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Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant was the top player in his high school class back in 1996. Another one of the top players in that class that Bryant was very close with was Tim Thomas, who would go on to have a 13-year NBA career himself. Of course, Thomas was once one of the most hated players by Lakers fans because of his infamous 3-pointer in Game 6 of the epic first-round playoff series between the Lakers and Phoenix Suns in 2006. But he and Bryant played AAU basketball together growing up and that relationship between the two would stretch well beyond the court and their playing days when Thomas and his family were in need. “Obviously we played AAU basketball together. Got a chance to compete against each other in the league, in a playoff series, all of that,” Thomas said in an episode of All the Smoke. “Obviously I lived in Calabasas. Accident happened right there. So I just felt like our connection, it’s always been there, ’96 class and all that. “You know in California you get those fires all the time, so it was one of those real bad ones. So we go down to Newport Beach with the family to get out of the house, might lose the house. That’s Kobe’s neck of the woods. So we pull up. First night we’re thinking about our house, the whole shebang. Pull up, go to a restaurant, get some dinner. Kobe knows the owner. He calls, ‘Take care of my guy.’ Bill probably $600-700. I’m getting ready to pull a card out, ‘Oh, it’s taken care of.’ I ask, ‘Who took care of it?’ They say, ‘Oh, Mr. Bryant.’ I’m like, ‘Mr. Bryant? That man don’t know I’m here. How he know I’m here?’ He was somewhere doing something. “And then the rest of the time we had to be there, which is probably two weeks or so, everywhere I went in the city, I ain’t had to pay for nothing. It was so crazy to the point where like, you know he got a bunch of homes down there. So he was like, ‘Yo, just go stay at the…’ My wife wanted to stay at the beach. You know we had a beachfront joint, so she’s like nah let’s just stay here. But he was like, ‘Just go to the house.’ It’s stuff like that with dude. I remember that situation like crazy because it’s right there. You try to drive over here and see what’s going on, but it’s crazy. As you can see, it’s tough for me.” This is the side of Bryant that many never got the chance to see, but just shows the type of person that he truly was. Because he was such a maniacal competitor on the court, some couldn’t imagine him being so kind and giving off of it, but that was the type of person he was and it’s stories like this from Thomas that bring a light to it. Bryant was truly a one-of-a-kind human being who was always there for those he was close to and that is why it is still, to this day, difficult for many to come to grips with the fact that he is no longer with us. Arn Tellem recalls orchestrating Kobe Bryant to Lakers in 1996 draft Bryant would spend his entire 20-year career with the Lakers, but it was not a guarantee that he would land with them in the 1996 NBA Draft and his agent at the time, Arn Tellem, recalled how they made that happen. If you love our reporting, choose LakersNation.com as a preferred source on Google.