Former NBA great Kobe Bryant paid a call on the Patriots' organized team activities earlier this week. Cornerback Stephon Gilmore admits to being 'star struck' by Bryant's appearance.

Glen Farley The Enterprise @GFarley_ent

FOXBORO – What has five championship rings and shows up at Patriots organized team activities?

If you guessed Tom Brady, you’d be wrong.

The five-time Super Bowl champion has been far too busy with his hectic offseason schedule – deeming activities like tossing passes to a race car driver from a yacht off the Mediterranean coast more important than practicing with his teammates – to attend this spring’s activities in Foxboro.

Five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant did find the time to make a stop at the Patriots’ OTAs on Wednesday, however.

“I have a ton of respect for Kobe,” Patriots head coach Bill Belichick said prior to Thursday’s OTA on the fields behind Gillette Stadium. “Obviously a great player, had a great career. Spent the day with him yesterday. He had a lot of great observations and things we could learn from. He’s a tremendous guy.”

No need to convince cornerback Stephon Gilmore of that.

“He’s a great competitor,” Gilmore said of the former Los Angeles Lakers great following Thursday’s OTA, “one of my favorite players to ever play the game so it was fun to have him here.”

“Everybody knows he’s a great competitor. He really perfected his craft and the details he took into the game and how he got better every day. (It was) just great to have somebody like that in the building. He’s one of my favorite players so it was an honor to have him here.

“It’s an honor, man,” said Gilmore. “Watching him growing up and seeing him come here and that being him you’re just kind of star struck a little bit. It was fun to have him here.”

Happy Gilmore: Gilmore, who left Buffalo to sign with the Patriots as an unrestricted free agent last year, said he had fun in his first season in New England.

“I have fun here,” said Gilmore. “There’s just no shortcuts. You’ve got to work for everything and I like that. If you don’t want to take shortcuts, you’ll like it here.”

Gilmore was one of a number of players asked about the Patriots way in the wake of comments defensive end Cassius Marsh made earlier this week. Obtained by the Patriots in a trade with Seattle last September, Marsh was released by the team on Nov. 21.

“They don’t have fun there. There’s nothing fun about it,” Marsh told Eric Branch of the San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s nothing happy about it. I didn’t enjoy any of my time there, you know what I'm saying? It made me for the first time in my life think about not playing football because I hated it that much.”