We were the same height, we both played the same position and we were both from Pennsylvania. What are your best memories from traveling around with him? Richard Hamilton and Kobe Bryant had epic battles in high school.
So you've always gotta have your foot down on the gas. And he always used to say the one time you take your foot off the gas, that's giving somebody else confidence that they think they can be on the same floor as you. And it was great for me, especially that early in my career, because me being around him and playing against him, it helped me for my career to always have that killer instinct. It was like, I'm trying to rip your head off, you're going to try to rip my head off. Listen, when they threw the ball up, there was not one time that crossed my mind that that's my buddy, I'm going to take it easy, we're going to laugh and joke. What were those games like when you faced him in high school? We're going to win the state championship next year." We always had a back-and-forth battle, especially in the summertime because that was the time when we were roommates in the hotel rooms and we were competing against all these other teams. He would always come back with, "Yeah, y'all would never beat us. And everybody else on my team I pretty much grew up with from straight out of diapers, and I knew the work that they put in. The only person on your team is you." Which, that's all he had on his team. Because it was like, "All right, you know what, yeah you beat me our 11 th-grade year in the regular season, all right. The times we spent in the summertime traveling to different AAU games and things like that, that was the time that we pretty much trash talked among each other. And also we played on the same AAU team, too. We also met up in the district finals too at the Palestra. We played against each other a few times in high school in regular-season games because we were actually in the same district. And right then and there, I realized that I had my work cut out for me.ĭid you get more amped every time you played against him? First shot, he came down, he crossed over and hit a 3-pointer and I'm like, "Aww, man, this is what Scoogie was talking about." Because you notice if a guy can play on the first possession. We both jumped tip, we were both the biggest guys on the team. He's still not as good as me." This was before the ball was thrown up. I was like, "Well, damn, he got me by probably about a good 15, 20 pounds." And in my mind I'm saying, "He still can't outplay me. I looked at the other end and I said, "Oh, man, the kid on the other end, man, he's 6-6, too." I was about 175, 180. And I can never forget it: I looked down at the other end of the court and I was 6-6 at the time, that was tall for a person from a small town. We end up playing them that year in a regular-season game. So I never got the opportunity to see anything else other than the players that were in that three-mile radius. There's nobody better than me." Because I never made it out of Coatesville, I never played anywhere outside of Coatesville. And I remember my 11th grade year, at the beginning off my junior year, my high school coach was like, "You know what, you think you're the s-, but I'm going to let you know this now: There's a kid that's right down the road that everybody's saying is the best guard in the country." And I'm like, "Yeah, right. It was funny because when I was in high school, I really thought I was really, really good. The following Q&A has been lightly edited and condensed.ĭo you remember the first time you ever encountered Kobe? With only four games left in Bryant's career, Hamilton, now an analyst for CBS Sports, looked back. The two of them met in high school and struck up both a friendship and a rivalry, the former of which endures to this day and the latter of which was rekindled most famously in the 2004 NBA Finals between the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Lakers. Kobe Bryant and Richard "Rip" Hamilton will be forever linked.
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