“It was a goal of mine to start surfing.”
Basketball legend and lifelong Lakers star player Kobe Bryant tragically passed away in a helicopter wreck in 2020. He was 41 years old.
Bryant was a basketball phenom with five NBA championships, an 18-Time All-Star, and was the 2008 MVP, but the dude wanted to surf.
That’s what he tells a room full of young surfers with Olympic dreams in the clip below. Specifically, he wanted to start surfing after retiring from basketball, but his first attempt didn’t wasn’t great. Considering the guy was 6′ 6″, he would’ve needed a board bigger than the average surf school 8’0 soft top.
In the clip above, Bryant says:
“I don’t know shit about surfing.
“It was a goal of mine to start surfing after I finished playing basketball. I tried one time and it was horrendous.
“And then the person goes, ‘You know, I think it’s the board’s fault, because I think you need a much, much bigger board.’
“And I was like, ‘OK, yeah, let’s go with that.’ But I think the thing that I’m most excited about is looking at the evolution of the sport and training.”
The clip is featured in a new documentary called Represent that’s streaming on Peacock.
The film follows female surfers including Carissa Moore, Caroline Marks, Courtney Conlogue, and Lakey Peterson, as they vie for spots on the first U.S. Olympic women’s surfing team in the Tokyo Olympics.
According to a rep, Represent “also delivers a brief history of surfing through archive footage and new interviews, which provide an in-depth view of what the first-ever inclusion of surfing in the Olympics means for the sport.”