EXCLUSIVE: Kobe Bryant on Retirement, Taking Hard Criticism and Who Would Win in Michael Jordan Match-Up

— -- Kobe Bryant’s retirement brings about the end of an era.

The NBA superstar has shattered records, won titles and earned the respect of fans and fellow players, and in an exclusive interview with “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts, the elite player said this was the right time for him to retire from the game.

“You know, going through my entire career, I've never really understood what athletes meant when they said, ‘You -- when you know you know.’ But now I certainly understand it ... So once I knew this was it, might as well say it,” he said in the interview that aired Wednesday on "GMA."

The married father of two daughters told Roberts how he came to his decision.

“I try to have at least 15 minutes of still time and just kind of sit in my thoughts in the morning and just kind of meditate. And normally what happens with me is my mind would always drift to the game. Always," he said in reply to Roberts’ question during the Tuesday interview. "And then I found myself sitting there. My mind wouldn't drift towards the game all the time anymore. And that's when I started realizing, ‘You know what? It's getting close. It's getting close.’ Because now I'm not obsessively thinking about the game anymore. It's not wired into my subconscious the way it used to be.”

Bryant, 37, announced his retirement Sunday night in a poem posted on The Player's Tribune, a website launched last year by former New York Yankees star Derek Jeter.

The poem, posted hours before Bryant took the court against the Indiana Pacers, read, "This season is all I have left to give. My heart can take the pounding, my mind can handle the grind, but my body knows it's time to say goodbye."

Bryant told Roberts that getting to the decision was “a slow process.”

“It was something that kind of evolved over the last three years, you know, with the Achilles injury, that really frightened me. Because you know, it was like, ‘My career could be over now.’ It scared me. ‘What am I going do next?’ sort of thing. So I took that time to start trying to figure that out,” he said, referring to his 2013 injury that left him unable to play for close to nine months.

After training hard, he returned to the game the following season and fractured his knee in a game against the Memphis Grizzlies in December 2013. He came back from that injury and then suffered a torn shoulder last January, sidelining him again for close to nine months.

“And it was just like, ‘Oh my,’ this is one thing after the next, you know? And so it was kind of a slow three-year process of kind of evolving to get to where I am,” he said.

The Philadelphia native dominated the sport for two decades, entering the NBA directly from high school and playing for the Los Angeles Lakers for his entire 20-year career.

During that time, Bryant won five NBA titles, was a 17-time All Star and earned two Olympic gold medals.

NOT HIS BEST SEASON

Bryant is his own biggest critic, and admits that this season hasn’t been his best, but some players – such as the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant – have come to his defense. Durant, who has said he idolized Bryant growing up, has expressed frustration at recent media coverage of the player’s performance.

“He's a legend, and all I hear is about how bad he's playing, how bad he's shooting ...,” Durant said in an interview with ESPN.com.

Roberts asked Bryant whether he agreed that the media was being unfair to him. Bryant said he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“You can't just sit around expecting everybody just to ... give praise all the time, right? “ he said. “You’ve got to be able to take the good with the bad.”