A NEW Kobe V Protro is rumored to drop next month — a modernized rerelease of a decade-old classic, the ‘Bruce Lee’, decked out in the yellow and black of the martial artist’s iconic costume.
Bruce Lee wore his trademark jumpsuit in the film Game of Death, where he starred alongside another Lakers great, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. According to the movie’s producer, the filmmakers decided to go with a yellow jumpsuit so that Kareem’s footprint would be more visible on Lee after the NBA star kicked him on the chest.
Lee would die during the making of the film, never to wake up from a short nap that he took after complaining of a massive headache. The movie was released five years later, in 1978, the footage chopped up and reassembled, with three different actors standing in for Lee in new sequences.
That tracksuit became an iconic part of Bruce Lee’s legend — the philosophical, poetic martial artist, taken from the world too soon.
Years later, Kobe would watch Game of Death… and every other film ever made by the legendary martial artist. He’s even gone beyond the movies, devouring anything and everything Bruce Lee.
“I’ve read everything he’s ever written. I’ve watched every film he’s ever been in, and I’ve watched pretty much every interview he’s ever done,” Bryant told the South China Morning Post back in 2017.
In the 2000s, Kobe Bryant was even a practitioner of Bruce Lee’s martial art, Jeet Kune Do.
“I can hold my own a little bit. I can kick your ass,” he once told a journalist who asked him about it back in 2008.
On a more serious note, Bryant (who was also a fervent believer in mindful meditation) told the Post: “The one thing – among many – that I have learned from Bruce’s philosophy of Jeet Kune Do is being able to adapt. It’s about having the fundamental skills available so that you can react to any situation.”
In the same way that “Mamba Mentality” became Kobe’s way of translating his on-court work ethic into an neatly packaged philosophy, Jeet Kune Do, or the “Way of the Intercepting Fist”, was Bruce Lee’s way of summing up his beliefs about combat and the fighting spirit into a new discipline. He forged an entirely new martial arts system around the key concept of “be like water.”
This serene admonition disguised a combat style that emphasized aggressive offense, striking fast, hard, and often without warning. The water in Bruce Lee’s philosophy was both the stillness of a full glass and the sudden rage of a flash flood.
"The concept behind this is that when you initiate your punch without any forewarning, such as tensing your shoulders or moving your foot or body, the opponent will not have enough time to react," Lee once wrote.
It’s a philosophy that paralleled Kobe’s own take-no-prisoners approach.
Another famous Lee quote goes: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
That’s a quote that would have undoubtedly appealed to Kobe, who would show up for practice at the crack of dawn, relentlessly drilling and practicing his skills. The Los Angeles Times said that Kobe took 30,699 total shots on the court — but with a work ethic like that, he’s undoubtedly taken much, much more in practice.
After all, for Kobe, the Mamba Mentality was self-improvement, but taken to apex predator levels.
Even the Black Mamba nickname was inspired, in a way, by Bruce Lee. In a low point in his life in 2003, Bryant decided to adapt the nickname after watching the movie Kill Bill. That movie’s protagonist, played by Uma Thurman, wore a tracksuit similar to that of Lee’s own.
The Bruce Lee tracksuit, of course, would also become the inspiration for a pair of Nike Kobe Zoom Vs first released in 2010 (seen above). Bryant specifically wanted a Game of Death-esque yellow and black colorway. He even added another small detail inspired by another of Lee’s movies: four small red scratches, to echo the injuries sported by Lee in the 1973 movie Enter the Dragon.
With Bryant's untimely death early this year, he is now remembered the same way Bruce Lee is: the hyper-perfectionist, charismatic sportsman, taken before his time.
After his death, Nike wisely decided to hold off releasing any new editions of its popular Kobe line. However, in April, the shoe brand quietly released the Mamba Fury, and then a month after, the Mamba Fury Alternate Bruce Lee — which now hold the distinction as the first Kobe sneakers released after his death.
Speaking of shoes, here’s another Bruce Lee connection to Kobe Bryant.
At the time when Lee was alive, he wore what was, at the time, the most popular running shoes on the planet: the Onitsuka Tiger. He was regularly pictured wearing a pair, and often had them on while filming on set. The South China Morning Post even once said that Lee was a key factor in making the shoes a global fashion icon.
During Bruce Lee’s film heyday, an entrepreneurial track and field athlete named Phil Knight approached Onitsuka in Japan and asked to be the American distributor of the popular shoes. The company Knight founded for this venture was called Blue Ribbon Sports.
Its name now? Nike.
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