"Pau hates it every time I tell this story," Bryant recalls. "He hates it.
We lost to the Celtics in '08 and it was a physical series. I mean they beat the crap out of us. We go into the Olympic year, that year, we wind up playing Spain for the gold-medal match and we beat them.
So now we come back to start training camp and Pau shows up first day of training camp, I have my gold medal hanging in his locker.
"The one thing he truly, truly love is his country. That is like everything to him. So it just drove him crazy.
He said 'You're an a$$hole!'
I said, 'Listen Pau, you lost to the Celtics, you lost to us in the gold-medal match, let's not make this three in a row this year. Let's win this thing.' That was it for him.
"Pau was a phenomenon to begin with. For him, it was just stepping up a level of physicality, that we needed him to get to, which he did and we went on to win back-to-back championships."