In the wake of the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven other people in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, CA on Sunday, I was hit by a wave of emotion from all sorts of different angles. I, like many people, was caught completely off-guard by this tragedy. Like a flame in a thunderstorm, plane crashes and helicopter crashes have a way of bringing an abrupt finality that quickly extinguishes any form of hope. At least in most car crashes, people get taken to the hospitals in hopes that something can be done. But those aerial disasters leave us with a sense of doom before we even see the crash site.
After receiving the news from my sister, I immediately thought it was a hoax. You know, the denial phase of grief. I mean, c’mon now! TMZ? Really? You know how trolls sometimes put out those “so and so passed away” posts, only to have the person in question (or a representative of that person) pop up on some form of social media to dispel the rumors and tell us said person is alive and doing well. Hell, it even happened to former Lakers player Rick Fox yesterday, who many on social media were placing on the same helicopter as Bryant. That, as we now know, turned out to be false.
After other, more reputable, sources started putting out the same news, I began to shift into an almost depressive phase of grief. Like, that shit hit me hard and I had no idea why. Emotions are a weird thing, man. They are personal interpretations of a situation based on that person’s past. They hit everyone differently. And you can never really control how they hit. You see, for me, in a weird way, Kobe Bryant was with me for every phase of my life. And I hadn’t realized that until yesterday.
My first true love in life was (and is) basketball. I tell my wife every October that I’m going to be with my mistress for the next eight months from time to time. And she has, over the years, come to accept that as a part of our relationship. I met basketball when I was about 9 years old. My cousin introduced it to me on the mean blacktops of Nuremberg, Germany. I was an Army brat, so I could only watch games on weekends when the Armed Forces Network would show games on tape delay at two in the morning. Eventually, I asked my mom for my first pair of Jordans. After a 90-day quarantine period, known to many older folks as layaway, I finally got a pair of what we now know as the Jordan V’s. And I was hooked. Basketball had a grip on me like nothing else could.
When I got back to the states in 1992, it was all about Michael Jordan and the Bulls. That dynasty forged my love for the game even more and gave me skin in the game in the form of a team to cheer for. Not just a team, but a winning team. Not just a winning team, but a historic, dynastic team. Living in Oklahoma, I didn’t really have a civic allegiance to any team, as the closest team was 150 miles away in Dallas (and that team sucked at the time). Instead, I followed the Bulls on WGN, while also beginning to notice the rest of the league. Guys like Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, Chris Webber, and Kevin Garnett all started popping up on my radar.
Then, in 1996, this kid popped on the radar. Some 17-year old named Kobe Bean Bryant was drafted by the Charlotte Hornets in the first round and then traded to the Los Angeles Lakers for Vlade Divac. Vlade Divac??? Vlade was the man. The Lakers’ center could score, rebound, and pass. He was almost like the center version of Magic Johnson. This Kobe Bryant kid better be good. Especially with him going to LA. That media is going to eat him alive if he doesn’t perform.
But perform he did. Within four seasons, Bryant was already one of the faces of the league. And I couldn’t stand him or the Lakers. You see, at this point in my fandom, the dynastic Bulls run was over. And the Pete Myers-led Bulls teams weren’t really doing it for me. For the first time in my life, I was just a basketball fan. No team affiliation and honestly, no player affiliation. Just kind of watching the league. And the Lakers were the kind of team you either loved or hated. And I was not a fan. They poached O’Neal from those fun Orlando teams. And for the first time in my life, I understood the correlation between big market and small market teams. Then they had beat the Scottie Pippen-led Portland Trailblazers in a 7-game series in the Western Conference Finals. Then it was championship after championship.
Basketball, honestly, got to be a bit boring. But maybe it was me. I was in college during this time and spending a lot of time with my girlfriend/fiancée/eventual wife. For the first time in my life, basketball had competition for my attention, and it wasn’t even close. While Bryant was off winning all his championships and then getting into a bitter divorce with Shaq, I was adulting, getting a college degree and getting married. I would still pay attention, but I wasn’t as in tuned as I used to be.
Then Hurricane Katrina happened. And Oklahoma City somehow ended up with a team. And I became a basketball fanatic again. I got season tickets, bought Hornets gear, and started finding my love for basketball again. Initially, I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the Hornets. Instead, I circled the games the Hornets played against the players that interested me. Allen Iverson, Shaq, LeBron. Carmelo Anthony. And, of course, Kobe and the Lakers. I eventually became a huge fan of the Hornets, but it was awesome to see the greats of the game at that time competing in my home state.
Eventually the Hornets morphed into the Thunder, and that was it. I was hooked. Ride or die with the Thunder. I finally had a local team. Something I could attach my civicness to from 90 miles away. It was at this point that I started viewing basketball differently. I started seeing it in a more mature, analytical way. No longer was it just about wins and losses or points per game. Now, I started focusing on team chemistry, body language, and passion.
This team was wild. They had this young, wunderkind scorer in Kevin Durant. They had this Tazmanian Devil of a point guard in Russell Westbrook. And they had this guy with an Abraham Lincoln beard that could score from anywhere on the court in James Harden. They lost a lot that first season, but in that second season, something changed. They were hungry. Each of those players wanted to be a great and they each had the skillset to become it. But while the Thunder players were hungry, Kobe Bryant was off in Los Angeles playing HANGRY.
After the Kobe/Shaq divorce, many in the NBA wondered if Bryant could win a championship without the Diesel manning the middle. In fact, O’Neal had already won a title in Miami with this young upstart named Dwayne Wade in 2006. So the pressure was on Bryant to win one without Shaq. His legacy needed it, many would say. While the Thunder were learning how to win, Bryant was a man on a mission. He eventually accomplished his goal of winning a championship in 2009, but in true Kobe fashion, he wanted more.
And in the 2010 playoffs, those two worlds would collide in the first round. Respect was something Bryant received based off his accolades. But there was something different in this series. Bryant was never the type to be buddy/buddy with any opponent. He was a calculated assassin on the court and any form of camaraderie between Bryant and an opponent was either an attempt at psychological warfare or a recon mission to see what kind of information he could gather from that interaction with the player. But by the end of this 6-game series, something was different. Bryant began to see the dogged determination that coursed through his veins reflect itself like a mirror on the faces of Durant and Westbrook. Kobe knew this team was going to be a problem.
Bryant went on to win another championship during that playoff run. To the Thunder organization, Kobe Bryant became the monster at the gate. They started to build their team with that in mind. The Lakers played big, with Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol patrolling the paint. The Thunder in turn, traded for Kendrick Perkins and slotted Serge Ibaka in at power forward. Instead of starting James Harden, they instead started Thabo Sefolosha, who was a great defensive player, but struggled offensively. Again, everything was geared towards beating Kobe and the Lakers.
The Thunder eventually beat a weakened Lakers team in the playoffs, and enjoyed some modicum of success. But they never achieved the ultimate goal of winning a championship. The Thunder’s insistence on playing like a team designed to beat the Lakers eventually led to it’s “slow downfall”, as Oklahoma City failed to adjust quick enough to the NBA’s changing philosophy towards pace and space methods. But in my opinion, the Thunder don’t reach the Olympian heights (four conference finals and one NBA finals appearance) they did without being laser-focused on beating Bryant and the Lakers. Every organization needs a big bad to go after, and Kobe happened to be that for the Thunder. After that 6-game series in 2010, you could see the wheels turning in the heads of Westbrook and Durant. They realized that in order to win in the playoffs, they needed that killer instinct….that Mamba Mentality.
Eventually, as it happens to all of us, our bodies begin to fail us. I learned to respect the hell out of Bryant, the player, because of his dogged determination, his killer instincts, and his obsession to win at all costs. Whether it was a mangled finger, a torn shoulder, or a ruptured Achilles, Bryant was going to stay on the court as long as he could. Kobe had a one track mind, and if a win or a championship wasn’t at the end of that track, he wasn’t on it. He was one of the greatest minds this game had seen and he had the athletic ability to go with that intelligence. This is why he will always be regarded as one of the greats in the game.
As much as I liked Kobe, the player, I was really starting to enjoy Kobe, the father. Again, like I said at the beginning of this article, Kobe has been with me through every phase of my life up to now. And fatherhood was no different. Like Bryant, I was also blessed with four daughters (one of whom is, coincidentally, named Giana). And much like the Bryant quartet, one of my daughters has gravitated more towards basketball than the other three.
On Sunday, I was waiting in line at Sam’s with my oldest, who happens to be the basketball player in the family. While we were waiting, we were discussing a play in her last basketball game. Now my daughter is a gunner. When she gets the ball, she is doing one of two things, either shooting it or passing it. And while she has a good jumpshot, she ain’t about that dribbling life. I think she would rather be caught with her pants down in public than be caught having to dribble in traffic. Her team was up late and the coach called Spread. During Spread, the ball moves quickly from one side of the court to the next in an attempt to waste time off the clock. The only way you shoot it is if you happen to get an open look heading towards the basket. Basically, the only shot you should be shooting in this set is an open lay-up. On this particular play, the ball is being passed around the horn and it gets to my daughter. What does she do? You guessed it. She shucks up a 3-point jumper that air balls. Luckily for her, the team was up by like 8 with like 15 seconds left to play and went on to win the game.
While we are discussing the play, I was acting out what she is doing. When I get to the part where she is shooting her jump-shot, I, of course, have to belt out the necessary quote for anyone shooting a jumper in dire circumstances: “KOBE!”. We (myself, my basketball playing daughter, and my other daughter named Giana, ironically) all let out a laugh. In the end, I hope that my basketball playing daughter learned something from that exchange.
Not even an hour later, I got the news of his (and his daughter’s) passing. That singular moment, of us in line talking basketball and invoking his name as a joke, stands out in my mind because I was doing two of the things I enjoy the most in my life: talking basketball and being a father. And ironically, in that moment, Kobe Bryant was also likely doing the same thing with a smile on hit face while looking at this daughter: talking basketball and being a father.