Strength of Kobe's Character is Guide for Ball, Ingram

By Kevin Ding - Senior Writer

Everybody can see the skillful players, but the question is, 'Are you willing to wait until you find a skillful player with high character?' Because eventually, the character is what wins out on the court. Jerry Buss in 2006 to the Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune

No one Monday night spoke of Kobe Bryant, skillful player.

In Lakers owner Jeanie Buss' prelude to the unveiling of Bryant's two retired jersey numbers, Jerry's daughter placed her emphasis on Bryant's hustle and heart, two words that Bryant, himself, had chosen to sum up in his career in his Dear Basketball retirement essay.

When you combined the hustle and the heart in Bryant over the course of a 20-year career, no matter how you add up 8 and 24, the sum total was incalculable.

"Either number," Brandon Ingram said, "he was still a killer."

Therein lay the essence of Bryant's character.

Kill or be killed. It drove him individually, but more importantly, it sweated through every oversized jersey he wore and washed over every Lakers team for which he played.

The reason that high character is so essential in the most talented players, as Jerry Buss fully realized, is that winning teams will take on the character of those players.

Luke Walton and Kobe Bryant embrace during the jersey retirement ceremony.

"When your best player is like that," said Luke Walton, who played on Bryant's two NBA championship teams as No. 24, "you kind of start to get taken over by that mindset."

And lest anyone believe Bryant's first three NBA championship teams ran solely on Shaquille O'Neal's diesel fuel, consider how Brian Shaw remembers playing on those teams with No. 8.

"At the time I asked (Lakers head coach Phil Jackson), 'When they do things wrong, why do you yell at Shaq but not at Kobe?' " Shaw recalled. "And Phil's answer was that we needed Kobe to be on attack. As a team, we needed Kobe's attack mentality, and he didn't want to take that away from him."

Bryant's relentless character was commemorated on Staples Center's wall with those two jerseys Monday night. It was a night made for basking in all that past Lakers glory.

Except it should be noted what Bryant said before the ceremony about just what it means to him to have lasting impact: "The true mark of a legacy," he said, "is how it affects the next generation."