In the days after a helicopter crash killed Kobe Bryant in January 2020, Michael Phelps walked the fairways at the Waste Management Phoenix Open in golf shoes marked with Bryant’s jersey numbers, 8 and 24, beside the names Mamba and Mambacita. The most decorated Olympian in history was mourning a close friend. He was also honoring the man whose relentless mindset he had praised for years. That same mindset had once nearly cost Phelps his life.
Michael Phelps and Kobe Bryant were two of the defining American athletes of their generation, the swimmer with a record 28 Olympic medals and the basketball star with five NBA titles for the Los Angeles Lakers. Their bond traces back to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Bryant first watched Phelps compete, and it lasted until Bryant’s death in January 2020.
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How Phelps and Bryant became friends
It started in Beijing. In August 2008, Bryant sat in the stands at the Water Cube and watched Phelps win the first of eight gold medals at those Games, a haul that is still a record for a single Olympics. Bryant was in China to lead the United States team that won back its Olympic basketball title. What he saw in the pool stayed with him.
“After seeing my first race in Beijing, I was hooked,” Bryant said, in remarks reported by NBC Sports. He later called Phelps one of the most phenomenal athletes he had ever seen.
The admiration ran both ways. Bryant built his career on a work rate few could match, and he saw the same thing in Phelps. He once marveled at the swimmer’s regimen, citing a daily intake he put near 8,000 calories, and said Phelps’s “training schedule is beyond demand.”
The advice Phelps wanted from Bryant
Both men left their sports in 2016. Phelps finished at the Rio Olympics with his 28 medals, more than any Olympian before him. Bryant had closed his own career a few months earlier with a 60-point performance in his final game for the Lakers. Two athletes who had spent their lives chasing the top now faced the same quiet question of what came next.
At the 2017 Golden Goggle Awards, Bryant presented a trophy and tried to coax Phelps out of retirement, an exchange covered by NBC Sports. By then the two had become friends.
Phelps soon began turning to Bryant for guidance on life after competition. In a 2019 Wall Street Journal interview, he said he enjoyed picking Bryant’s brain about building a business and a brand once the medals stopped. Bryant had a head start. He had co-founded the venture capital firm Bryant Stibel and won an Academy Award for “Dear Basketball,” an animated short, and he made the second act look within reach.
What Mamba Mentality really asked of him
Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality” became shorthand for a particular way of working. It meant total commitment to the sport and the discipline to train hardest on the mornings he least wanted to. Phelps has repeated the idea often and credited Bryant for it. He has described greatness as a matter of doing the hard things even when the will to do them is gone.
Phelps did not need to be taught that. He had lived it since he was a teenager, and it had nearly destroyed him.
Phelps’s lowest point, and the 45 days after
For much of his career, Phelps fell into a deep depression each time the Olympics ended. He has traced the first bout to 2004, after the Athens Games. The hardest stretch came after London in 2012, when he won four golds and two silvers, then came home and decided he no longer wanted to be in the sport, or alive.
The fall of 2014 brought him to the bottom. After a second arrest for driving under the influence, Phelps spent close to five days alone in his Baltimore bedroom, barely eating or sleeping, in what he has called the most frightened he has ever been. He then flew to Arizona with his sister and his girlfriend, Nicole Johnson, and entered The Meadows, a residential treatment center in the desert, where he spent 45 days.
“I am extremely thankful that I did not take my life,” Phelps told a Kennedy Forum conference in 2018, in comments reported by CNN. Those moments of recovery, he said, meant more to him than any gold medal.
Phelps credits that kind of drive to Bryant. The same drive had already pushed him to his lowest point.
The day Bryant died
On January 26, 2020, Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, died with seven other people when their helicopter crashed in the hills above Calabasas, California. They were flying to a youth basketball game.
Inside the Phelps home, the grief came with fear. Nicole Phelps has recalled looking at her husband and asking whether they could get him help, telling him she did not know what she would do if she lost him. She had already watched him survive his lowest point once.
Phelps has spoken about Bryant’s death the way people describe losing family. He has said that thinking about Bryant still brings him to tears.
The mindset Phelps still carries
Six years after the crash, Phelps has become one of the most prominent voices for athlete mental health in the United States. In April 2026 he visited a mental health crisis center in Utah and spoke about reducing the stigma around asking for help. Sports Illustrated gave him its Muhammad Ali Legacy Award for that work. His message to other athletes has stayed steady. He tells them to ask for help, and reminds them that no medal is worth their wellbeing.
He delivers that message while still wearing Bryant’s shoes.
The two ideas do not fit together easily. Mamba Mentality tells you to push through pain and hide any weakness. Phelps now argues for the reverse. Across years of interviews about Bryant and about his own depression, he has rarely been asked to square the two.
Maybe he does not fully reconcile them, and maybe he does not need to. Bryant’s intensity may be part of what kept Phelps moving on the mornings when stillness felt dangerous. The same fire can forge a champion and burn the person underneath, sometimes inside one career.
What Phelps says now would have sounded foreign to him at his peak. He says that surviving meant more than winning. And he says it in the shoes of the man who taught him never to stop.
