I’m of the age where I can’t remember being a sports fan without Kobe Bryant’s presence looming large over the landscape.
If you’re like me, you grew up watching him dominate on the basketball court for the Lakers. You shouted his first name as you threw up contested jumpers in pickup games or crumpled trash and threw up turnaround fadeaway jumpers into the garbage.
You bought his shoes and played as him in the video games and shared his basketball memes when memes became a thing later in his career. You’ve gotten into some heated Jordan, Kobe or LeBron “greatest of all time” debates over the years. You just saw all the tributes paid by NFL players in the Pro Bowl and NBA players over the last few days, and you knew it wasn’t something they just did for the clout.
You were probably hurting on Sunday to some degree, even if you “hated” him on the court for beating your favorite team over and over again (trust me, I’m a big Allen Iverson fan).
I was working out at the Power Shop on Sunday afternoon and forgot to bring my headphones. It was empty enough in the back that I could hear someone ask to change the channel on one of the TVs above the cardio area because something something Kobe Bryant in the news. It didn’t sound too good, so I pulled out my phone.
It didn’t register for me right away. It was there, right in front of my face, but it wasn’t real. No way. I texted a few friends and quickly heard from several I hadn’t gotten to yet. Then, people I rarely talk basketball with hit me up. The story had to have legs. When I found out that not only was it true, but his daughter Gianna was confirmed as another of the nine people who died in the helicopter crash, it hit me.
They’re really all gone now. This is absolutely crazy.
So much has been written and spoken about Kobe’s accomplishments since Sunday. Even if you’re not a huge NBA or sports fan, there’s a good chance I’d just tell you things you already know and have heard a thousand times in the last five days. Instead, I’ll write about my favorite thing about Kobe: his role as a parent, especially concerning Gianna.
Say what you will about Kobe’s selfishness as a player, but that same guy could not have been more generous with his time with the next generations. That was especially true with his daughter and her basketball teams. You don’t have to look very far to find clips of the two working out together, or to find social media posts where Kobe praised her and her teammates and talked about wanting the best for them all regardless of whether any would go pro in the future.
A Jimmy Kimmel clip from 2018 made its rounds on Sunday. I must have watched it at least 10 times when I found it. In it, Kimmel asks Kobe a question about Gianna and he immediately lit up. He talked about her attitude — which she 100 percent inherited from him — and how it would come out around his fans.
“(Gianna will) be standing next to me, and it’ll be like, ‘And you gotta have a boy. You and V gotta have a boy, have somebody carry on the tradition, the legacy.’ She’s like, ‘I got this. No boy for that, I got this.’”
He was so proud of Gianna and it totally comes through in the clip. He fully supported her and believed she truly would carry on his legacy, even if she wouldn’t do it in the NBA with the men. Maybe it’s because he had nothing to prove to anybody after the career he had, but there was not an ounce of “living vicariously through my kid” in him the way there is in too many parents who start things with good intentions but spiral out of control. Kobe taught kids how to do plenty on the court, and I hope he teaches adults how to support their kids in a healthy way off of it.
Sunday was an extremely dark day in the sports world, but his legacies in basketball and after it will shine brighter than five championship rings in the LA sun.