Kobe Bryant on why he always declined invites from Michael Jordan to play golf

Kobe had a perfectly good reason why he didn’t want to play golf with Michael Jordan.

The late great Kobe Bryant idolized Michael Jordan through and through. From the moment he learned the game of basketball, he wanted to be like His Airness and emulate his every move. It was this familiarity with Jordan’s psyche that Kobe used to elude the former’s invites to join him on the golf course.

Legendary competitiveness

Jordan’s competitiveness is the stuff of legends. Whether it was on or off the floor, the North Carolina native simply had to be better than anyone else. On the floor, it was the way he willed his teams to victory. On the golf course? It was a battle of wits, pride, and, most importantly, skill. Kobe knew this all too well, so he declined every invitation from Jordan to join him for 18 holes.

“Michael is competitive in all things that don't make sense,” Kobe said.

Kobe narrated that Jordan tried numerous times to get him to play golf with him. However, Kobe knew better than to compete with a living legend. He knew that Jordan was already a high-level golfer while he was not even a novice player.

“He would try to get me to play golf all the time. ‘Mike, I know about you. I've written book reports about you in elementary school. I know you started playing golf in North Carolina. So that means if I'm doing the math, you've been playing golf for like a hundred years. I have not picked up a golf club ever. The last thing you're going to do is get me on a golf course and annihilate me. Not gonna do it,’” the man known as the Black Mamba added.

Wouldn’t let it go

There are plenty of examples of Jordan’s incredible competitive nature, but one of the most well-known incidents happened during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. According to NBA photographer Nathaniel Butler, the Dream Team held a ping-pong tournament among themselves, and Duke Blue Devil Christian Laettner emerged as the winner, beating Jordan in the finals.

Butler narrated that Jordan slammed his ping-pong paddle, stormed out of there, and didn’t speak to anyone for two days. The team eventually found out that Jordan spent that time sharpening his ping-pong skills, looking to beat Laettner in a rematch.

“Come to find out, he had a ping-pong table delivered up to his room,” Butler said. “No one knew about it. And he was practicing for the rematch. They had a rematch two days later, three days later. It was (something like) 21-4. He destroyed him.”