Kobe Bryant: Former Stroudsburg basketball player recalls 'fierceness in his eyes'
Editor's note: This story originally published in the Pocono Record in 2020.
Kobe Bryant was a dominating force long before he embarked on a remarkable 20-year career in the NBA.
Ken Lacey, now a Yonkers police lieutenant, played against him one memorable night in high school.
This was in 1996. Lacey was a center on the imposing Stroudsburg High School Mounties. That 26-4 team took on Bryant's Lower Merion High School team from suburban Philadelphia in a state playoff quarterfinal round at Martz Hall in Pottsville.
Lacey, a 6-foot-9 all-state center whose presence dominated the floor, recalled how much his team relished the opportunity to play such stout competition.
“There was nothing but excitement,” Lacey recalled. “We just had a team filled with guys who loved to play basketball. And the idea of us getting to play against the best, it just made every guy on that team, myself included, just extremely excited to get on the court and face him.”
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Understanding that Bryant would be the Mounties’ biggest obstacle, then-Stroudsburg coach Shawn Thornton’s ultimate goal was to stop him from scoring. Right?
Wrong.
“We watched a lot of film and saw how different teams approached him and kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to actually make any extra effort to stop him,” Thornton said the day after Bryant died in a helicopter crash in California. “He was averaging 36 points per game, and if he got that, well, our job was to stop everybody else.”
Battling Kobe and flu
The game against Lower Merion was different – partially because of Bryant, partially because Lacey was battling the flu.
The night before the game, Lacey woke up sweating and got sick. His parents called Stroudsburg’s athletic trainer, who recommended drinking Gatorade and eating bananas. Lacey said he never was able to get back to sleep, just trying to hydrate and keep food down.
“I felt awful, not just being sick,” Lacey said. “I felt awful because I knew I wasn’t going to be at my best playing against the best.”
Nonetheless, Lacey toughed it out and was able to play for spurts at a time. Thornton knew, though, Lacey was a “shadow of himself” that day.
As for defending Bryant, that task was handed to Emmet Donnelly, a foreign-exchange student from Ireland.
“This guy was scrappy. Tough,” Thornton said of Donnelly. “Tough kid who could just rise to a challenge. And so we put Emmet Donnelly on him and gave up seven inches, but he was tough as nails on him.”
'Most competitive stare'
As the game wore on, Bryant put everything on display and scored exactly his average, 36 points, en route to a 71-54 victory for Lower Merion. Two games later, Bryant ended his high school career with a state title before being drafted by the Charlotte Hornets as the No. 13 overall pick in the NBA draft. He was immediately traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.
“He didn’t disappoint anybody who came to see him play,” Thornton said. “True to his career, he didn’t take a play off.”
Lacey, who went on to play three years at Rider University before a nine-year professional career in Europe, remembers standing across from Bryant, preparing for the game’s opening tip, and knowing immediately what Bryant was capable of.
“It was so easy to predict that he was going to be great,” said Lacey. “Because at 17, to have that fierceness in his eyes, I had never seen any look like it. And I got to play three years at college and nine years in Europe, and I never saw it again. And that was from a 17-year-old kid. And he gave me the fiercest, most competitive stare and look in his eyes that I ever saw in a pretty long basketball career.”
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Lacey recalled that the team thought they might expose one weakness in Bryant’s game — his outside shot. That didn’t last long.
“He started the game with back-to-back 3-pointers and we were down 6-0,” Lacey said. “We knew he was going to be faster than everybody on the court. We knew he could jump higher than everybody on the court. There was no weakness.”
Bryant’s superiority was evident that night.
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'It motivated me'
But Lacey’s illness still leaves a massive what-if lingering for both Thornton and Lacey.
“You get used to relying on certain things,” Thornton said. “Ken was a guy who, on any night could — he averaged 23 points a game and over 15 rebounds. Trying to figure out what you’re going to do without that? Here’s a guy who’s trying to play (through the flu).”
“That’s been, unfortunately, something that as a team we’ve all had to live with, and obviously I’ve had to live with it never knowing what if, never knowing the answer to that,” Lacey said.
Lacey said he didn’t blossom into the player he became until later in development, but once he did, he was exceptional. Meeting Bryant, though, changed his entire mindset.
“For a two-year stretch, I never felt like I had true competition on the court like I did that day,” Lacey said. “And to be just outclassed in every way in every facet of the game opened my eyes and made me hungrier. A guy I had just played against was going to get drafted and go into the NBA, and I was going to college.
“So I recalled those feelings after the game when I was preparing myself to go to college and play in college. I used that as motivation. Just how special of a player he was, it motivated me because I never wanted to feel like someone was that much better than me.”
From the Lakers to the NBA 2K video games, Bryant became not only a household name but a legend, an icon.
This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Former Stroudsburg player recalls squaring off against Kobe Bryant
