SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – “You’re the Black Mamba, but I’m the White Mamba,” said a trash-talking 13-year-old in 2011 at the Kobe Bryant Basketball Academy in Santa Barbara.
“I would constantly approach Kobe at any opportunity, even when I wasn’t supposed to, pestering him to play me one-on-one,” says a now 21-year-old Palmer Chaplin. “I berated him with trash talk about how I could beat him and he entertained it, saying stuff like ‘that’s not a game, that’s a destruction.”
