By Antonis Stroggylakis/ info@eurohoops.net
Dirk Nowitzki hasn’t yet recovered from the shock following the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his teenage daughter Gianna in a helicopter crash and feels that it will be difficult for him to ever get past it.
“I can honestly say there hasn’t been a single minute of any day that I haven’t thought about it,” Nowitzki said to the Dallas Morning News. “It’s so sad. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get over.”
Nowitzki expressed having these emotions five days following the crash that took the lives of nine people, including Kobe and 13-year-old Gianna. The German basketball great was informed about the horrible incident when TMZ reported that Kobe was on board the helicopter that crashed Sunday (26/1) morning at a mountainside near the city of Calabasas, California. After the first moments of disbelief, he hoped that the whole thing is just a bad joke.
“At first I was in denial. Then someone said TMZ might have been hacked, so I got my hopes up that it wasn’t true,” said Nowitzki.
Nowitzki faced Kobe in numerous occasions from 1998 to 2016, when the “Black Mamba” retired. They were also teammates on the Western Conference All-Star Teams 13 times.
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