Obituary: Kobe Bryant, 1978-2020

Kobe Bryant’s death is an absurdity. The helicopter crash in which the 41-year-old basketball legend perished, alongside his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, opened a horrifying vacuum within reality itself. Interviewed on the sidelines of a basketball game in Israel soon after the news broke, the former NBA All-Star Amar’e Stoudemire embodied the sudden evacuation of meaning and reason that millions of other people experienced on Sunday afternoon. Inside profound brackets of silence, he said, “I have no idea what to even think … I don’t know what my emotions are. I don’t even know who I am, it seems like.” Then he wept.

Kobe’s death is an existential rupture because he was both human and superhuman in ways that only a truly great athlete, and maybe only an all-time great basketball player, can be. He left behind the finest poetry a human body is capable of creating, emanating from psychic wellsprings of pettiness and sheer unstoppable will. More than any other NBA player, Kobe ensured that the decade after Michael Jordan’s retirement would be its own monumental era rather than an interregnum or a hangover. He helped turn the modern NBA into the grand psychodrama we know and love, that now-familiar titans’ clash of mind, spirit, and ego.

Kobe entered the league at the age of 17, in 1996, sporting a short afro and an irritating and, it would turn out, accurate conviction he would soon be a Jordan-level talent. He played his high school ball in Philadelphia but spent much of his childhood abroad thanks to his father’s post-NBA playing career — Kobe never wasted a single second in college but spoke fluent Italian and won last year’s Oscar for best animated short film anyway. By his early 20s, Kobe was human anti-matter.

Kobe won three consecutive titles playing in Shaquille O’Neal’s shadow, including a sublimely dominant 2001 postseason in which the Lakers went a fearsome 15-1. During this period, Bryant was one of the league’s great heels, an arrogant scoring machine who invented his own nickname (Black Mamba — it stuck) and despoiled entire franchises (sorry, Sacramento and Portland) but whose obsessiveness and simmering resentment of O’Neal arguably doomed the team’s shot at a historic four-peat.

Naturally, Kobe’s defining rivalry was with a teammate, who it is now fair to say he soundly defeated. There are lots of almost-Kobes in today’s NBA, isolation wizards who still have the brains and discipline to play within a system; pixie-like shooting guard-small forward hybrids who can pop a 3-pointer on one possession and then posterize a seven-foot center on the next one. However beloved Shaq may be, there aren’t a lot of semi-mobile goliaths still playing these days, are there?

Shaq and coach Phil Jackson both left in the mid-2000s, and for a time, the Lakers languished with Kobe as their star. Those years had their moments, though. Kobe sank an incomprehensible 81 points against Toronto in 2006, a single-game total unmatched in the modern history of the NBA. The babyface turn, along with the ascension to permanent god-tier stature, was complete by the time Kobe led the Lakers to back-to-back championships in 2009 and 2010.

In 2013, an aging and often-injured Bryant signed a two-year, $49 million contract, guaranteeing years of mediocrity for the Lakers. Then, he scored 60 points in his immortal final game in 2016. Forty-nine million and a string of 30-win seasons for one performance that transcends time and space and basketball and sports itself: That was Kobe Bryant, the living apex of everything an athlete could be — greatness personified, even and maybe especially when he was at his most frustrating.

Kobe was a father of four who leaves behind a 7-month-old baby and a wife he first met in his teens. Bryant was credibly accused of rape in 2003, and his death in such a sudden and senseless fashion, beside a young daughter, on the way to one of her basketball games, provides additional vexing proof of his humanity, and of everyone’s.

The popular phrase, “Ball is life,” refers to the idea that there is nothing in existence that basketball doesn’t contain. Kobe proved it, right up until the unspeakable end.

Armin Rosen is a New York-based senior writer for Tablet Magazine.

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