with memories and moments shared with Bryant.
“He was just an ultra-competitor,” Williams said of playing with Bryant during 2015-16. “We had a conversation and I said, ‘Yo, I’m on to you.’ He’s like, ‘What you mean?’ I said, ‘You want people to think you’re a jerk. But you’re one of the nicest guys in the world. That’s how you want to be remembered when you’re done playing, like you want everyone to think you was this hard-ass competitor and just a jerk to everybody.’ But I said, ‘That’s not your natural nature. … You’re forcing your mean on everybody else.'”
“Well, you also hear the stories about all of his philanthropy work that he did and the charitable things that he did for Make A Wish kids and different things of that nature,” Williams added. “So he was such a complex person and just had so many layers to him. We’ll miss him, but I took away a lot of things from him.”