If you saw young Kobe Bryant, there’s a story to tell | Mike Jensen

Running his mouth against Kobe Bryant wasn't the best idea Luke Cunningham ever had. But it was Narberth, outdoor summer ball. Cunningham, a ballplayer himself at Monsignor Bonner High, wondered, what kind of name is Kobe? And so what if his father played in the NBA?

Cunningham remembers telling Kobe, off the cuff, how he heard his father wasn't a very good NBA player.

Kobe must have heard him.

"He blocks my shot," Cunningham said. "He essentially caught the ball and threw it into a jungle gym like 40 feet away, over a fence."

For the last two decades, Cunningham has occasionally told the tale - explaining how facing Kobe directly changed the course of his own life. (He had to rethink this basketball thing.) As Kobe Bryant prepares for his last NBA game Wednesday, there are all sorts of people around this area with their personal stories of facing Kobe before he reached the NBA.

Not just players. Maybe you grabbed a neighbor and went to see Lower Merion against Conestoga or the biggest battles against Strath Haven, just to say you'd seen Kobe. Maybe you sat in the corner of the Palestra and watched him against Rip Hamilton's Coatesville High, PIAA District 1 semifinals - that night Bryant caught an alley-oop for a backward dunk. Didn't matter that the dunk missed, it was still the play of the game.

There were others. Do the Scranton guys who lined up for Kobe's autograph after they got beaten in a state playoff game tell the tale? Who was the big guy who stopped shooting after Kobe blocked his first shot in another state game? Around the Central League, everyone has a story.

"There was a play where I was sticking [to] their point guard - I thought I had him trapped on the sideline," said Larry Johnson, a couple of years ahead of Bryant at Central League rival Penncrest. "All of a sudden he throws it over his head."

Johnson's first thought: "What's he doing?"

Then he saw Bryant appear . . . then he saw the alley-oop dunk.

Former Chester High and Providence star John Linehan got a chance to see Bryant the teenager from all sorts of angles - beating him badly, getting beaten by him, and also as a teammate and roommate on a travel team.

At the height of his NBA career, Bryant was asked about the toughest defender he ever faced. Bryant said, "You may laugh, but it's a guy named John Linehan."

In Bryant's junior year, district final at Villanova, Linehan's Chester High team drilled Lower Merion, 77-50. Bryant had 23 points. Linehan had six steals. Linehan remembers how the Aces wore the number 27 - the margin of that game - on their warm-up jerseys the whole next season.

First, Bryant and Linehan were AAU teammates at a big tournament, the Charlie Weber Invitational at the University of Maryland. They were roommates.

"I took the game seriously but I liked to have fun also," said Linehan, a graduate assistant at Drexel this past season who still holds the NCAA record for career steals from his Providence days. "We're in the hotel room, it was around 10. I wanted to stay up and play video games. When I tell you those lights were out at 10, those lights were out, no sound whatsoever. We were going into our 12th-grade year."

In that tournament, the big game was Bryant's team against Tim Thomas, the consensus two best players in the country. Linehan remembers how the game already had started when Thomas walked in, traveling from another event.

"There was like a roar," Linehan said of the sight of Thomas. "There were four courts there. The other games had nobody around them. Every college coach in America was surrounding this court. I was sitting next to Kobe, he saw Tim walk in. He started grabbing at the ends of the chair, he got so excited."

The next season, Linehan remembers Chester High facing Lower Merion twice. He recalls getting throttled by Kobe in the district final - although the final score was 60-53 - and Lower Merion won the final battle in overtime in the state semifinals. Bryant had 39 points, Linehan had nine steals. It all explains why Bryant last year got Nike to release a Kobe basketball shoe with orange and black coloring as a homage to the Chester Clippers.

There are other big games, of course. And Lower Merion didn't win them all. You can still find YouTube highlights of Donnie Carr and Roman Catholic High getting past Lower Merion in a showdown at Drexel. (So many highlights, a season's worth in one game from both Carr and Bryant.) A Hazleton player once stripped Kobe, then a junior, in the last seconds and Hazleton went on to win in overtime in the state tournament.

"Hazleton, I owe y'all one," Bryant told Hazleton's star the next summer at the Sonny Hill League, and Lower Merion won it all the next year.

Cunningham and his guys from the Upper Darby area weren't paying too much attention to the wider basketball scene. They learned about Kobe on the fly at Narberth. Going into his junior year at Bonner, already 6-foot-5, Cunningham had the task of covering Bryant. He remembers a teammate telling him at halftime, "Hey, man, your dude is killing us."

His trash-talking certainly didn't go well. While Kobe's father, Joe "Jelly Bean" Bryant, played in the NBA, maybe Cunningham mentioned that his own father was a pretty good head of an employees-only credit union in Blue Bell.

Cunningham wears Bryant's return trash talk as a badge of honor. ("[Expletive], Rony Seikaly.") The other thing Cunningham remembers is how Kobe's teammates were trash-talking, too. Didn't seem right, he thought. Kobe was clearly a superhero. The others, he thought - "you're a future dentist."

The real message from that day was the realization that there were different ways to play the game of basketball and Cunningham's future had limits.

Cunningham remembers going straight home ("My brother didn't want to give me a ride") and getting on a rowing machine the family had. Cunningham had never rowed but his brother had done it at Bonner and gotten some scholarship money to St. Joseph's. Cunningham joined Bonner's rowing team and ended up rowing at Brown, and later was an assistant coach at Columbia and UCLA.

The trash-talking apparently was ingrained since Cunningham also went on to write for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for three years and was head writer for last weekend's MTV Movie Awards.

Telling the Kobe tale at comedy clubs, Cunningham said, "That story crushes in Portland," since the Blazers lost their own epic battles with Kobe's Lakers. In Los Angeles, where he now lives, Cunningham said the story takes a more appreciative tone. And in Philly?

"It's so weird," Cunningham said of how Bryant is viewed here. "People appreciate him as a great player, but they don't like him."

They love the tale, though. Nothing exactly like him has been seen around here since. If you were on the court with Kobe, you have a story.

"It's actually just a fun thing to be able to tell your kids," said Johnson, the Penncrest graduate who has coached Penn State Brandywine's women for the last 10 years.

What's to tell them?

"You played against one of the best who ever played," he said.

And if you trash-talked him at Narberth, you found out that jungle gym wasn't as far away as it looked.

mjensen@phillynews.com

@jensenoffcampus