On Sunday, shortly after the news broke that Lakers great Kobe Bryant had passed away in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, rumors started circulating that his former teammate Rick Fox was also on that helicopter ride and lost his life too. Thankfully, that turned out to be a false report as Rick was NOT on board of the flight, but he has since opened up about what his families had to endure during such difficult time.
“My family went through, in the midst of all this, something that I couldn’t imagine them experiencing,” Fox said, adding that it is one of his daughter’s “greatest fears” to find out through social media that one of her parents died.
“She, fortunately, called me and we were just talking and crying about the news of Kobe,” Fox said. But it was while he was on the phone with her that he began to receive multiple phone calls, which he said he ignored because after hearing the devastating news, he “[wanted] to be with my kids and my family.”
Fox said that someone had told his best friend, King Rice, that he may have been on the helicopter. “I’m seeing King’s number repeatedly going and going and going, and I think he’s worried about me, so I said, ‘I’m gonna talk to my best friend,’ so I answered and said, ‘Hey man, this is crazy about Kobe,’ and he just was bawling,” he recalled.
“And I started crying. And he was like, ‘You’re alive!’ And I was like, ‘Well, yeah. Like what do you mean?’ And it was in that moment that my phone just started going, and my mom and my sister and my brother… This has been a lot to process for all of us.”
“I’m glad that’s over with, but it was hard to deal with because it shook a lot of people in my life,” Fox concluded.
Check out Rick’s reaction to Kobe and the false rumor of his death (below).