The alpha-dog tussle begins here, outside the locker room, as the Lakers huddle before taking the floor against the Bucks. Shaq leads them into a bouncing frenzy, bodies ricocheting off each other, turning the circle into a mosh pit. Kobe stands back, enjoying the show he sees before each game, a spectator rather than a participant. When the rest of the team heads out of the tunnel, he bends over, grabs his toes, lays his head on his knees. Shaq looks back at him, waits, then shakes his head and jogs out to the floor. Cheers from the Staples Center faithful follow.

A few seconds later, so does Kobe, and a distinctly separate, slightly louder shout of joy erupts as he trots into view.

Kobe scoffs at the notion that this separate entrance is by design.

Indeed, before the next game against Vancouver, it is J.R. Rider, still snapping on his sweats when Kobe finishes stretching, who jogs out last. But this is the game O'Neal misses to receive his LSU diploma. Maybe it doesn't matter to Kobe if he's the last one out. Maybe it just matters to him that Shaq isn't.

In a utopian world of teamwork and togetherness, this isn't an issue. But the higher you climb in the NBA, the trickier the obstacle course becomes. Every accolade becomes a point of contention. Minutes, shots, touches, salary, endorsements, All-Star selections. Media guide and magazine covers. Who has the hottest hoops shoe or apparel. Right down to who is introduced last at home, or who is the last to jog out onto the floor.

So here we are at the summit with the defending champions, who just happen to have the league's two most dominating players. Only that's not good enough, for either them or us. Which is the most dominant player? Who is the true leader, the more indispensable piece, the proverbial drink-stirring straw? It was undeniably Shaq last season, an honor he waited seven years to claim, an honor he fully expected to enjoy for several seasons to come. But it's no longer his, for one simple reason: Kobe refuses to wait for anything.

Forget the argument about which player the Lakers can less afford to lose. This is about which one captures your attention, your imagination and, yes, your respect, however grudgingly it may be given. It's about a player who has a vision of himself atop the basketball universe and will accept nothing less than that realization. It's Kobe's team; in fact, it's Kobe's league. If and when Shaq and the rest of the Lakers come to grips with that will determine if they can repeat as champions.

"Bottom line, Shaq is going to have to become comfortable with it," says Laker guard Brian Shaw, who goes back to Orlando with O'Neal. "Because Kobe is not going to change, I'll tell you that right now."

***

Kobe has defied more than logic to get here. He's scaled an entire mountain range of resistance, as much from within the Lakers organization as from any triple-teaming opponent. One week into this season Phil Jackson privately asked him to resume last season's role, letting the offense flow through Shaq and taking over only in the final seconds of a possession or the final minutes of the game.

Kobe's response: "Turn my game down? I need to turn it up. I've improved. How are you going to bottle me up? I'd be better off playing someplace else."

Jackson normally wages public campaigns to get players to do his bidding, but Kobe's veiled threat of a trade demand would have been far too volatile in the court of public opinion. Kobe responded to Jackson's request to pull back by cranking it up—his average of 16 shots in the first five games jumped to 26 over the next five. But his performance rocketed as well. A string of five games of 31 or more points vaulted him to the top of the league's scoring race. Then came 43 against the Spurs, 38 against the Mavs, 36 against the 76ers—while forcing The Answer to take 27 shots to score 27 points—and 51 in 51 minutes in a classic battle with the Warriors' Antawn Jamison.

Finally, after Kobe outdueled Vince 40-31 in a win over Toronto, a Canadian broadcaster declared, "The Lakers were known last year as Shaq's team. Not anymore." Later that same night, the Lakers' victory was discussed by the broadcast crew on ESPN Sunday Night Football. Gushed Joe Theismann about Kobe: "I don't think there's anything he can't do." Not one word was said about Shaq, last year's All-Star, regular-season and Finals MVP.

Shaq is well aware of the shift. When the Lakers flew into Portland, an adidas billboard featuring Kobe's face, five stories high, greeted them on their trip from the airport. There's a mural on the hotel nearest to the Staples Center that shows Kobe soaring to the hoop. In the Air Canada Centre before the Lakers faced the Raptors, a man held a simple black-on-white sign that read, "Hey Shaq! 0 for 12?" in reference to a recent record-setting 0-for-11 effort from the free throw line against the Sonics. A few rows up, a family held up an ornately painted banner that read, "We Luv Kobe."

Shaq joined the dot-com frenzy by starting Dunk.net, a sporting apparel line that planned to let customers design their own gear online. Innovative but poorly marketed, Dunk.net slashed its staff from 40 to four. Kobe, meanwhile, is in the midst of an enormous advertising push for his self-designed kicks, "The Kobe," with old-economy adidas. His profile, in a rendering like Caesar's on a Roman coin, graces the shoe's inner lining.

The entire onslaught has left The Daddy feeling helpless. As a big man, he depends on Kobe to get him the ball. If he expresses his frustration publicly, it becomes a nationwide story and a distraction for the Lakers. Besides, he waged a public-relations war with Penny in Orlando and John Q. sided with the guy closer to his size. He hears the adolescent screams and sees the No.8 jerseys. He knows it would be no different this time.

Kobe knows too. An opportunist without a conscience, he cares no more about Shaq's duress than he would about Iverson or VC falling down and giving him the ball for a breakaway slam. No time for sympathy on the fast track to preeminence.

It takes a healthy dollop of ruthlessness to become the league's best player at 22. Kobe knew Shaq would need time off after going so deep into the playoffs and wouldn't be physically ready to match last season's performance. So Bryant spent the summer honing and refining his shot. It's hard to fathom his claim of burying 2,000 shots a day until you see last-second threes whipping through the net, pull-up J's floating home no matter how abruptly he stops and baseline fadeaways falling regardless of how many hands are in his face. The degree of difficulty is breathtaking at times, but he's shooting nearly 50% because he's a voracious offensive rebounder; he dunked three putbacks so hard in a game against the Rockets that his shoulder was sore the next night against the Mavs.

"Everybody expected me to come back and do the same things I did last year," Kobe says. "But I've improved so much. I have to prove to myself and the league that I'm a better player. Every night. For 48 minutes."

Had Shaq worked as diligently on his free throw shooting, maybe this would be a fair fight. But that problem is even worse this season, something he attributes to watching some old high school game tapes with Orlando neighbor Tracy McGrady last summer. Shaq liked how he looked shooting free throws and decided to return to his high school form. "I got cute and switched up," he said. "Never change if something you're doing works."

He has since switched back, but though he's slowly improving, the damage has been done. For some reason—a nagging ankle and Achilles injury, his reluctance to go the free throw line or a belief he's not going to get the ball—O'Neal is not posting up as aggressively as he did last year. He remains one of the league's top rebounders and his blocked shots are up, but his scoring and field goal percentage have slipped. Even he admits, "I've been a step slow in certain situations."

But none of that, he feels, is justification for restructuring the offense. "Don't judge my game on last year because the same things aren't happening," Shaq says. "We had a certain program and it worked. I don't see us doing that same program.

"Don't say 'we' have a problem. I'm not a guard, I have to be fed the ball. When the dog is fed, he'll guard the yard. When he's not, anybody can come in. Right now, I feel like a token big man, like Luc Longley or Chris Dudley. And that's not my game."

It's a valid, if somewhat exaggerated, complaint. In an OT loss to the Warriors, Shaq and Kobe ran a pick-and-roll on every possession down the stretch. Not once did Kobe lob the ball to Shaq, even after Shaq bluntly told him during a timeout, "Drop it off." Kobe wouldn't because he figured Shaq would get fouled and go to the free throw line, where he's shooting a career-low 38.6%. Better to bet on himself, since he's shooting a career-high 47.7% from the floor and a career-high 87.3% from the line.

"If Shaq were a 70% free throw shooter, it would make things so much easier," Kobe says. "We have to know our strengths and weaknesses. I trust the team. I just trust myself more. Yeah, we won last year with the offense going through Shaq. But instead of winning series in five and seven games, this year we'll have sweeps."

But the offense hasn't been the problem—the Lakers led the league in scoring with 101.2 ppg through 33 games. Defensively, though, they've slid from last season's sixth in points allowed to 22nd and from first in field goal percentage to 15th. Jackson and Shaq argue the switch from an interior to a perimeter offense has caused the slide. Phil's take: Kobe's early-clock jumpers mean an aging Lakers' team must spend more time on defense. Longer shots also result in longer rebounds and more fast breaks, exposing L.A.'s weak transition D.

Perhaps. But when Shaq had six blocks against the Warriors, not one came in helping Horace Grant, who took the brunt of Jamison's 51 points. When Damon Stoudamire was lighting up Mike Penberthy in a Dec. 13 Portland victory, Penberthy was doing his job by forcing Stoudamire into the middle for help. O'Neal simply wasn't getting there in time.

Shaq's take: Don't make me one-dimensional. I'm better than that. You want my D, you've got to use my O.

Kobe's take: No, I don't.

***

This unfolding drama is a rerun of sorts for a couple of Lakers. When he was with the Bulls, Grant watched Phil coerce a young Michael Jordan into involving his teammates. Both Shaw and Grant played with Shaq and Penny in Orlando and saw firsthand how that battle over proprietary rights soured their partnership and ultimately sent them their separate ways.

The difference: Shaq knows the importance of having that other great player, and how difficult life is without one. Kobe doesn't. All that matters to him is escaping Shaq's shadow. It galls Kobe to hear talk that Iverson and Carter could be everything he is if they played with Shaq. He wants people wondering what Shaq would do without him. And he'll do anything to prove his point.

"I have German shepherds, and the guy who trains them does no obedience work for the first six months," Shaw says. "He just lets them play, so they don't lose their aggressiveness. If a dog constantly hears 'No!' it'll look around before acting on its instincts. It's the same thing with Kobe. You want him to keep that attack-mode mentality."

But there's a lot of bark that goes with that bite. At least once a game Kobe becomes embroiled in a heated dispute about the offense with a teammate or Jackson, sometimes both. When he missed a forced shot off a pick-and-roll with Grant against Houston, Bryant immediately let Grant know he understood he should have passed it. Still, Jackson yelled admonishingly, "Kobe!" His young star glared back. Kobe was playing so well—he finished with 45 points, the most anyone had scored on the Rockets since MJ's 45 in '98—that he figured he earned some rope. "I was pissed," Kobe says. "I was thinking, 'Calm down, Phil, I got this.'"

Later, while protecting a lead down the stretch, Kobe had Stevie Francis posted up. But Shaw ignored him, swinging the ball to the other side of the floor. At the next stop in play, Shaw explained that he had strict orders from Jackson to run the play all the way through to completion.

On the last possession of the first quarter in a recent game against Phoenix, Kobe roared down the court and lost the ball on a spin move into the middle. Kobe beelined for Jackson to explain, and they argued. Jackson had directed Kobe to run a high pick-and-roll to get open and then kick the ball to one of the team's perimeter shooters. But Kobe ignored the pick and tried to draw the defense by driving directly to the basket. "I don't need a pick to get a shooter an open shot," Kobe said.

Phil's real purpose, of course, was to get other players involved, since more offensive touches, whether for Shaq or Penberthy, result in more defensive effort.

All of which often amuses rather than deters Bryant. Talking in a reception area on the second floor of the Lakers' practice facility, as Jackson and various assistant coaches stroll past, Kobe gleefully talks about Phil's attempts to control him. "Phil told us to run '53' and then said, 'This is not your play, Kobe!' So later in the game in another timeout, he asks us, 'What do we want to run, 53?'

"I said, 'Yeah, run 53, the Kobe play.'"

Shaq fails to see the humor. He has overcome his image of being nothing more than a dunker, of being distracted by movie and musical interests, of being a deserter for bolting Orlando. After all that, one season in the sun doesn't feel like enough. He'll grouse about the Lakers' offense and then cryptically ask when the trading deadline is. Or muse about retiring in a couple of years. Jackson was stunned when Shaq waved for a sub several times in the Lakers' Christmas Day loss to the Blazers. "That game wasn't played at a pace that he could've been physically fatigued," Jackson says. "I think he's mentally fatigued."

It doesn't help that each player resents the other for not acting his age. Shaq is an ultrasensitive 12-year-old in a monstrous 28-year-old body; 22-year-old Kobe acts like a bloodless 50-year-old corporate raider. Shaq just picked up his college diploma in, as he claims, "crayon biology," while Kobe has his eye on matrimonial parchment this winter. Shaq has appeared in funny commercials being flummoxed by a 9-year-old and a raspy-voiced baby named Bob. Kobe does ads in which he's a Roman philosopher, reflecting on creativity in an Italian courtyard, or talking trash—in Italian.

While talk of Shaq using hand signals to deprive Kobe of the ball is roundly denied—"If I am," Shaq says, "they sure aren't working"—their relationship will never be idyllic. But personal feelings aside, there's still no tougher combination in the league. On that they agree.

"What we built last season is still there," Kobe says. "Every time we need something clutch, Shaq and I are there. The formula's just changed a little." True. With the game on the line against the Raptors, Shaq didn't hesitate to help Kobe defend a potential game-winning jumper by Carter. And against the Blazers, Kobe didn't hesitate to throw a lob for Shaq to flush.

But chemistry at crunchtime may be useless unless they can avoid the early-game conflicts, when Kobe all too quickly gives up on an entry pass to Shaq, or Shaq fails to stop Kobe's man driving for a layup. Until some sort of accord is reached, the Lakers are not likely to repeat and inspire Kobe to leap into Shaq's arms as he did after they dispatched the Pacers last June, a moment immortalized on the Lakers' media guide—and a moment of bonding not seen since. "They want the same goal, to win a championship," says Grant. "But until their minds meet about other things, we won't be the team we can be."

More or less, the rest of the Lakers still consider themselves Shaq's team, although they're not happy that he's letting his personal tussle with Kobe affect his play. When Ron Harper refuses to discuss the matter because "I might hurt the feelings of some of these sensitive people," there's little doubt he's referring to Shaq.

The allegiance to Shaq comes from the punishing screens he sets, the double teams he draws to get teammates open shots and the layup-saving help he can provide when they're beaten off the dribble. He's also the team cut-up. He'll tell teammates that if he were a pimp, he'd change his name to It's-Not-Him. Then, if any of his girls were questioned about who they worked for, they would point to Shaq and say, "It's not him."

Kobe, distrustful of teammates who have talked behind his back since he arrived in the NBA five seasons ago, has pursued no such rapport. Grant believes Bryant must reach out if he wants to develop the support he seeks. "I remember Phil telling MJ that he had to trust his teammates," Grant recalls. "Mike didn't go overboard, but he'd invite guys to his room to play cards, just enough to let them know what he was about. To be a leader, everybody has to have respect for you on and off the court. You can't just be a great player. Every once in a while, you have to be able to say, 'I made a mistake. My fault.' I really don't think we have a leader right now, unless it's Phil."

Part of Jackson's genius is knowing when to take a stand, and that time hasn't arrived yet. He knows from his repeat days with the Bulls that first-time champions suffer a postseason hangover that carries into the next season. The Lakers' schedule, a whirlwind of 32 games in the first two months, slows to 12 in January. That means practice time to whip Shaq into shape and convince Kobe that curbing his attack is best for the team. The Lakers already have lost almost as many games as they did all last season, but Jackson has yet to challenge them. "It's hard to tell a team that plays into June what's an emergency," he says. "You can only say 'Wolf!' or 'Fire!' so many times before a team's response level decreases. And they're right, it's not an emergency right now."

And until he reaches the ever-enigmatic Rider and gets Derek Fisher back from foot surgery in February, Jackson knows he can't survive without Kobe, who can dribble through traps, defend the league's best point guards, attack the offensive glass, consistently get out on the break, create his own shot at crunchtime and make his free throws.

Kobe also has the most precious attribute a team or a player can have—an unshakable faith that he will come out on top. His faith is so strong that 29 teams, including his own, and a seven-time championship-winning coach have not been able to alter his flight plan.

And if they take a good look at where it has taken him—and them—they'll stop trying.

This article appears in the January 22, 2001, issue of ESPN The Magazine.