Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bryant: The Obsessive Who Willed Himself Great

On 13 April 2016, in the last basketball game of his life, a thirty-seven-year-old with a rebuilt Achilles tendon scored 60 points against Utah. It remains the most anyone has scored in a final regular-season game. He had announced his retirement five months earlier in a poem called Dear Basketball that began from the premise that his body knew it was time to say goodbye. The body knew. He made it perform once more anyway.

An Italian Childhood

Kobe Bean Bryant was born in Philadelphia on 23 August 1978, the son of the NBA player Joe "Jellybean" Bryant and Pam Cox Bryant, and was named after Kobe beef his parents had seen on a restaurant menu. When he was six the family moved to Italy, where his father played out his career, and Kobe grew up across Rieti, Reggio Emilia and Pistoia. He became fluent in Italian and Spanish as well as English.

That detail explains more than it appears to. He arrived back in America at thirteen as a foreigner in his own country, a boy who had learned basketball as a European studies a subject, from film and repetition rather than playground osmosis. The outsider's analytical distance never left him.

Lower Merion, and the Leap

At Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, he became a phenomenon. As a senior he carried the school to its first state championship in fifty-three years with a 31-3 record, averaging 30.8 points a game, and left as south-eastern Pennsylvania's all-time leading scorer with 2,883 points, a mark that had belonged to Wilt Chamberlain.

He then skipped college entirely. The Charlotte Hornets took him thirteenth overall in the 1996 draft and traded him immediately to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he would stay for twenty years. Twelve teams had passed on him. At eighteen he won the 1997 Slam Dunk Contest and made the All-Rookie Second Team; the rest of the league had begun to understand what it had declined.

Three Rings, and the Split

Paired with Shaquille O'Neal and coached by Phil Jackson inside the triangle offence, Bryant won three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002, the last such run the NBA has seen. It was also a partnership that could not hold. Both men wanted the same territory, and when it broke apart Bryant was left to prove he could win as the sole axis of a team.

He eventually did. He was named Most Valuable Player in 2008, then won back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010, taking Finals MVP both times. Along the way he passed Jerry West to become the Lakers' all-time leading scorer, in a franchise that had employed Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. Five championships, eighteen All-Star selections, two scoring titles, and 33,643 career points at 25.0 a game, fourth on the all-time list. With the United States national team he went 26-0 and won Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012.

Eighty-One

On 22 January 2006 he scored 81 points against Toronto, the second-highest single-game total in NBA history behind Chamberlain's 100. That season he averaged 35.4 points a game, only the fifth player ever to clear 35.

The most revealing thing about the 81 is a remark he made years afterwards. Told that his teammate Smush Parker had been the second-highest scorer on the floor that night, Bryant replied: "Now you know why I had to score 81." He was not joking, and he was not being generous. He had already said publicly that Parker was the worst and should not have been in the NBA. This was the man entire: brilliant, contemptuous, and incapable of pretending otherwise.

Colorado

In 2003 Bryant was arrested in Colorado and charged with sexual assault. The criminal case was dismissed after his accuser declined to testify, and a related civil suit was settled. He maintained that the encounter had been consensual. Time's assessment is that the case threatened his family and his career, and that he went on performing at the highest level for more than a decade afterwards.

It cannot be filed away as a footnote to a sports record, and any account of him that omits it is dishonest. It sits permanently beside everything else in this biography.

Mamba Mentality, and Dear Basketball

He took the nickname Black Mamba from Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, and built around it a public philosophy of extreme focus and self-punishment. "I would go 0 for 30 before I would go 0 for 9," he said. "0 for 9 means you beat yourself." The Mamba Mentality became shorthand for a work ethic bordering on pathology, and it outlived his playing career; it is now quoted by athletes in sports he never played.

A torn Achilles in April 2013 effectively ended his prime, and the last three seasons were a slow, public dismantling. When he retired he did not drift. In 2018 he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Dear Basketball, the animated version of his retirement letter, making him the only person ever to hold both an Olympic gold medal and an Oscar. Time described him as intellectually sophisticated, a man with a brain as elevated as his body.

Why Kobe Is Called a Genius

This is a genius of preparation and of physical craft, not of intellect, and it is worth being exact about what that means. Bryant's gift was not freakish athleticism; several contemporaries jumped higher and ran faster. What he possessed was an almost forensic capacity to study the game and then rebuild his own body to execute what the study demanded. He dismantled Michael Jordan's footwork frame by frame and reassembled it in himself. His fadeaway was not instinct; it was a manufactured solution to the problem of being guarded by people his own size. Time called him the fair heir to Jordan, and the inheritance was deliberate rather than accidental.

The second component is volitional rather than technical: an ability to sustain that regime for twenty years without the boredom or complacency that ends most careers. Scoring 60 points at thirty-seven on a broken body is not talent. It is twenty years of accumulated deposits being withdrawn at once.

The counter-case has three parts and all are fair. First, the label rests on craft and will, not on originality of thought; he perfected an existing game rather than reinventing it, as Stephen Curry arguably did. Second, the same obsessive certainty that produced the 81 made him a poor teammate for long stretches, publicly contemptuous of players who could not match him, and there is a serious argument that his shot volume cost his teams as often as it won them games. Third, and most gravely, the 2003 case means that any account of his character must sit alongside an allegation he never faced trial for. Genius, here, describes a method, not a man.

Legacy: Calabasas

His last tweet, sent on the night of 25 January 2020, congratulated LeBron James for passing him on the all-time scoring list: "Continuing to move the game forward @KingJames. Much respect my brother." The next morning, on 26 January, a helicopter went down in Calabasas, California, killing Bryant, his thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others.

The grief was global and disproportionate even by the standards of celebrity death, because he had died in the middle of a second act nobody had finished watching, and because Gianna died with him. The Lakers had already retired both his numbers, 8 and 24, on 18 December 2017, making him the only player in NBA history with two retired jerseys at one franchise. He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020 and named to the NBA's 75th Anniversary Team in 2021, and the league renamed its All-Star Game MVP award after him. He is remembered, accurately, as the most relentless worker his sport has produced.

Achievements

• Worked as basketball player, screenwriter and professional athlete