Mike Sielski - The Rise--Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality

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For Kate, Evan, and Gabe

ON THE DAY AFTER KOBE Bryant died, a high school classmate and friend sent me an email that carried the force of a fist that I couldnt see coming. Thought youd find this interesting, Ben Relles wrote.

Embedded in the message was a link to a thirty-six-second video. On the right side of the videos split-screen shot was Kobe, wearing a charcoal, scoop-neck sweater, sitting at an expansive cherry desk, riveted to flickering images on a laptop. He was in the executive offices of YouTube, where Ben was working to find new content for the channel. Kobe had come to the companys Southern California headquarters in January 2018 to pitch a show based on Wizenard, a series of childrens books he had created that combined the themes of sports, fantasy, and magic. As it turned out, YouTube wasnt funding childrens programming at the time and didnt buy the show, but it was genuinely one of the most impressive pitches Ive heard, Ben said later. He was incredibly passionate about the idea and clearly hands-on in every aspect of it.

On the videos left side were the images that had grabbed Kobes attention: footage of a basketball game between two suburban Philadelphia high schoolshis alma mater, Lower Merion, and mine, Upper Dublin. Ben and I were seniors then. He was a backup forward on the team. I was an editor of the student newspaper and lacked the skills and athleticism to play organized ball beyond intramurals. Kobe Bryant was a freshman. It was the second game of his high school career.

On December 7, 1992, as part of its high school boys basketball preview package, The Philadelphia Inquirer had published a pair of brief articles, one about each team. Both squads were green and were expected to struggle, but according to Jeremy Treatman, the correspondent who had written about the Lower Merion Aces, one player represented a glimmer of hope for them: Remember this name: Kobe Bryant.

The following week, the teams squared off in the consolation game of a four-team tournament at Lower Merion. In that thirty-six seconds of footage from that game, the Upper Dublin player closest to the cameraa senior guard named Bobby McIlvaine, the number 24, also Kobes number, huge on the back of his red jerseywhipped a cross-court pass to a teammate, Ari Greis. After Greis caught the ball on the right wing, he used a left-handed dribble to surge past Kobe and bank in a floater from the lane. A family friend of Bens had filmed the game, and Ben, having kept the tape all these years and knowing he would be sitting down with Kobe, had converted the recording to a digital file. Then, once the YouTube meeting had ended, Ben had played the footage on the laptop, and one of his coworkers had taken care to capture Kobes reaction to it. There it all was, in cosmic juxtaposition. You could watch Kobe as a thirty-nine-year-old watch himself as a fourteen-year-old in real time.

That is hilarious, he said. Great defense, Kobe. Thats horrible defense. You can replay that all fucking day. Oh. My. God. Nawwwww! Thats funny. We only won four games that year.

SO WHERE were you when that helicopter slammed into that Calabasas hillside in January 2020? Fixing yourself a midday snack in the kitchen? Relaxing in your recliner? Cleaning the garage? Me, I was in my car, my two sons in the backseat, hustling home so my eight-year-old could change and get to his 3:45 basketball game. And when we got thereI didnt notice it, but my son did, and he didnt tell me about it until after the gamethere was a player on the opposing team, his arms peeking out like sapling branches from underneath a white T-shirt and a green tank top, the word KOBE written in black marker on his sleeve. You dont forget a day like that. You dont forget a death that causes the global compass to tremble.

That was Kobe Bryants reach and power. We attach so much to our athletes. We see what they have done and can do. Thats their gravitational pull, the attraction they have to us. They give us a standard to aspire to, a bar against which the rest of us can measure ourselves, and with Kobe, that pull was even stronger, because he was not limiting himself to basketball. He had been the executive producer of a short animated film, Dear Basketball, that had won an Academy Award and was based on a poem he wrote when he retired. In his post-Lakers life, he was, by all appearances, a loving husband to his wife, Vanessa, and a doting and demanding father to his four daughters. With time, with a media and fan base willing and eager to forgive, with the purchase of a gigantic diamond ring for Vanessa, he rendered the scandal that once stained his reputationa rape accusation and his arrest in Colorado in 2003an afterthought to most, though not all, of the public. He had put aside his petty wars with Phil Jackson and Shaquille ONeal. There seemed great things ahead for him, things beyond the five championships and the fifteen All-Star Games and the 33,643 points and the 2008 NBA Most Valuable Player Award and the self-certaintya belief in himself so absolute and obvious that it practically glowed and radiated from himrequired to take the final shot when everyone in the arena knows youre going to take it. And now all that excellence and redemption and promise had been extinguished, and there was no sense of it to be made. It was barely worth trying. You sat there and it sank in and you gaped and shook your head.

Those great things had begun in and around Philadelphia. It might not feel that way any longer, because Kobe was so much a part of Los Angeles for so longhad gone from boyhood to manhood there, always under the spotlights glarethat it seemed as if he had sprouted as a fully formed seventeen-year-old, complete with exquisite jump-shooting form, out of one of Hollywoods hills. But no. The great things had begun at Lower Merion, located on the Main Line, the posh suburb that hugged Philadelphias western border. They had begun on the courts of those neighborhoods and playgrounds and parks, in the stuffy gymnasiums of local high schools, and in the tournaments of the countrys AAU circuit. Sure, many Philadelphia natives still note that Kobe technically wasnt from the city, wasnt one of them, but ask yourself: Was there ever a player who better embodied what being a Philadelphia basketball player meant, what it looked likethe edginess, the kill-or-die-yourself competitiveness? It taught me how to be tough, how to have thick skin, he said in late 2015, before his final game in Philadelphia against the 76ers. Theres not one playground around here where people just play basketball and dont talk trash.

Those great things had begun with his high school coach, Gregg Downer, who formed and was formed by Kobe, who won a championship with him, too, and would love and be loyal to him forevermore, who collapsed to his kitchen floor, disbelief accelerating into despair, when the news of Kobes death broke. Those great things had begun with Treatman, who went from covering Kobe to befriending him, from a freelance sportswriter to one of Kobes most trusted confidants and to a mover-and-shaker in the world of Philly hoops. His 1992