Following the massive international media play that was the 2006 World Cup, basketball star Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers wonders what could have been had he and other athletes in the NBA decided to play soccer growing up. “If myself, Tracy McGrady and LeBron James had a soccer ball at our feet instead of a basketball at 2 years old, with our size, it could have been something,” Bryant told the Chicago Tribune. “If we had played soccer all our lives, I think [the U.S. soccer team] would have been pretty potent.” Kobe actually grew up playing both soccer and basketball after his dad moved to Italy when he was just 6 years old. Like any youngster in Italy, Bryant developed an appreciation for the global game; he credits his time playing soccer with helping him improve his footwork, though he admits that he was no superstar on the soccer field. “I wasn’t anything spectacular,” Bryant said. “I would have moments of doing something crazy that really wasn’t done on purpose. I’d pull off a nice move that was unintentional.” He says soccer helped teach him to how to run at different speeds and to use both his right and left feet for pivoting. Bryant returned to the U.S. in 1991, where he turned his concentration solely to playing basketball. Had he stayed in Italy, “I would have kept playing [soccer], that’s for sure,” Bryant said. “I loved basketball so much, but I also wanted to play for AC Milan. That was my team growing up.”