Kobe: Elegy for the Great & Terrible

The first basketball game I ever watched was game 2 of the Lakers - 76ers finals matchup in 2001. I remember it vividly. My parents were sitting, drinking tea. I was playing with some Jurassic Park action figures. My dad told me to come over and watch some basketball with him. It was odd, my dad didn't give a shit about sports and never had, but I think he just wanted to spend time with me. My parents chatted, it was something to put on in the background, and somewhere, sometime, the TV exploded, and we all turned to watch the replay of Kobe grabbing the most unlikely offensive rebound and putting in a fadeaway with three guys on him. That was the moment I became transfixed. I didn’t know how to read basketball, but it looked impressive. That’s probably one of my all time basketball moments, Kobe had a million moments like that in his career, but that was the one that made me stop and pay attention.

And then my dad was transfixed. Then my mom. My sister came home and started watching with us. Over the next few days, my entire family, for the first and last time, watched basketball, locked into the gods on the court. Kobe and Shaq. Shaq and Kobe. Kobe. Herculean. Unbelievable. He took a family that could never care, and made them fans for a week. He made me a fan for life.

This is in my top three most vivid memories of childhood. Some of it was the shared experience with my family. Some of it was the unconscious feeling of creating nostalgia as it happens. And the rest of it was Kobe.

My love of basketball has ebbed and flowed since. I latched onto my hometown Raptors as a ride or die, and I witnessed haplessly as Kobe dumped 81 points on them in ‘06. You gotta respect it. Movies took over my life for a bit since I had no one to talk hoops with. Masai Ujiri and the Derozan-Lowry era brought me back. LeBronto drove me away, there's only so much heartbreak someone can take. I tuned into last year's playoffs just in time to watch game 7 in Philadelphia, and the miraculous, beautiful shot that brought me back to being a full throated, bona fide, superfan one more time.

And it's all thanks to Kobe. His drive, his presence on the court, the unflappable, balls out nature of his game, and his inhumane discipline spoke to a legion of first and second generation immigrant kids who bought into the dream of a protestant work ethic. He was a god to everyone, but he was especially a god to us, something particular about his masculinity, his intensity, and his fuck-you-style that mirrored everything we wanted to be.

It's easy to forget that Kobe is more recent than most of us remember. He retired in 2016. Lakers fans have LeBron and AD to focus on now. The rest of us have the new league, the 3 point focused, ever evolving league of player empowerment, two superstar small market success. As with all legends, Kobe’s has started to recede. Maybe it's his own fault. He loved the game and the money it brought him. Maybe he was anxious about what would come next. For whatever reason, he played beyond the point he'd codify that legend. There's enough decline in his story to forget those years he knocked out championships and put down 25 to 30 points a game.

But you watch a fucking highlight reel and it comes back. It comes back hard. He was the game. The way he cut and spun, the way he carved up the offense and knew, just knew the ball would go in. Shots from behind his head, impossible looking 3s, you'd think he was a psychic. Superhuman. There aren't enough adjectives. Spike Lee documented his work ethic in a spectacular documentary, once. Kobe worked hard and made it look easy. Kareem had his skyhook. Larry Bird had his jump shot. Kobe had his fadeaway, and everything else. It was a powerful statement on what it means to be the best at what you do. Kobe was the best, and better than that.

He raised a generation of fans. He made the game bigger than anyone thought it could ever be. In the last year, I became a sneakerhead. The first pair of shoes I bought were Jordans. The second were Kobes. I'm not the only one. Lakers fans have an unusual blessing in the longevity of their retired superstars. I suspect many of them will be grieving for a long time after today. I can't blame them.

To watch Kobe on the last CRT TV in Mississauga, Ontario, at the age of 7 was to know you were watching earnest magnificence, a sort of terrifying, dead eyed intensity that spoke no feelings except totalized control. That was Kobe. Kobe was locked in. He owned the sport. He loved the game, but did he ever have fun? On the court, he was more magic than Magic. He was also merciless. It was the basis of his image. Commitment to the work above all else, and “all else" included people, too.

And then there was Kobe off the court.

Maybe it's hubristic to expect all of our black athletes to be Muhammad Ali. It is not hubristic to expect all of our athletes to not be rapists. Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault charge, which was ultimately resolved in a settlement through a civil suit, gives me pause. When all of this was going down, I was 8 or 9 years old. I had no idea what it meant. The rest of the world didn’t take it too seriously as I grew older, and neither did I. It’s only in the last few years the sort of weird, Men in Black mind wipe nature of the case has begun to disturb me. Its cleansing from the public consciousness is confusing, it’s a brutal case to read about. It’s cruel. And my best and worst instincts both tell me it’s probably true.

In my heart, I believe it.

It's hard to imagine Kobe's actions getting through the modern, Adam Silver led NBA, but it's not like there haven't been other unpunished offences. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I don't think his career would have been as long lasting, that the fans would have been so deliberately ignorant, if he had come into the league and all of this had happened five, six years later. In a lot of ways, Kobe was a relic when he retired in 2016, of an era of the NBA both an inch and an ocean away from where it is now. His only real contemporaries that are still playing might be Vince Carter and Pau Gasol, but Gasol was never as flashy and if Carter was lightning in a bottle, Kobe was that eternal thunderstorm off the coast of Venezuela.

Professional sports is a beast that represents and creates the conditions by which human beings realize the limits of their potential. It's the synthesis of technology, training, and will that form an ever heightening floor by which we become faster, stronger, and smarter.

It's also an unbelievably profitable space, one in which young men are given immense amounts of attention, power, and money that they've never been equipped to handle. That they could never actualize in their adolescence, or even dream of. Nowhere is this better articulated than in the NBA, where your odds of getting into the league are lower than your odds of winning the lottery. And the NBA is where the primary driver of the sport are black men, men who overwhelmingly come from a world that has deliberately been crafted to work in opposition to them, of urban poverty at worst and the casual racism of everyday living at best (Kobe, for what its worth, grew up pretty well off). To achieve this dream, many forego a higher education. It's discomforting to think of giving an 18 year old boy a million dollars and expecting him to be a man. This usually articulates itself in reckless spending. In ever accelerating displays of wealth. Most basketball players end up broke at the end. The league has a mental health issue that's slow to be addressed. Players pushing themselves to the limits sooner are aging out their joints faster than you could ever imagine. The primary victims of this are never just the player. You see this in other sports too. Think of how Floyd Mayweather's illiteracy is a punchline. Think of how big his fight purses have become despite a history of domestic violence. Restorative justice doesn't mean Floyd Mayweather can't be saved. But perhaps it also means that he shouldn't be rewarded.

None of this is to absolve Kobe. He was alleged to do a terrible thing. He is responsible for his actions, and never has and now never will be absolved of them, be forgotten for them, pay the price for them, or escape them. He is also part of a system that denies its players an element of their humanity, that's always accelerating, where salaries are forever expanding, where young men are being locked into careers earlier and earlier, at a higher risk of injury, at the disincentivization of any other interest, growth, or humanity. To say nothing of the psychosexual nature of the game. Kobe came out of his sexual assault charges and gave himself the nickname The Black Mamba, a moniker that conjures up a variety of anxieties and excitement for the white majority. To deny its sexual affects would be disingenuous, willfully ignorant of the way society hates, loves, fears and fetishises people of color. Kobe was a prick who knew good PR.

Above all, Kobe's victims deserve peace, and Kobe's image should be interrogated, thoroughly and critically. I can't speak for those victims, obviously. I don't know if what happened today will bring them that peace or not. I don't know if there's a process they wished they could have undergone. I don't know their trauma. All I can do is hope they'll be okay. That there is some peace in their lives. It’s worth thinking critically about his legacy, on and off the court. About the way we condition men. About the ruthlessness of sports capitalism. About the ruthlessness of Kobe. Post-hoc takes calling out people for posting #RIPMAMBA are useless. There are larger questions about how to make sure this never happens again. About the way we structure, examine, and rehabilitate people. About how we take care of victims.

With Kobe, there were other things, far less important things. He wasn't a good teammate, or he was a great teammate, depending on who you ask. He coached kids ball. He was a family man. He won an Oscar.

And blah.
And blah.
And blah.

If you've read this far, you know the two things you have to know about Kobe: He was one of the greatest ever to play the game, and his impact on culture, economy, kids everywhere, and to the sport itself cannot be understated. He was also, in all likelihood, a rapist, and that should be centered in every discussion of Kobe Bryant, from now until history has forgotten him. These things are not equal. No matter what order you put them in, it'll seem like you're diminishing his crimes in favor of recognizing his skill. Let me state, for the record, I'm not. This is what I know about Kobe. This is what I feel about Kobe. And this is what I feel are the two things everyone should know about Kobe. Everything else can be a determination of biographers, historians, trivia nerds and Lakers fans.

I've had a lot of conversations today with people who think his greatness as a top ten player is overrated. I don't know, all I know is I saw him play as a kid on TV, and no player has left me in that kind of awe since. LeBron came close in the 2017 finals. Reruns of Bird are hard to compare since they’re from another era. Jordan is Jordan, Inconceivably good, but a little too before my time to appreciate. Kobe was Kobe, on the court, although no amount of greatness excuses him off of it.

It leaves me with a heavy feeling in my stomach, of a deep sadness, and difficult questions about the nature of heroes. Ultimately, I have a memory of Kobe that'll never be tarnished, that led to a love of a game that I watch, day after day, most years after most years, despite its cruelty, because the greatness of the sport just might be worth it. Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I love it, and I'm not going to stop watching it. Before today, I hadn't thought about Kobe in a minute. Next week, I’ll probably be the same as I was yesterday.

Sports and politics are the two spheres in which the poetry of human experience are best communicated. The miracles, the unbelievable coincidences. The occurrences so bizarre you'd never put them in a screenplay. The kind of things that remind you that there is magic in this world. Today, just a few hours after LeBron James passed Kobe Bryant as the number 3 all time scoring leader in Bryant’s hometown of Philadelphia, Kobe died in a helicopter accident in Calabasas, California. His 13 year old daughter was with him. He left behind a legacy of unimaginable ugliness. He left behind a legacy of uneclipsable beauty. He was a piece of shit, perhaps overrated as a player, perhaps not, but a demonstration of how single minded obsessions create awful, talented, legendary people.

Sometimes, less often, good people become legends too. Sometimes, the poetry of legends isn't triumphant. Sometimes it's cruel. Sometimes it's complicated. Sometimes it's simple. Sometimes it's just fucking sad, man

But hey, it's great poetry, isn't it?