Tribute: 12-foot Great White shark named “Kobe Bryant” honoring Laker legend who dove with them to learn “devastatingly vicious basketball skills!”

The patience. The timing. The angles.

Great White sharks are very skilled at many things including eating men, scaring people, getting their pâté eaten by Killer Whales and starring in movies but did you know they are also experts in basketball offensive and defensive schemes?

It is, apparently, true. Laker legend Kobe Bryant, whose life was tragically cut short in a recent helicopter crash, used to study the apex predators in order to learn how to stuff fifty points down Allen Iverson’s gullet with devastating, unstoppable, vicious skills while holding the Philly star to nothing.

Zero points.

Extremely heartless. Great White style.

Now, Kobe has a Great White named after him. A 12-foot young adult swimming off of Guadalupe Island and let us meet this famous jr.

The photographer who first captures full-body pictures of the left and right side of a shark can pick its name, but many are just known by a number.

This shark was #24 — which was also one of the numbers Bryant wore as a Los Angeles Laker.

That’s not the only connection between Bryant and the shark.

Martin Graf, the diver, who photographed #24, actually took Bryant in a shark cage back in 2013 and gave him an up-close look at two great whites.

“He got into our cages and he spent a good short chunk of the day, hanging out on the boat and in the cages,” she said. Bryant told Graf that he became interested in sharks when he was living in Italy as a kid, she said.

The designs of some of Bryant’s Nike shoes were inspired by sharks and he wrote in a 2017 article for The Players’ Tribune that he studied great whites to help him prepare to guard Philadelphia 76ers star Allen Iverson.

In the piece, Kobe writes:

On March 19, 1999, Iverson put 41 points and 10 assists on me in Philadelphia.

Working harder wasn’t enough.

I had to study this man maniacally.

I obsessively read every article and book I could find about AI. I obsessively watched every game he had played, going back to the IUPU All-American Game. I obsessively studied his every success, and his every struggle. I obsessively searched for any weakness I could find.

I searched the world for musings to add to my AI Musecage.

This led me to study how great white sharks hunt seals off the coast of South Africa.

The patience. The timing. The angles.

Wonderful but as surfers, as ocean warriors, we better up our games as we play against actual sharks.

Time for all of us to head into the video room, notebooks open, Shark Week on.

Etc.

Many skills to learn.