All’s OK With Kobe and Tex

Confronted Friday with a potentially divisive Internet story about their relationship with each other, Laker assistant coach Tex Winter said he once had the same debates with Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant maintained, “I love [Tex]. He’s my man.”

The Lakers generally are over the squabbling that coated the early years of Phil Jackson’s tenure, with Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant and Jackson finding ways to live and play together.

So, it was viewed with some surprise in Laker circles when an old friend of Jackson’s and Winter’s wrote a grim article that quoted Winter as saying Bryant was, among other things, “selfish” and “uncoachable,” descriptions that allowed the writer -- Charley Rosen -- to muse on “Kobe’s swollen ego.”

Rosen wrote Jackson’s last book, “More Than a Game,” was Jackson’s assistant with the Albany Patroons of the CBA, and as a freelance columnist for ESPN.com has spent enough time in Los Angeles recently to dine with Jackson and accept rides from Winter.

A recent conversation with Winter apparently took place on the drive home from the Lakers’ season opener, a loss to the San Antonio Spurs in which Bryant took 29 shots and missed 20.

Winter, Godfather of the triangle offense and a rigorous defender of it, had told Bryant, “You played stupidly.” To which Bryant replied, “You coached stupidly.”

The exchange was not a particularly unusual one, given, as Bryant said, “He’s bullheaded. I’m bullheaded.”

Anyway, Bryant said of the accusations of stupidity with a laugh, “He did. And I did too.”

The shock for Bryant -- and Winter -- was reading about it three days later.

“We’ve had encounters like that before,” Bryant said. “That’s how Tex and I are. We go way back. I have so much respect for him.”

Winter, 80, said he believed he had been venting in confidence, and said Rosen picked critical words from their conversation and used them out of the larger context.

Bryant spoke at separate times with Winter and Jackson, and everyone agreed to move on.

Jackson said that suspicions Rosen might have gotten his criticisms from Jackson were unfounded.

“I think that Charley is a novelist that ended up trying to write some journalism, and it’s not really journalism,” Jackson said. “I had nothing to do with that.

“Kobe and I have a great relationship. I don’t want it to be compromised.”

He suspected Bryant and Winter’s wouldn’t be either, revealing that in the tumultuous times between Jackson and Bryant, “Tex was always his strongest defender. They have a relationship that bounces along at times.”

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The Lakers tentatively have targeted a Nov. 12 game against the Atlanta Hawks for O’Neal’s return.

O’Neal, who on Thursday night was cleared by his physician to double his rehabilitation work, said only, “I don’t know. It depends. I’ll be back very soon.”