Sean Deveney - Remembering Kobe Bryant: Players, Coaches, and Broadcasters Recall the Greatest Basketball Player of His Generation

Copyright 2016, 2020 by Sean Deveney

Previously published under the title Facing Kobe Bryant

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau

Cover photo credit: Getty Images

ISBN: 978-1-61321-977-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61321-980-5

Printed in the United States of America

By the time January 26, 2020, turned over into January 27, when officials in Calabasas had spoken, when rumors gave way to facts, when players and coaches around the NBA had registered their grief and sadness, when the hard fact of the thingKobe Bryant, only four years removed from retirement and just 41 years old, was dead in a helicopter crash along with his daughter and seven othershad been absorbed as reality, there were still the fans.

And there were fans, everywhere. Bryant, after all, was the standard bearer for the league in the new millennium, the player who took over as the face of the NBA after Michael Jordans retirement in 1998. He arrived on the scene as a brash 17-year-old heaped with such immense hypehe played in Hollywood, after allthat it seemed impossible for him to live up to expectations. But he did that, through 18 All-Star appearances and five championships, through the high-profile convulsions in his professional life on the floor and personal life off it, through a magical farewell season that he capped with a 60-point performance.

In the aftermath of Bryants shocking death, everywhere, there were the fans.

In Los Angeles, where Bryant had spent his 20 years as a player, no doubt there were fans. Hundreds gathered at the Staples Center, the centerpiece of downtown L.A., a building that might not exist were it not for the exploits of Bryant, even as stars were pulling up in their chauffeured cars for the Grammy Awards. Impromptu memorials cropped up on the sidewalks outside the building, dozens of fans crowded around each one.

But it wasnt just in L.A. Across the country, in Lower Merion near Philadelphia where Kobe Bryant had gone to high school, fans gathered and laid flowers at Bryant Gymnasium, the building that had been dedicated in his honor nine years earlier. A spokeswoman for the school said that the teams coach, Gregg Downer, was devastated by the news, too much so to accept media requests.

More than 4,000 miles away, across the Atlantic, the Italian Basketball Federation announced that a moment of silence would be observed in every game for seven days. Bryant had grown up in Italy, when his father was playing professionally there. On the other side of the globe, in the Philippine capital of Manila, children gathered to mourn at the House of Kobe, a gym built after Bryants visit in 2016. Bryant had visited the country five times, but it remained a dream in the city for him to come back and see the facility that was built in his honor.

Just to see him would have meant something for basketball-crazy fans, the congressman behind the project said.

But, too soon, Kobe Bryant has been lost. Its a tragedy for his family, a heartbreak for the Lakers, a difficult blow for everyone in and around the NBA. But Bryant touched so many beyond those borders. He was a global icon. For the millions, maybe even billions, touched by his legacy as a player and an ambassador of basketball, there was grief.

Bryants world was the NBA. He touched so many beyond those borders, though. For the millions, maybe even billions, who witnessed his legacy as a player and an ambassador of basketball, his death brought an acute sense of loss. He died too soon, as his post-basketball life was just taking shape.

And there will be grief for a long time to come.

Kobe Bryant, 1978-2020

I T HAS BEEN talked about plenty of times, the initial impressions I had of Kobe Bryant. We brought him in for a workout (ahead of the draft in 1996), and you could see after a few minutes that he was head and shoulders above everybody else we had been looking at. I do not want to make it sound like I saw something special or that I saw something other people couldnt see. It was not something I saw. It was something inside of him. Some people have it, some people dont. Kobe was so talented, even at a young age, and it was pretty evident when you watched him as a seventeen-year-old kid, he was extraordinarily gifted as an athlete. Anyone could have seen that. But he was more gifted as a young skilled player. A lot of young players are terrific athletes but they dont have the skill level he did. Honestly, a lot of veteran players dont have the skill level he did. But he combined two elements, regardless of the skill level you have, regardless of the physical gifts that you have: one, his work ethic was second to none, and two, his competitive desire was second to none. That really separates the men from the boys.

He was the most talented player I had seen in a long time. You can have great skill, but if you do not have the work ethic you are not going to accomplish anything in your life. I do not care what youre doing. He was an exceptionally gifted young man. When he was born, he was a prodigy kid, and he just needed to find his own niche. His niche happened to be basketball, and he found it. But the work ethic he has shown was exceptional. You can have great skill, but if you dont have work ethic, you are just going to tease everybody about what your potential is. Anyone who is great at anything has a work ethicand really, there are a lot of players who have a great work ethic but did not have the skill Kobe Bryant had. The combination of those two made him what he was.

I knew his father, Joe, a little bit even before we drafted Kobe, though I did not know him well. I still run into Joe once in a while, and he still likes to play basketball; that gives you an idea of what the game meant to him. He had a passion, too, but he did not have the it factor that his son had. But then, few have that. Thats just the genetic makeup, where somewhere along the way, someone is gifted in a unique way, someone winds up with all the attributes that make him or her just right, and Kobe had that. Everything was lined up with him. But one of the things you could see was that the parents were very open to encouraging their kids to explore their own talents but also to be exposed to the rest of the world and not be limited. I think Kobe was affected by growing up in Italy (where his father played for seven seasons), not growing up in this country, seeing the world from a different perspective at a very young age, understanding other countries and being able to speak to people in another language. It makes you more worldly, it makes you more experienced, it gives you a different outlook. Any kind of different background, any kind of different experience will let you grow in a way that other experiences cant match.