Tim Thomas says that when California wildfires forced his family out of their home, Kobe Bryant quietly arranged to cover his living expenses throughout Los Angeles for nearly two weeks, and says when he tried to pay for a $700 dinner bill the waitress let him know Kobe already had it covered “Man, it’s crazy. When I got in the league, I bought a house in Bryn Mawr, right? Which is five minutes from Villanova. So Lower Merion is right there. I used to see his moms and stuff at the grocery store. Obviously, we played AAU basketball together. We had our fun times with that. Got a chance to compete against each other in the league, in playoff series, all of that.” “Obviously, I lived in Calabasas. The accident happened right there. So I just felt like our connection has always been there. You know what I mean? ’96 class, all of that. But in California, they get those fires all the time. So it was one of those real bad ones. We go down to Newport Beach with the family to get out of the house. Might lose the house, whatever.” “So we pull up the first night. We’re thinking about our house, the whole shebang. We go to a restaurant to get some dinner. Kobe knows the owner. He calls, ‘Take care of my guy.’ Bill’s probably $600, $700. I’m getting ready to pull a card out. Oh, it was taken care of Who took care of it? ‘Oh, Mr. Bryant.’” “I’m like, ‘Mr. Bryant? That man don’t know I’m here. How he know I’m here?’ He was somewhere doing something. And then the rest of the time we had to be there, which was probably two weeks or so, everywhere I went in the city, I had to pay for nothing.” “Really, he took care of everything. It was so crazy. To the point where he’s got a bunch of homes down there, so he was like, ‘Yo, just go stay at the house.’ But my wife wanted to stay at the beach. We had a beachfront, so she’s like, ‘Let’s just stay here.’ But he was like, ‘You just go to the house.’”