Talk of the Town

Kobe Bryant is second in the NBA in scoring, fifth in assists and No. 1 among all players in being analyzed and dissected. Since signing a seven-year, $136.4-million contract in July to stay with the Lakers, Bryant has continued to be held up to the light in almost every facet of his life, on and off the court. Bryant sat down with The Times and discussed the perception that he ran off Shaquille O’Neal, how stung he felt by former coach Phil Jackson’s critical comments and why he refers to his teammates as “my guys.”

Q: Shaquille O’Neal is gone, Phil Jackson is gone and Karl Malone probably won’t be back, which makes this team clearly yours. People look at the standings and see the Lakers are 14-11. What do you see on the court that makes you think this thing’s going to work out?

A: Look at the way we’ve played in the games where we’ve lost. Take our game in Orlando where we had a 15-, 17-point lead. Take Phoenix where we had a 10-point lead with a couple minutes to go. And in Phoenix we had a 17-point lead. Sacramento here came down to the wire. Those are four very winnable games for us against some of the top teams in the league. All of a sudden, you win those four games, we’ve got [only] seven losses. That makes a world of a difference. We’re right there.

Q: You are the most scrutinized athlete in the NBA, possibly in all of pro sports. With that reality, do people know the real Kobe Bryant?

A: It’s funny for me to hear people say, “Well, he’s aloof” or “He’s standoffish” or whatever. I’m really not like that. I can see how they may think that in light of what took place the past year, because I just kind of had to hunker down. I couldn’t trust anybody. I didn’t know who to trust. That’s just not my personality. I’m a pretty outgoing dude.

Q: After hearing that you had disagreements with Shaq and Phil and Karl, you are often perceived as having been behind the changes to this team. Is that accurate?

A: It’s not. It’s kind of interesting because when everything happened with Shaquille, people don’t want to believe the obvious. It makes too much sense for them to believe. It comes down to Jerry Buss, the fact that he wasn’t willing to give him an extension. When that decision was made, I hadn’t made up my mind where I was going to play. When Shaq goes out and he demands a trade, and they decide to trade Shaquille and Shaquille doesn’t want to come back, the reason’s obvious.

Then all of a sudden I’m in a bind because Phil left, Shaq left, and now I’m sitting there with my decision to make while going through the free-agency process. People are saying, “Well, if he leaves L.A., how can he abandon us like that? If he comes back, he must have chased Shaq and Phil out.” It’s a tough one to be in. I wanted to play for the Lakers. And now everybody who’s in Shaq’s corner and everybody who didn’t like me for whatever reason is using that as an excuse to say “You chased him out,” and that’s just not true.

Q: Many Laker fans say you’re running the team now. Are you consulted on personnel moves or anything like that?

A: (Laughing.) Yeah. If people think whether it’s Shaq down in Miami or when Shaq was here, that Jerry West or Mitch [Kupchak] and them were just going to trade somebody and not even ask him for his advice, they’re living in the dark. If I’m here and Mitch is going to trade somebody, he’s going to come and let me know what he’s going to do. I don’t go up there and say, “Aw, don’t trade him.” Shaq, when Jerry West was here, never said, “Oh, don’t trade him.” You just stay in the loop so you don’t stay in the dark. That’s all. It’s just communication.

Q: Phil Jackson said some pretty pointed and direct stuff about you in his book, basically saying you were uncoachable at times. Did that sting?

A: Everybody’s uncoachable at times. People can talk about Michael Jordan being coachable and this and that, but he’s had many disagreements with Phil. Shaq’s had disagreements with Phil. We all have. But for whatever reason, he had a particular dislike for me and wanted to trade me before I ever even started developing as a player. For whatever reason, I don’t know. I have nothing but love for Phil. Phil has taught me so much about the game. It hurts for him to continually throw jabs my way when I have nothing but respect for him.

Q: Starting with your appearance on ESPN last week, you’ve been opening up more doors with the media. The first month or two of the season, it had been difficult to get into in-depth discussions with you. What has changed?

A: I’ve done actual interviews with reporters where they ask me a question, I’ll answer the question and in the article, the answer I give them is not to the question that they asked me. You’d be surprised. I’ve done interviews. This is right before I started going through all this stuff. I was like, “Who can I trust?” I just can’t talk to these people because every time they come to me with an idea or a concept for a story, they write something that’s completely different. They’ve got my teammates in there, taking stuff out of context and all this other stuff. I’m just like, you know what? I’m just going to back off of all this stuff. It just took a while for me to open back up again and just be myself. It was a process I had to go through.

Q: What led to the final decision to open back up with the media?

A: Just time. I just needed some time. I’ve been that way from when I first came in the league. I’m an outgoing dude. Now, people seem to think I’m a hermit. I haven’t been that way. What you see is what you get. It was a trust thing. What would you do? It was ridiculous. I felt upset, hurt, betrayed [by the media].

Q: Did you make the right choice by re-signing with the Lakers?

A: I wouldn’t change anything. Well, the one thing I would change is I would have gone through the free-agency process a lot faster and try to make my decision before Shaq was traded in the hopes of coming back to L.A. and calling Shaq to see if he wanted to come back still, or if Buss didn’t want to give him the extension, would he still have wanted to come back to L.A. That’s the one thing I would have done differently. I think that would have changed a whole bunch of things as far as the perception of me chasing him out of town and all this other stuff.

I wouldn’t have changed coming back to L.A. This is it, man. Whether Shaq would have came back or not, this is the place I dreamed about playing ever since I was a kid. If people don’t believe that, I have pictures to prove it. I have pictures of me in an L.A. practice jersey at the age of 10. I have pictures of me in a Magic [Johnson] jersey at the age of 7. I’ve got all that stuff. I was a Laker die-hard forever.

Q: If the belief is that you’re aloof and standoffish, how do you portray yourself as being a likable person over the next seven years in L.A.?

A: (Laughing.) I don’t need to portray anything. I just need to be who I am. I don’t have to go out there with bells and whistles on and say “I’m revamping my image.” I just need to be myself.

Q: You’re always referring to teammates as “my guys.” Is that a Michael Jordan thing?

A: I did that, like, once. Everybody’s like, “You can’t say ‘my guys.’ ” Whoa. I was just saying “my guys,” not even meaning “my guys.” It just shows you how much people are paying attention to every step I take. I’ve just got to be careful how I phrase that type of stuff. I don’t mean it in any [possessive] way. If the fans knew the type of interaction we have on this team, they would see that that’s completely not the case. I’m one of the guys.

That’s exactly what it is. The game we played [Friday] against Washington, was case in point. A lot of people’s conception of me is, the pass I gave to Caron [Butler] in the corner to hit the three to go ahead [potentially], they’re thinking I would have pulled up and shot it because I had two guys on me. But no, Caron’s open. If he makes the shot, we win. If he misses it, we lose.

Q: Do you ever feel like you can’t win, with complaints of both passing too much and shooting too much?

A: There’s a motto that my English teacher told me a long time ago in school: Sometimes you have to dare to be great. When you do that, you’re going to [tick] some people off. You can’t go out there and try to please everybody. I think Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] said that too in one of his biographies that I read. I do read books every once in a while. He said you can’t please everybody and you shouldn’t try to please everybody. Some people aren’t going to like that. That’s kind of what I live by.

Things could be a lot tougher too. I can’t sit here and be like, “I’m the most scrutinized athlete.” Things were a lot tougher. You can go back to the days when Jackie Robinson first came into the major leagues. That’s a lot tougher time than what I’m going through. Or when Red Auerbach first accepted Bill Russell with the Celtics, and he had to go through that. Those are serious times. I can’t look at my situation and be like, “Man, I’ve got it tough, I’ve got it bad.” You look at those guys and what they had to go through.

Q: How big is Saturday’s game?

A: In my gut right now, I don’t have one butterfly, nothing. What people fail to understand is when I first came here, I was a bench player on the second unit. I had a chance to play against Shaq every day in practice. From day one, I’ve never been the type to back down from anything on that basketball court. He knows that. And the teammates who have played with me know that.

When we practiced last season or the year before when we were on opposite teams [in practice], we were jawing back and forth. It’s not going to be any different. The only difference now is millions of people are going to be watching.