ARDMORE, Pa. — This past fall, Doug Young was sitting in Kobe Bryant’s Southern California office when he got a first-hand look into his friend and former teammate’s post-basketball career. Surrounded by stacks of manuscripts, Bryant was hard at work on a children’s book, just one of the storytelling mediums he embarked on after retiring from the NBA.
At one point, Bryant looked up at Young and asked him if he ever thought that Bryant would be doing this back when they were teenagers.
“I guess he expected me to say, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘Nothing you have ever done has surprised me,’” Young recalled. “Because I think we all saw just how hard he worked. And when he had a goal and when he had a passion and when he had a dream, nothing was going to get in the way of that.”
Before Bryant conquered the NBA for two decades, and became a global superstar in Los Angeles in the process, there was the quiet high school on Montgomery Avenue…
