Today is the birthday of NBA champion, 4x All-Star, and 4x Defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace. A friend and I were discussing his very successful and surprising career, and it was only a matter of time until we went back in time to 1997, when a 19-year-old Kobe Bryant posterized an unknown Big Ben (who was undrafted during Kobe’s 1996 Draft class) during a preseason game after crossing his Bullets teammate Jimmy Oliver.
My friend pulls up a crappy quality copy of the dunk on YouTube, and I tell him a story about me and my college roommates (shout out to Emmy Award-winning Ryan Young on CNN) all jumping off a couch at the same time when we saw the dunk back in ’97. I then told him about Kobe’s second-half ankle-breaking move that led to a pretty wide-open dunk, because Ben didn’t want anything to do with Kobe after that first-half dunk. I can see it in his eyes that he thinks I’m making this up and wants proof from 18 years ago.
I dig in my closet for the VHS tape labeled ’97 Lakers’ and find the very first time this dunk was shown on ESPN SportsCenter. There it was: Kobe crossing Jimmy Oliver and then introducing himself to Ben Wallace in the first half, and Kobe once again making Jimmy Oliver look bad by making him do a split before throwing down a baseline dunk that had the late great Chick Hearn and the Lakers bench celebrating.
The video clip was an in-game update, but if you actually care who won the game, the Lakers did 123-121 in OT.
Even at 19 years old, Kobe never showed his opponents any mercy 🤯 #BestOfLakersWizards pic.twitter.com/82lRqFDxH9
— Los Angeles Lakers (@Lakers) March 28, 2020
The dunk was even used on an ad for the 1998 Nintendo 64 game NBA COURTSIDE with these words:
Rule #1: You never want to be on somebody else’s poster.
The best thing to come from that dunk was that it motivated Ben to become the beast he became.
“Without that dunk, I don’t know if I’m the player that I am today,” Ben said to Rick Kamla. “After that, I told myself, ‘Ben, that’s never gonna happen again’. And you know what? It didn’t.”
What did happen was Ben got some revenge in 2004 when the Pistons beat Kobe and the Lakers in the NBA Finals. Seventeen years after that, the undrafted inspiration for all hoopers joined Kobe in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
The Greatest Undrafted NBA Player Ever! pic.twitter.com/jeznuIjoqV
— David Astramskas (@redapples) September 10, 2023
BONUS VIDEOS
Check out Ben Wallace’s dunk before getting dunked on + a rare alternate angle of the infamous dunk
Nick Van Exel on the dunk