UPDATE, AUG. 17, 9:19 A.M.: The most important new wrinkle in the San Diego battery case against Newport Coast's Kobe Bryant is not that his attorney Mark Campbell is calling 21-year-old Thomas Hagos' accusations baseless and that they will be fully defended. Nor is it the fact that churchgoers are backing up the Black Mamba, denouncing paparazzi and supporting an NBA superstar's right to privacy in a house of worship. It's not even that Hagos and San Diego cops are under gag orders until Aug. 24.
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Nope, nein and negatory.
The biggest scoop is that despite all this shit, Kobe did this last night:
That was over the second best player on the floor, Oklahoma City guard James Harden, for Bryant's 45th point and the win in a Drew League game (thanks, NBA lockout) in what appears to be LA's smallest gym.
Damn glad Mamba's got his priorities straight.
ORIGINAL POST, AUG. 16, 11:13 A.M.: Police in San Diego are investigating a man's claim that he was injured in church by Kobe Bryant.
The Lakers superstar and most-famous Newport Coast resident was attending a St. Therese of
Carmel service in Carmel Valley Sunday when the incident is alleged to have happened, according to police.
The Black Mamba believed the man was snapping photos of him and wife Vanessa Bryant with a cell phone camera, so the perennial NBA All-Star took the phone, did not find any pictures and then left the church, police were told (according to San Diego's News 10).
End of story? Not exactly. The man went on to claim that having his mobile removed from his hand somehow resulted in his wrist becoming injured–so severely that the fellow says he had to go to the hospital for treatment.
Wonder if between the church and the emergency room a call was placed on that cell phone to a personal injury attorney?
The police investigation, as they say in the sports pages these days, continues.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.