Former UNC star Rick Fox: inaccurate death report ‘shook a lot of people in my life’
Former UNC basketball star Rick Fox said he was grieving Kobe Bryant’s death with his children when he noticed his phone kept buzzing. He ignored it at first because he just wanted to be with his family, Fox said Tuesday night on TNT’s Inside the NBA.
He thought everyone wanted to talk about Kobe.
But his best friend and former North Carolina teammate, King Rice, who is currently the head coach at Monmouth University, kept calling.
When Fox finally picked up, Rice was crying.
“I started crying and he was like ‘you’re alive,’” Fox recalled. “And I’m thinking, ‘well, yeah. What do you mean?”
The initial news of Bryant’s death, as first reported by TMZ on Sunday, gave little details other than that Bryant was in the helicopter that crashed, and that there were no survivors.
Inaccurate reports on social media began to surface that Fox was also a passenger in the helicopter.
“It was in that moment, that my phone had started going, and my mom and my sister and my brother,” Fox said. “This has been a lot to process with all of us, quite frankly. We’re blessed to have had the time we had with Kobe.
“A city is mourning, a family is mourning. We’re all mourning, and 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 played at UNC from 1987-1991. He led the Tar Heels to the Final Four during his senior year. He was also teammates with Bryant on the Los Angeles Lakers from 1997-2004 where they won three NBA championships in their seven years together.
The erroneous report also affected former UNC player and current NBA analyst Kenny Smith, who is the father of current UNC point guard K.J. Smith.
Smith said he was driving home with his father when he got a text that Fox was on the helicopter. He said he texted former UNC player J.R. Reid, but Reid did not respond.
He said he told his son that he wasn’t sure whether he should text Fox. But he finally texted him, “just say hey,” to make sure the report wasn’t true.
Fox responded “Hey” with a broken heart emoji.
“And I just screamed,” Smith recalled, as he broke down crying.
This story was originally published January 29, 2020 at 10:50 AM.
