The Mamba Effect
Kobe Bryant was ubiquitous.
Each era of the NBA has a hero, a definitive canonical figure or figures. The first wave saw Bill Russell leading the Boston Celtics to an impressive eight consecutive championships from 1959 to 1968; the second wave brought us Julius “Dr. J” Irving who singlehandedly introduced the “slam dunk” into the game’s basic vernacular; the third wave brought forth the double-act of Bird v. Johnson of the “Showtime!” era that brought a Tempest-like drama to the game; the fourth wave saw the impossible air-bending feats of Michael Jordan. Whether or not you were a Lakers fan, Kobe Bryant was a hero for the millennial age, the fifth wave of NBA stardom, a maestro who awed us with the impossible-to-count buzzer-beaters (the one during Game 4 of the first round of the 2006 NBA Playoffs against the Phoenix Suns comes most immediately to mind for me); the unbelievable 81-point game; and the slew of records he broke, one after the other. You wouldn’t have the current crop of wily shooting guards of Generation Z without him. There are thousands of kids across the world named Kobe. To this day, and perhaps today more than ever, you can’t walk around the streets of Los Angeles without seeing at least a dozen Kobe Bryant jerseys.
But you didn’t have to be a basketball player or even an athlete to find inspiration in his resilience. A transcendent energy, his work ethic reverberated beyond sports; I’ve always vowed to love as much and work as tirelessly as he did for the game. His love for the game manifested itself in his 20-year career, the continued intimacy he maintained after his retirement and in his off-court ventures — perhaps the most public culmination came in the form of his 2018 Oscar win for his short animated film Dear Basketball (based on a beautiful 2015 love letter of the same name posted to The Player’s Tribute). His priorities were based in perfecting every single element his game, he was all about the granularities of the game, frequently pontificating on the minutiae of practice. In an interview with ESPN, Chris Bosh said as much about Kobe’s unrelenting work ethic during USA Basketball practice: “We're in Las Vegas and we all come down for team breakfast at the start of the whole training camp. And Kobe comes in with ice on his knees. He's got sweat drenched through his workout gear. And I'm like, 'It's 8 o'clock in the morning. Where is he coming from?'
A high pain threshold allowed him to play through injuries for which players nowadays would call entire seasons out. A utilitarian on the court, he was a master of both offense and defense, sparing his body of unnecessary movement for the highest possible return investment. Questionable, however, was his treatment of opponents and teammates on the court which mirrored that of the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket or J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. He was tough. He was fiery. He was a competitor. This was his trademark Mamba Mentality, and it effectively shaped the current incarnation of the NBA.
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Kobe Bryant was the first basketball player I remember ever being aware of; well, both Kobe and Shaq since they were the bigs on the Lakers at the time. Growing up in Southern California and having been born to a family of die-hard Lakers fans, it was seemingly in my DNA to follow suit; “I bleed purple and gold,” I proudly wrote on my MySpace page many moons ago. The 3-peat era in which the Lakers won three consecutive NBA championships was a renaissance for a team that yearned to relive the glory days of the Showtime! era but had faltered during the 1990s. The induction of the teenage prodigy from Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia into this rebuilt team signaled a new era for not only the team but for the league itself.
The resurgence of the team reinvigorated the entire Southland. Laker flags were strewn across cars on the freeway like a semaphoric army. When the Staples Center was opened and became the home court for the Lakers in 1999, downtown Los Angeles became the hub, an aural shift that reverberated across cities, states, countries. The single figure that represented this wave was Kobe. He was the standard-bearer of the game for people across the globe. It’s hard to dance around the fact that he was just so fucking exciting to watch. You never knew what he was going to do next. He remained beautifully unpredictable through to his retirement in 2016.
The zeitgeisty impact Kobe had on the City of Los Angeles was insurmountable. He possessed a Hollywood charisma but never allowed hubris to overshadow the work; even in the twilight of his career, he was the first one to practice and the last one to leave. Regardless if you thought he was greatest or not, each career milestone of Kobe’s — and at many points, it was difficult to keep track — was a cultural earthquake that still experiences aftershocks to his passing. Earlier, I was in my car outside my apartment smoking a cigarette and crying intermittently. Behind me, I see a postdates courier deliver food to one of my neighbors. The customer thanks the courier and says, “Rest in Kobe.” Currently, I am in a Lyft on my way to my sister’s and already I see Lakers flags on cars. On Twitter, I saw the Metrolink stops read Kobe above the turnstiles. Confused, grieving Lakers fans from across the Greater Los Angeles area have flocked to Staples Center, the very epicenter of Kobe’s legacy, for a communal morning. Today, and for the forthcoming days and weeks, the city is in mourning.
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You know when they say that just because you do something well doesn’t mean you can teach it well? Being a fluent English speaker doesn’t mean you can be an ESL teacher, or just because you’re a concert pianist doesn’t mean you have the patience to teach grade-schoolers basic scales. Kobe wasn’t just a marvel on the court. He wasn’t just the human highlight reel we celebrate for changing the game, but a team leader and facilitator who, at a particular point in his career, mentored teammates. Former Laker and teammate of Kobe’s Sasha Vujacic shared in a recent interview that “Kobe, from day 1, accepted me as a younger brother,” and that his mentorship drove the Lakers to back-to-back NBA Championship titles in 2009 and 2010.
Off the court, Kobe’s strength shone off the court, as a father, as a husband, as an ally, as a philanthropist. Though I didn’t know him personally, what I saw was a loving father who wanted to give everything to his girls, a dedicated husband who knew the boundaries between work and family. As a player, he began to use his platform to spread charity, but rather than just merely sign a check, he lent his talents personally. He opened the Kobe Bryant Basketball Camp in Santa Barbara, and in the offseason, embarked on a yearly tour across Asia. Following his retirement, Kobe was mostly seen at the sidelines of his daughters’ games. He lent his charitable nature to expanding diversity in the entertainment industry. In his heyday, Kobe was considered the second-coming of past greats like Wilt Chamberlain and Jordan. But the facet of Kobe that means more to me than the record-breaking team facilitator: Kobe the story-teller.
In 2009, the filmmaker Spike Lee and cinematographer Matthew Libatique expertly followed one such game in the magnificent documentary Kobe Doin Work. About 30 cameras fixed on the subject, we follow Kobe for a day and watch a late-season 2007 game nearly in real-time as we hear a player’s commentary. He’s humble, acknowledging plays that didn’t go as planned and mumbling asides to himself as a reminder to work on a particular facet of his game. He speaks highly of the storied, long-time head coach Phil Jackson, the Zen Master, and most memorable for me offers sweet pearls of wisdom about the game itself. More than any other account of the man, Kobe Doin Work demonstrated Kobe’s scholarly approach to the game; there was a solution for every problem. Sometimes it took years to reach that solution, but you don’t stop for anything.
“It’s just a beautiful game, isn’t it?” he genuinely pondered during the second quarter of Kobe Doin Work, comparing the kinetics of the triangle offensive strategy to a ballet. “It’s like a dance, a particular choreography. None of this exists in a vacuum.” And he’s not wrong, especially in regards to his own movements. Finesse is a word that was often used to describe Kobe Bryant, often as a derogatory (as if he lacked the opaque brute force of a LeBron James or the flashy stamina of an Allen Iverson). But it was the best way to describe the way he moved. Effectively finesse, he sailed through lines of defense with the precision of hummingbird, light on his feet like a prima ballerina in plays that crescendoed like a Stravinsky score into a far-flung buzzer-beating 3-pointer or an earth-shattering slam dunk. He wasn’t called the Black Mamba for no reason, an alpha on the paint who really appeared to foresee each shot, each pass, each play; I am far from the only one who cursed at an overly ambitious shot only to eat my words as soon as the ball miraculously made it into the hoop — how the fuck did he do that? How did he make it look so easy?