Hear Gregg Marshall’s take on the legacy of NBA legend Kobe Bryant
In December 1995, Gregg Marshall was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to see some of the best high school basketball players in the country.
On the floor for the Beach Ball Classic: Lower Merion High School star Kobe Bryant. He scored 117 points in three games and won the dunk contest.
Bryant and eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter, died in a helicopter crash Sunday. Tuesday at his weekly news conference, Marshall reflected on that day on the East Coast and the basketball life Bryant went on to have.
“It was very apparent that he was a special player and he had that ‘it’ factor, he was just going to be a dominant, dominant player,” Marshall said.
Marshall was an assistant at the College of Charleston at the time. Back then, Chicago Bulls icon Michael Jordan was at the height of his career. Marshall said everything in basketball revolved around Jordan until Bryant came along.
“It was amazing how his game was copied a little bit about Michael,” Marshall said.
Marshall said after Bryant’s death, he saw a tribute video that matched film of Jordan with film of Bryant making the same moves with the same results.
“He followed, in my opinion, the greatest player ever and really was just dynamite in his career all the way up until that last game where he scored 60 points,” Marshall said.
Monday, Shockers freshmen Tyson Etienne and Grant Sherfield shared their reactions to Bryant’s death. They said Bryant was someone they looked up to, and Etienne even said he tries to follow his blueprint and plans to carry on his legacy.
“A lot of the young men that I coached emulated him and worshiped his game, like, ‘Man, I want to be Kobe,’ where the older guys wanted to be Michael,“ Marshall said. “He meant a lot to folks in the basketball world,” Marshall said. “Obviously from what I’ve read, (he) was a tremendous dad and a tremendous husband to his wife, so he was a good role model at the end.”