“He was untouchable in your eyes”: Kobe Bryant - My First Hero
Processing the death of Kobe and Gianna Bryant is to mourn the loss of a childhood hero and a stolen future
Kobe and Gianna Bryant died on Sunday, and it really feels like the world is in mourning. That’s at least how it seemed as I walked through the Detroit airport in a daze, waiting for my connection back home while refreshing Twitter and texting friends and family.
Not Kobe, not like this. And then some time later, not Gigi too. Ultimately, nine people were lost.
Kobe Bryant created a lot of emotions for me. As a kid, elation. Watching him and Shaq win their first title in 2000 is my earliest basketball memory. A few years later, I watched in awe as Kobe warmed up in the Thomas & Mack Center for an exhibition game. He might’ve played a whole five minutes, but he was there — all 6 feet 6 inches of him — stretching and putting up shots for an adoring Las Vegas crowd.
As I grew up, I admit my Kobe-fandom wavered. I couldn’t quite process everything, but I knew he wasn’t a squeaky clean person. He ran Shaq out of Los Angeles. He alienated teammates. He didn’t pass enough. But at the end of the day, and most often, at the end of a game, he was undeniably Kobe Bryant.
I’m not sure to really process this.
In my mind, and in so many others, Kobe Bryant was superhuman. He had superhuman mental toughness. He had a superhuman intensity. His ability to will his team to victory was legendary. Every basketball player has a Kobe story. Every basketball fan has a Kobe memory. On many occasions, those memories overlap. It’s what happens when a career spends two decades near the top of the pile in terms of relevance, drama or success. He was so much fun to watch as he took over, and he was so much fun to jeer when his “I got this” mindset worked in the other team’s favor.
On Sunday, the world shared one more Kobe where were you when? moment.
Inevitably though, the 2003 Colorado case floats to the forefront. Kobe Bryant allegedly sexually assaulted a woman, and though the charges were dropped, a civil suit was settled out of court, and Bryant apologized while not admitting guilt. The apology itself is interesting to look back on in 2020 with so much more awareness of how these things were handled then and should be handled now.
It’s possible to grieve and also hate what happened in Colorado. My heart hurts for his wife Vanessa and three daughters who lost a husband, father and sister in all of this. At the same time, I do not fault anyone for carrying mixed feelings given his past. Part of me wonders if he would’ve ever addressed the case again years from now, but maybe that’s a conversation he wished to have in private with his wife and daughters. As adulation poured in from around the world and prominently in Los Angeles though, I could only imagine how triggering or painful it might be to see someone with that stain on him glorified and deified.
I woke up Monday morning with all this swirling in my mind to a text from my sister, and it helped me settled into all of what I was feeling and why I felt it. It read:
“Hey. It’s okay to be sad about it still. It’s crazy. He was one of your biggest heroes and influences growing up. I loved watching you and the boys get so excited to watch him play. He was untouchable in your eyes. More than a human. I love you so much.”
When his career ended, Kobe basically disappeared from the game — he had other work to do. After tearing his Achilles, it seemed like he came to terms with his basketball mortality and sought authorship of his post-basketball life. He made children’s podcasts and cartoons. He wrote. He won a freaking Oscar. He still gave insight to the game, but only in the way that fit him. When players reached out to him, he answered. When athletes suffered major injuries, he reached out to them.
In a way, it felt like he was becoming the Godfather of basketball — always looming with gracious wisdom when called upon. He wasn’t an old-head complaining about load management or “the way things used to be” as analytics and efficiency became a premium. He lauded younger players who showed the same competitive drive or the same innate curiosity he carried. He talked trash in Slovenian to Luka Doncic. He became close to Oregon superstar Sabrina Ionescu. He championed women’s sports and athletes just because he wanted to and admired them.
When Gianna Bryant expressed real interest in the sport, he became the ultimate Sports Dad. He showed back up to the Staples Center sitting courtside with Gigi beside him, watching her watch the game, listening as he explained the game’s intricacies where he once made his full-time jurisdiction. Her growing love for the game reopened it for him in a different way.
Undoubtedly, this is the biggest sports-related death in decades. As NBA legends — from Jerry West and Bill Russell to Michael Jordan and Devin Booker — gave their public statements, I realized this is the first basketball superstar the world lost. And potentially, one of the game’s three biggest stars of all time. He transcended the sport. The term “bigger than basketball” feels thrown around too often, but Kobe really was. He touched every corner he could access, reached out to business leaders and authors like J.K. Rowling and directors like J.J. Abrams to pick their brains.
It’s eerie reading Ramona Shelburne’s profile on Kobe at the end of his career. He speaks of his basketball death freely, and in an interview with The Ringer’s Micah Peters, he speaks about his “comfortable” relationship with his own mortality. He always said he wanted to be remembered as someone who got everything out of life, who lived to the fullest in the least cliche but most realized sense possible.
Seeing people move on from the news almost makes me angry. How dare they carry on with a life without Kobe Bryant? But it’s something we all must do. In Shelburne’s piece, Kobe talked about learning how to play “Moonlight Sonata” on piano to make a grand gesture to his wife. Taking lessons would have been too easy. Instead, he taught himself by ear.
“If you just sit down and say, ‘I’m going to learn this thing until I do,’” he told her, “there’s not really much out there that you can’t figure out eventually.”
Grieving celebrity deaths is a strange phenomenon that carries valid emotion. Moreover, it was nothing but painful watching teams play with heavy hearts just hours after learning the news. People inside the NBA often talk about the league as a “fraternity,” and when someone rises to Kobe’s level, that reach is even deeper and more vast. He spent 20 years in the same city, with the same franchise. Not every year was joyful. There were trade demands, losing seasons and more than a few ugly losses. But Los Angeles took in a brash 18-year-old and watched him grow into a legend of the game, a legend of the city and a son all their own. Seeing the scenes at Staples Center and the Mamba Sports Academy was only a beautiful testament to his ties with the heart of the city.
Kobe Bryant was my first hero. I never learned a solid post-fadeaway and I never became multi-lingual, but the work ethic, the curiosity, the pursuit of the best possible version of one’s self, that is still obtainable. Moving on will happen, slowly but surely. And maybe, with that Mamba Mentality, I’ll learn what life is like without Kobe until, eventually, I’m doing it.
