The Man Who Coached Michael Jordan AND Kobe Bryant To WIN! Tim Grover

Tim Grover joins Stephen Bartlett to discuss how a traumatic childhood watching his immigrant father dispose of cadavers shaped his 'dark side' and drive. He explains his philosophy of confronting your inner darkness, the difference between being interested and being obsessed, and the obsessive attention to detail he used with Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. He recounts how he cold-mailed 14 Bulls players to break into pro training and built data-driven workouts by manually counting Jordan's steps. The conversation explores accountability, the deterioration that happens at the top, and the personal cost of winning on family and relationships.

• Tim's father, a former professor in India, took a job as a 'degreaser' dismantling and burning anatomy-class cadavers, which Tim witnessed at age four.
  00:02:38
• Tim cold-wrote 14 letters to Chicago Bulls players (skipping Jordan) and Jordan ended up reading one and asking the team to find out about him.
  00:30:49
• Tim manually counted Jordan's steps and left/right foot landings during games to design asymmetric next-day workouts decades before tracking tech existed.
  00:57:48
• Jordan's compliment: 'I don't pay Tim to train me, I pay him not to train anybody else.'
  00:59:51
• Jordan introduced Tim to Kobe when he retired, saying Kobe could 'use' him.
  00:55:13
• Tim's five-year-old daughter asked 'if I eat less will you stay home more,' and he kept packing for his trip.
  01:17:34
• Before a game Kobe sensed a hoop was wrong; maintenance measured it an eighth of an inch off.
  00:40:10

• Grover's mantra: 'different scares people' but attracts the right people and emotions.
  00:13:39
• He distinguishes interested ('a hobby') from obsessed, saying 'interested people watch, obsessed people change the world.'
  00:37:33
• With Kobe he walked arena floors to find dead spots in portable wood courts to gain a positioning advantage.
  00:39:08
• Michael Phelps told Tim he trained daily to shave 0.001 of a second off his time.
  00:33:24
• Grover says 'Mamba mentality is not a mentality, it's a lifestyle' and has seen it destroy more careers than it helped.
  00:49:33
• Tim's first training job paid minimum wage of $3.35/hour; the certification exam the club used was one he had written for school.
  00:27:42
• He had heated arguments with Jordan and was the rare person willing to say no to him.
  01:00:52
• Bartlett shares that letting an underperforming country head off the hook for over a year cost his company seven figures.
  01:09:13

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