The Narrative of Kobe Bryant
This essay originally appeared in the anthology 11:59PM Sunday (Clover Press).
During the 2015–16 regular season, the average cost of a ticket to a Los Angeles Lakers game was approximately $US128. With celebrities courtside at most games, the truly talented blend with the mediocre; Jack Nicholson with George Lopez, Denzel Washington with Arsenio Hall. On Wednesday 13 April, the price of a single ticket soared and was reported by ESPN.com to have peaked at $US997. Those same celebrities would be courtside to say farewell for the team’s final game of the season, versus the Utah Jazz. There they would also farewell one of the Lakers’ all-time greats and one of the game’s most divisive figures, Kobe Bryant, in what would be his last NBA game.
Bryant’s final game was a microcosm of his career: he finished with 60 points, a record for a player in his final career game but also the highest number of field goal attempts by a player for the 2015–16 season, having taken 50 shots (a career high for Bryant). He shot the go-ahead basket, with 31.6 seconds remaining, like so many baskets before it—with little to no conscience. This final burst of glory wasn’t at all congruous with the year past; having announced this would be his final season in late 2015, Bryant limped through the year with a loss of athleticism that led to his lowest points-per-game average since his sophomore year in the league. Despite this, fans around the league were cheering where they had once booed. Where he was once a ball hog that had to win at all costs, these fans cheered at this now rebranded killer instinct.
Throughout Bryant’s career, his obsession with being the best bordered on maniacal, often alienating fans and media outlets as well as a selection of teammates. He made no secret of the player he imitated. ‘His technique was flawless, ’Bryant said about Michael Jordan in his wide-ranging 2015 interview with Ahmad Rashad for NBATV. ‘I wanted to make sure my technique was just as flawless.’ Tracy McGrady, a contemporary of Bryant, recalled staying with him in LA. Both immensely talented teenagers, McGrady remembered how a young Bryant would always watch Michael Jordan home movies, ‘emulating him on the basketball court; how he talks, how he walks, how he conducts himself'.
While Kobe Bryant’s career got a Hollywood ending, his obsession with being the best and beating the best was setting him up for failure. In his pursuit of Jordan’s accomplishments, he’d never win the six championships Jordan and his Chicago Bulls won. He’d never reach that mark media outlets and fans think defines a successful NBA player. Bryant would never emulate the Jordan narrative, the gold standard in professional basketball.
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In his 1994 essay ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’, David Foster Wallace analysed the ghosted sports memoir of the eponymous tennis star and asked why the public have an obsession with professional athletes. He theorised that watching the performance is not enough; that the public ‘want the Story’, to hear about ‘humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain.’ This stems, he argues, from our inability to see the ‘exquisite hybrid of animal and angel’ in ourselves.
Whether an athlete fits these ideals or not, the public will always find ways to fit a narrative to an athlete. For every good guy, there’s a bad guy; for every winner, there’s a loser. And Kobe Bryant was no different. Even as he entered the NBA as a self-assured, and some may argue arrogant, 18-year-old with the tiny ’fro, Bryant’s was a life a lot of the public would struggle to identify with. Spending the majority of his childhood in Italy where his dad, former NBA player Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant, played, he learnt to speak fluent Italian and appreciate soccer. And while there were flashes of early promise, it wasn’t until his fourth year in the NBA that he became a perennial All-Star. Bryant’s playing style fitted LA like a glove and, teaming with Shaquille O’Neal, the Lakers won the first of three successive championships during the 1999–2000 season, with former Bulls’ coach Phil Jackson using the same offence that won Michael Jordan his six championships.
But championships or no, people notice rape cases, especially those involving young basketball stars. In 2003 Bryant denied the allegation, although he admitted to a consensual affair, and settled out of court with an unknown amount paid to the victim. Damage to his reputation was indisputable with McDonald’s, among his largest sponsors, choosing not to renew his endorsement deal. Among the fallout and near-derailment of an NBA career, Bryant created a new name for himself: Black Mamba. As one of the fastest moving snakes on the planet and famed for its deadly aggression, Bryant felt the Black Mamba summarised his style of play perfectly; who he was now and who he was going to be.
By 2004, Bryant’s status as a belligerent teammate had also become an issue. Before the beginning of the 2004 season, Bryant and O’Neal’s public feud was mercifully finished with the Lakers trading O’Neal at the request of Bryant. This divided Los Angeles; you were either Team Kobe or Team Shaq. In the 2015 interview with Rashad, Bryant admitted to an animosity towards O’Neal. ‘I was obsessive,’ Bryant said. ‘He wanted to do it a different way.’
With O’Neal, one of the most dominant to ever play the game and a beloved figure in Los Angeles, now out of his way and a change of jersey number from 8 to 24 (one more than Jordan’s famous number 23) he’d win two more championships with his totalitarian leadership. But by the start of the 2010 season, Bryant was among the most disliked athletes in the US, despite winning his fifth championship the previous season. And despite LeBron James’s jersey burning in the streets of Cleveland following his defection to the Miami Heat, Bryant was still more disliked. His Q Score, a value measuring the familiarity and appeal of a brand, celebrity or sportsperson, was lower than James’s, placing Bryant in the company of Michael Vick (convicted of illegal dog fighting) and Tiger Woods (noted philanderer), among others.
Over the course of the next four years, Bryant’s playing style was not changing—he still hogged the ball and openly belittled teammates—but his narrative was. The public had accepted his story, and his disposition had shifted from belligerent to cantankerous. Videos were still making it to YouTube, now more funny than threatening. In a video from a Lakers practice from late 2014 he can be heard saying ‘Y’all motherfuckers ain’t doing shit for me!’ and storming off the court, having earlier called his team ‘Soft like Charmin’ (a brand of US toilet paper). At this stage of Bryant’s career he was in a losing race with time; injuries had ravaged his body and like any old man he couldn’t care less whose feelings he hurt. In the Rashad interview he justified these crotchety outbursts, saying ‘Leadership is lonely but that’s fine.’
As the 2016 season was winding down, Bryant’s career had come full circle. He had regained the ground he’d lost with fans. NBA.com listed his jersey as the third highest selling and even Shaq had forgiven his misdeeds. If the Big Aristotle could forgive him—going as far as to call him the greatest Laker of all time—why should the public’s hatred continue? People were now able to appreciate the killer instinct, sacrifice, precocity, liniment and pain, even if they hadn’t come from humble roots and at the expense of the team spirit. He was a reflection of society: always wanting what the other person’s got. But perhaps more importantly, Bryant had now accepted he wasn’t Jordan. He’d accepted and embraced his role as the villain and, ironically, was loved for it. This was his narrative.
Bryant had matured. This seismic shift from an athlete, always one of the more cerebral in professional sports, who when he realised that you can’t please everyone, he—or opportunistic, savvy marketing executives—had embraced the inevitable; the hatred, the steep decline in skill, while in the process showing he was human and had a sense of humour; something Bryant had been unable or unwilling to do throughout his twenty-year career.
In a Nike commercial where other professional athletes lauded praise on Bryant, the ad ends with fellow basketballer Kevin Durant describing Bryant and his in-game trash-talking with one word: ‘asshole’. Another Nike ad features Bryant as a maestro leading fans and opponents in a reimagined cover of the Otis Redding classic ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. But nowhere was this self-deprecating caricature more evident than in an ad for Apple TV with Bryant sitting with Michael B Jordan who is slated to play Bryant in a fictitious movie. Bryant is surprised to realise that Jordan would portray him throughout the entire film and as Jordan puts it, ‘Like a hero, on the verge of a steep decline’.
‘There’s a bit of a misconception that winner and success comes from everyone putting their arms around one another and singing Kumbaya ... ’ said Bryant to Rashad. ‘That’s not reality.’ It may have taken the public twenty years to realise but if you wanted the angel, you had to take the animal—flaws and all.
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Harold 'Baby' Miner was the first of the post-Jordan generation. He could dunk but that’s where the similarities started and ended. Then there were Penny Hardaway and Grant Hill, both careers cruelled by injury. Vince Carter was Jordan-like in a lot of ways except the most important: he lacked the killer instinct. LeBron James’s career is still a half-decade off judgement and then there is the recent emergence of Steph Curry for the Warriors. Kobe Bryant, however, remains the closest thing to Michael Jordan.
The mystique surrounding Michael Jordan’s career continues to grow, from the fallacy of him being cut from his high school varsity basketball team, to the five MVPs, to the videos of him dunking from the free-throw line. Then there are the six Final MVPs to go with his six championships—the last of which was won on a Jordan game-winner in his last game for the Chicago Bulls—not to mention the cultural impact of Space Jam and Air Jordans. His career reads like a storybook and remains the gold standard for all basketballers, something to be emulated and to strive for.
Narrative is critical to how the media and fans view basketball players but such a large part of narrative is made up of chance and probability, which is completely out of the control of the athlete. This chance could be as simple as injuries, or more abstract concepts like the city or the era in which the player plays. Jordan’s narrative, or rather the mystique surrounding it, is no different, having occurred in a pre-internet era and everything that comes with it: social media, the 24-hour news cycle and TMZ. A New York Times article by Andrew Keh reported how NBA players regularly check their phones during half-time of games. In early 2016, a rookie teammate of Bryant’s fell afoul of Laker players when a video he’d taken of Nick Young discussing an affair ended up on social media. Could it be that Jordan benefitted—by sheer chance—from playing in the era he did? With this, anecdotes of Jordan punching teammate Steve Kerr and bullying Luc Longley into catching the ball would no longer be seen as jocular stories of a bygone era, but bullying from one of the game’s greats.
Michael Jordan’s narrative will be forever unattainable—legacies tend to grow the longer a professional athlete has been retired, especially one saturated with nostalgia. It’s futile for current basketballers to try to mirror another player’s narratives when there are so many external factors outside their control; marketing, the media—both professional and social—and chance. Sporting narratives are individual with no ‘one-size fits all’ label. Bryant’s narrative will be forever linked with Jordan’s—a story, unknowingly created, of forever second-to-the-best, forever striving to mimic and recreate his hero’s accomplishments and just coming up short. In this way Bryant and Jordan were the same hyper-competitive arsehole who filled the same area of a Venn diagram—the part where obsession, skill, competitiveness and intelligence intersect. While Kobe Bryant’s and Michael Jordan’s playing days overlapped by a few years, they were separated by a generational gulf of iPhones, Twitter and YouTube. But only by pure chance.
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As the game finished between the Jazz and the Lakers, with the Lakers victorious and the audience giving a standing ovation, Bryant addressed the crowd from half-court. ‘The thing that had me cracking up all night long,’ said Bryant to the masses, ‘was that I go through twenty years of everybody screaming “Pass the ball” and on the last night everybody’s like “Don’t pass it!”’ before bursting into maniacal laughter. Bryant was greeted on-court by some—but not all—of his ex-teammates as he joined them in retirement. ‘It takes a lot of time to be a great friend or to be social,’ he said in the Rashad interview, ‘and that’s time I just wasn’t willing to give.’
As Kobe finished his address to the fans, he self-assuredly, and some would say arrogantly, finished with ‘What can I say? Mamba out.’ To some, he’ll always be the bad guy, the ball hog, aloof future Hall of Famer and Jordan wannabe. For once, he seems content with that story.