Shane Battier: So I never spoke to Kobe outside the gym ever, we never had a relationship. You know Kobe… he would always play mind games with me. One day he’d be super friendly like ‘Hey Shane! How are you doing man? How’s your family?’ And the next day he wouldn’t even look at you, and then the next day he would go ‘Hey man, good to see you!’ So it was this game within the game within the game. And I was just like… remember Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh? I was just like Eeyore, ‘I can’t guard Kobe, he’s so much better than me, I’m just lucky to be on the court with him…’ He actually wrote about me in Mamba Mentality book, fantastic book, obviously and the page was on Kobe Stoppers, and he’s like ‘I don’t believe anybody could stop me, my muscle memory was better than anybody, he’s talking about the hand in the face with Kobe’ but he said ‘Shane did something very smart where he never said he could guard me, and always downplayed his ability to play me, but I saw that as false humility and I attacked him because of it’… And he was right!!! He was right!!! He knew! That was the game we played, it was the game within the game within the game, only he and I knew we were playing, it was this metagame, so f*cking crazy, that only he and I knew at the highest level of competition. So when he passed it really, really affected me because I always thought I’d have this conversation with him one day, and we will one day in up above. For me, that was the purest level of competition that I faced in all my years of basketball and I miss him.