“Hey Coach,” I said as I entered the Lakers basketball operations office.
“Hi,” he said back with a smile and his cell phone in hand.
“I can come back,” I told him.
“Ten minutes,” he replied nodding his head.
– It’s not every day you get to sit down and hear a story from the legendary Bill Bertka. And his stories — there’s nothing like them. He has witnessed almost every pivotal moment in Lakers Basketball.
In 1968, Bill joined the Lakers as a scout, courtesy of the General Manager and Head Coach at the time, Fred Schaus. During the 1971-72 season, he worked with Head Coach Bill Sharman as an assistant coach, scout, and film editor. In 1974, Bertka left the Purple & Gold to become the first-ever general manager for the New Orleans Jazz. Six years later, Sharman and Pat Riley asked him to return as an assistant coach for the Showtime Lakers. Bertka served as an assistant coach for two decades, entering Phil Jackson’s era. From 2001 until the 2011-12 season, he held the position of Lakers Director of Scouting. Today, he is a basketball consultant and special assistant, but almost everyone in the organization still calls him “Coach.”
At 95 years old, the longest-tenured employee of the team, and still equipped with one of the sharpest basketball minds, he has agreed to honor the franchise’s 75th anniversary season by sharing stories on what he’s seen throughout Lakers History—
“That was a long ten minutes,” Bertka said to me when I returned.
As we moved from the office to a quiet conference room, I took my seat but did not see him behind me. He had taken a quick detour, stopping by Darvin Ham’s office, the Lakers’ new head coach. “Boy, you are working your ass off,” he said to Ham.
He apologized to me for the delay, still chuckling at his observation. And when he sat down, he confirmed, “Today we’re talking about Kobe Bryant?”
Yes, today is about Kobe.
“Are you going to talk to anyone else for this article?” Bertka asked.
“Just you,” I answered.
Coach was a little concerned that his objective outlook from coaching Kobe might miss the mark on who the 5x NBA champion was in his entirety.
The stories he shared encompassed “the evolution of a very gifted basketball player.” His words, not mine.
“There were two phases of Kobe,” Bertka started things off. “I knew him during his formative years — and he was a pain in my ass.” He said with a big grin.
Bertka explained that during their first year together there were no problems. Their second and third years were smooth too. Kobe listened to Bertka because he respected his knowledge of the game and expert player IQ.
“We got along pretty well,” Bertka recalled. “But it was about the fourth year, we’re having a scrimmage game, it’s a practice game, but the kind of player that Kobe was he’s playing in those scrimmage games like they were playoff games. He’s not gonna coast or not play hard because it’s a scrimmage. That’s not his attitude towards basketball.”
“So, I blew the whistle on an out-of-bounds play,” and Bertka said he told Kobe, “Kobe their ball.”
Kobe had shot back, “What do you mean their ball?”
And Bertka answered, “Kobeee the ball went off you, give me the ball.”
Coach then explained what came next:
He said he was standing there with the ball in his hands. And as he’s sitting with me in the conference room, he swings his hand up in the air and slaps it down on the glass, his 1985 NBA championship ring clanging against the surface. “Boom knocked it out of my hands,” he said.
“I said Kobe are you alright? What are you doing? How in the hell,” Bertka recited with a half smirk.
Kobe later apologized; Coach explained. Bertka said how this story is a testament to the passion and relentlessness Kobe brought from the very beginning, even before he was harnessed.
It was early June of 1996 the first time Bertka officially met the Naismith High School Player of the Year, hailing from Lower Merion.
The Lakers’ longtime former exec, Jerry West, called on Coach to head over to the Inglewood YMCA to evaluate “this high school kid.” They brought with them Michael Cooper, Larry Drew, and Mitch Kupchak Bertka recalled.
The acclaimed workout and what followed with the draft deal were works of art each in their own right, and that’s keeping things simple. One of the greatest workouts ever seen prompted the trade of center Vlade Divac to the Charlotte Hornets for a high school kid.
This wasn’t an ordinary high school kid though. From the beginning and throughout his 20 years, Kobe did not tremble at the fate of failure, and he did not shy away from insufficiencies, he did not allow himself to entertain fear.
Now, even with this mentality. He did not enter the NBA and immediately became a disrupter. He didn’t start his first year. He averaged 15 minutes and 7 points a game.
He didn’t start his second year either, he averaged 15 points for 26 minutes a game.
And in his third year, which was a shorter season, he started 50 games. The 20-year-old averaged 26 minutes and 19 points a game.
That was the brilliance of his pursuit, Bill recalled. “That’s one thing that’s loud and clear when you look at his 20 years, every year he got better — he got better at something every year. One of the reasons for that was whenever you pointed out something that he couldn’t do, he considered it a challenge. And he considered weaknesses as motivating tools. He was gonna’ show you that he didn’t have any weaknesses.”
In his first year, that 1996-97 season, the Lakers played Utah in the Western Conference Semi-Finals. In their fifth game, a deciding game, “this rookie, Kobe Bryant,” Bertka recalled, “takes four ill-timed shots. And he’s a rookie, not a veteran. So, in this game, all four of those bad shots were AIRBALLS.”
“And I said to him, you are not strong enough,” Bertka explained. “Well, that just motivated him. He started weights. He started weight training because of that comment.”
He started improving his physical condition and that informed the other aspects of his game. Bertka noticed that he matured as a basketball player in his first year with Head Coach Phil Jackson. “It was that 1999-2000 season that Kobe Bryant became a legitimate basketball player.” He became a champion for the first time too.
“He studied the game,” Bertka explained, “He knew everything about the game. He knew every player.”
“Did he know more than you?” I asked him.
He laughed, “Oh ya, a lot of people know more than me.”
“As I reflect on him during his career,” Bertka declared, “He had intangibles. Intangibles are those things — courage, passion, intensity, competitiveness, fearlessness, resilience, all those intangible qualities. You could always see that he had those.”
Maybe those intangibles are how Kobe grasped failure better than anybody? Any inadequacy, he invited it in, held it in his hands, until it turned to dust.
Bertka’s stories about Kobe are objective.
They are proof in the best way— you can’t talk about Kobe’s greatness without examining his flaws because Kobe robbed failure of his fragility; Kobe made failure a rite of passage, an endless series of stops on the way to becoming legendary.
“He showed me how he lived his life,” said Bertka, “that if a person has shortcomings, they keep going… they can be… look what he did… he became a very special person in the world.”