YouTube Gold: Air Kobe

One of the knocks on Kobe Bryant was that supposedly he had good but not great athleticism and through hard work made himself an all-time great.

There is some truth to that - Bryant was famously hard working and very few guys got more out of their natural abilities than he did. At one point someone asked him why he always wanted to take the last shot. He said because no one else worked as hard as he did and so he didn’t trust them in the clutch.

There are a lot of ways to measure athleticism of course and the NBA and NFL have evolved superb ways to assess athleticism. We honestly don’t know if that criticism of Bryant was valid but we can tell you this: it certainly didn’t apply to his vertical.

In this video, Bryant leaps up to the top of the backboard and plucks off a $100 dollar bill.

Not many guys, even in the NBA, can do that.