A star is mourned; His name was Kobe
Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash
Kobe Bryant is gone. Just a little more than a day since it happened and the permanence of that statement is still stone heavy in my chest.
Kobe was the singular player of my era on the team I’ve loved since discovered basketball. I wouldn’t call him a hero, given our relative similarity in age. Magic Johnson filled that role for me growing up.
No, watching Kobe play the game was witnessing the seemingly simple and effortless layers of his artistic genius peeled back one at a time. Stripped to the skill, then the work, then the single-minded focus, then the insecurity, then the stubbornness, then the ego, then the mistakes, and finally to the love at the center of it all, a passion that made him maddeningly certain of himself.
But the thing about heroes is that they are human and fragile and beholden to the same dangers as the rest of us.
I think what made Kobe such an icon to his fans was that if you watched him long enough, you came to the same conclusion everyone else did: he was a true believer in himself, willing to use anyone and anything as motivation to prove that belief valid over and over again.
That certainty made him capable of amazing things in basketball and his pursuits off the court. It also made him struggle with his role and responsibilities when he’d caused others pain.
And I think it made the rest of us looking on wonder, at times, if he was fully human. He seemed like he was the product of his own will and some freak giftedness all at the same time, something that resembled our dreams of being special but only our dreams.
But the thing about heroes is that they are human and fragile and beholden to the same dangers as the rest of us. We build monuments of their mystiques, trade interest for infatuation with their abilities, invest our collective hopes in their singularity.
All of this makes it easy to forget the impermanence of it all, the way some people make us forget the transience of existence, if just for a while, because of their proximity to our aspirations.
I guess this is what I’m taking away from this tragic situation. I don’t want to make a metaphor of a man.
Photo by Marcel Schreiber on Unsplash
Yesterday, that proximity was lost. The news of Kobe’s death, for me, was seismic. It was also somewhat familiar.
All these years later, I can still summon the sensation of hearing that Magic had contracted HIV. I was a sophomore in high school, and my friend Elaine found me in class to ask if I’d heard the news. I had not.
When she finished telling me, I stood up and left. Walked off campus and spent a couple hours wandering around. In my head, this was a death sentence.
Later, someone wheeled a TV cart into the weight room on campus and I watched Magic’s press conference where he confirmed the rumors, tried to set people’s minds at ease about his prognosis, and retired at 32 years old.
When it was over, I was sick, physically. I tried to believe it when he said he planned to go on and live a long and healthy life. But I also knew that people going public about having HIV usually meant AIDS would claim them soon. That’s how it felt back then, that my hero was fragile and human and dying.
Except he didn’t. Instead, Magic went on to reach a zero-viral load with treatment, become likely the most humanizing face of efforts to change the public perception of HIV, and construct one of the most successful post-sports business careers of any athlete I can think of. In essence, he’s lived long enough to redeem much of what once felt lost.
Kobe, on the other hand, will not. In shocking fashion, he’s gone just as he was setting out to accomplish the goals he had for after sports. As a parent. A writer. An investor. And a man.
At the same time, as complicated as it is to ponder in this moment, he also still had work to do. Like any human does. And also unlike most of us. In Kobe fashion, nothing he needed to work through was small, including his flaws.
I guess this is what I’m taking away from this tragic situation. I don’t want to make a metaphor of a man. I don’t want to shield myself from the full expression of who Kobe was so that I can only quote his inspirational words or reference the way he played the game.
At the same time, I want to hold space for the side of him that gave passionately to a variety of causes and doted unreservedly on his kids—the fact that he was flying with his daughter GiGi to one of her basketball games is so emblematic it hurts—along with the side of him that was so self-assured he had yet to reckon with some of his weakest moments.
Maybe I want to maintain my hope that he would mature enough as a man to be capable of performing the labor that would lead to fuller levels of atonement.
Maybe I just remember that we so often build idols to eventually betray us, but the models we fashion them after are people and people are always more complicated than the portraits we paint of them.
In Jim Murray’s classic 1998 column “A star is born; His name is Kobe,” the venerable L.A. writer poked fun at the hype of biblical proportions surrounding the then 19-year-old kid still just beginning his ascent of the mountain of fame that would eventually render so many people speechless at the news of his death. Deft as always and armed with various scriptural allusions, Murray poked fun at the unique reality that existed in the space between fans’ overblown expectations and Kobe’s dizzying level of potential.
But it’s not the jokes that came that came back to me in the aftermath of Kobe’s death. It was the now somewhat prophetic last paragraph
“Any way you look at it, you might want to get his autograph before he ascends into hoops heaven. He won't be hard to find. He'll be the one walking through doors without opening them.”
I wonder, though, given Kobe’s rejection of doing anything with the mere goal of being good enough, if we are more likely to find him there lamenting the things he never got to accomplish despite all that he did.