Perhaps he was ahead of his time. Perhaps that is what a prodigy really is, not so much young and gifted but young and mysterious. How else to explain a rangy thin seventeen year old who looked too young for the DMV. Kobe Bryant came into a league of skeptical men with a notorious confidence. He was never like the rest, not by a longshot, he was never in conflict with what he wanted. He knew where this basketball job was going to take him even as he knew he would not make friends to get it. But add it all up. The 18 year ride, the agony and ecstasy, the pain and pleasure and championships and exceptional disappointment and exceptional love, all have led him here, two weeks from beginning another season. It has been a crazy, intense, climatic ride of falls and getting back up. Emancipated, tested, doubted and applauded- that is the circle that orbits his world. Or to put it another way. Kobe Bryant’s career has lasted longer than Michael Jordan’s, Jerry West’s, Oscar Robertson’s, Wilt Chamberlain’s and Larry Bird’s.
Dec 8, 2013; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant (24) reacts during the second half against the Toronto Raptors at Staples Center. Mandatory Credit: Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports
We recreate the myth of the hero: loved until he is hated, despised until he is loved again. It is a vicious cycle, a sort of schizophrenia that may have mattered to Kobe if his ruthless ambition had not affected his career. Or infected it. They say a disease begins before the eye can see it, it begins surreptitiously. It climbs a thousand steps before you feel dizzy because of it. Some may call it psychosis of the mind. Kobe calls it normal.
All or nothing is how his workmanship could be described. Most people find laziness comfortable but for those who don’t, say Caron Butler or Jodie Meeks who watched Kobe’s habits and emulated them, well that was the easy part. It takes commitment to attach yourself to someone else’s routine, to let it rub off. To honor fidelity. But Kobe’s complex mania or as Michael Jordan called it, “his sickness” is his alone. For Kobe- and this is what has been so hard to grasp- it is not just the winning, although that is enough of an enticement. It is the guts of getting there, the persistence, the practices, the obsessive rituals, the training, the defiance, the blood, sweat and tears that precipitate coming back from the brink of death. That is how Kobe defines what and who is great. Are you tough enough to fight through the worst part of your career?
Kobe Bryant, at eighteen years old and then nineteen years old and even twenty years old, could be two versions of himself on the very same night. He could be heroic and slash his oppressors on the court as if he was Julius Ceasar at the Battle of Alesia. And he could be the villain from which all sports narcissism has its roots, intolerant, calculating and absorbed. Even as there is no middle ground, there is a truth all can agree, even those who merciless boo him for saying pretty much what he wants these days and after 18 seasons he is entitled. The deepest of his critics accept that Kobe Bryant was never a generic face in the crowd, never someone you would point to and yawn. And then say, “oh yeah…him, what did he do?”
Dec 13, 2013; Oklahoma City, OK, USA; Oklahoma City Thunder small forward Kevin Durant (35) and Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant (24) reacts during the second quarter at Chesapeake Energy Arena. Mandatory Credit: Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports
18 years later Kobe is who he was when he first entered except the mystery is gone and he can soak up his status as a phenomenon. It is hard to grasp the roots of his adoration at this juncture in his career. Sure, he will exit soon so a lot of it is romance and a lot of it is wanting to adore his last days. But that doesn’t scratch the surface of why when Kobe Bryant hasn’t played professional basketball in nine months his jersey was the fifth best seller during the playoffs. Every player ahead of him on the list (Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Kawii Leonard, Tim Duncan) made it to their Conference Final.
His familiar on court rage was absent when he made his high school to the NBA announcement. The press conference was as glittery as the city he would one day play for. Camera’s flashed so fast the shutter speed created its own chatter. Kobe sat at a table, grinning, he might have been chewing gum. He looked like a senior in high school or even an 11th grader. It was in that one moment, in that aesthetic framed by television cameras, that this skinny kid from suburban Philadelphia by way of Italy seemed arrogantly unimpressed by what he was doing. No shooting guard had every thought so much of himself to decide he didn’t need more help in college. The writers were put off by Kobe’s confidence and smug grin or that he had the audacity to carelessly perch sunglasses atop his head like this was the Cannes Film Festival media session.
It is the thief or the hero or the villain or the brave that gets the attention. Somehow it leaked out that Lakers General Manager Jerry West thought so highly of Kobe Bryant he predicted his greatness. The fans anticipated a hero. Barely into his first season, Lakers coach Del Harris, skeptical over playing an 18 year old, had to face the rage of Kobe-philes. Religious myths start like this, with a group of people so desperate for beauty and rage and triumph and sacrifice and obsession, they begin their pilgrimage. Credit those who started with Kobe, who were there at the beginning and never wavered and 18 years later still see the balding, slower 36 year old as someone forever young. If they had their wish he would simply fade away when he was done but sports legends rarely exit the stage without pulling time with them.
Which brings us here, to two weeks of imagination, 14 days of the mind doing somersaults and envisioning Kobe Bryant without seeing Kobe Bryant. There is an idea out in the world of who Kobe Bryant is after such a long layoff but no one can really be sure if what we know is exactly what we will see and what we will see will even matter the way it used to. Perhaps we have given up, not on the hero part, you can still be heroic and not lead your team anywhere special, but we have given up on all the other things we expect out of a star. All it means is that you are not young and we know that, we accepted it; you do have a grave after all.
Kobe was born free 18 seasons ago, he was a child and he was a man and he had yet to lay claim to the most important aspect of his fame: his willingness to give everything up, to be exhausted without feeling a burden towards it. He resides in this miraculous and skeptical position because he set it up this way on purpose: win or live the catastrophe.
A generation is gone, the one Kobe came in with and he can’t answer how he lasted this long. There is no answer. There is only Kobe in the quiet gym with the smell of a leather ball and the solace of his own obsession and his maniacally self confidence that has fought off a crippling body. He has relentlessly nurtured the ego part of his mind- not for us, for him. Because here, in the loneliness, there is no applause, only timing and repetition and sweat. Only the old guy who remembers the young guy who remembers not the fall but the quiet beauty in the comeback.