Hard 8
Rest In Peace, Kobe Bryant…
In 2004, I packed up my car and drove west. (Well, and a bit south.) 2,343 miles, to be exact. From Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California. I made the entire journey by myself,¹ because I was heading to a city where I knew absolutely no one. After graduating from college, I was starting a new life.
A year and change later, I still knew basically no one. I had worked a half dozen jobs trying to break in to Hollywood.² I got a lot of people a lot of coffee. I was pretty lonely. But at the end of many of those days, during a certain time of year, I had one thing to look forward to: basketball.
Specifically, watching basketball. On TV.³ And given my location, that meant one team: the Los Angeles Lakers.⁴
When people hear about my Lakers fandom — or just read Twitter — they’re often surprised. And the above is the long-winded answer. I liked to watch the Lakers because I was a lonely transplant to Los Angeles with nothing else to do. They were my respite. All things being equal, I would have preferred to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers, but that wasn’t an option. And actually, that’s not the full picture either.
While I did enjoy watching the Lakers games, what I actually enjoyed about them really boiled down to one thing: Kobe Bryant.
With the news of his tragic passing today, that’s where my mind is traveling. To all those games watching Kobe and the Lakers. This was the era just after Shaquille O’Neal had left the team. The “rebuilding” era. The team wasn’t great. But Kobe was. He was absolutely electric to watch every single night.
Thinking back on it now, I think it’s fair to say that I wasn’t actually a Lakers fan, I was a Kobe fan.
I have always been the type of person who greatly admires people who are truly exceptional at what they do. It’s both inspiring and aspirational — even if you don’t do what it is that these people do — to be so good at something so as to transcend everyone else in the field. That was Kobe Bryant during those years that I watched him in Los Angeles. Sure, they weren’t winning titles every year, but you knew Kobe would put everything he had into getting them back to the point where they were doing that again. And he eventually did.
It’s largely the same reason why I’ve loved watching tennis over the past decade or so. We happened to have been living in an era when a set of the best players of all time — maybe the three best in mens and a fourth on the other side who is almost certainly the best ever in her field — have been battling. In 50 years, I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw those players play. Tiger Woods in golf. Mike Trout in baseball. The same is true with Kobe. Love him or hate him, you simply have to acknowledge that watching him play basketball was something special. Something you’ll talk about in 50 years.
January 22, 2006 seemed like any of those mundane, rather sad days I talked about above. Except on that day something magical happened. There I was watching the barely .500 Lakers play the even more woeful Toronto Raptors. The Lakers were down 18 at one point in the third quarter.⁵ That’s when Kobe kicked it into another gear.
He had 47 halfway through the third. Then 53. Then 64. Then 67. Then 72. Then 74. Then…
It was unlike anything I had ever seen and unlike anything I have ever seen in the nearly 15 years since. It was not the Raptors versus the Lakers that night, it was the Raptors versus Kobe. They knew it. He knew it. They could not stop him. And his 81 points led the Lakers to an 18 point victory. It seemed impossible. At the same time, it seemed nothing was impossible.
Years later, I had the chance to meet Kobe Bryant briefly in a very different setting. It was that moment — watching the 81-point game, alone in my studio apartment in LA, in a state of euphoria — which flashed into my head; it was truly surreal. I had come a long way. And Kobe, by virtue of his greatness on the court, had helped me weather a rather trying time.
I would never dare mention this in such an encounter, of course. But I’m confident he knew that his quest for greatness in his arena inspired a lot of people in many different ways. That’s the thing: it’s not even what he did, it’s the way he did it. It was about far more than basketball.
I’m a big believer in intangibles; in certain things being transmitted even if it seems that there’s no direct path. Kobe Bryant wasn’t just great at basketball because of his skillset. That was part of it, sure. But what made him truly transcendent was his drive, passion, and sheer will. You can compare stats and rings and what not, but these intangibles are the things that you can’t measure which are nevertheless conveyed in ways big and small.
I realized this far more clearly after he retired from the game, hearing him talk about his other endeavors. A lot of celebrities and certainly many athletes blow a lot of smoke in talking up side hustles. This was not Kobe Bryant. He was more than thoughtful about anything of which he spoke. Listening, you just felt that he was going to do whatever it took to reach success at that thing. No matter what it was. And that’s the real tragedy here: that he was still such a young person — 41 years old⁶— and could have focused that drive on so many more endeavors.⁷
The year after that 81-point game, Kobe switched his number from 8 to 24.⁸ And I moved away from Los Angeles. Kobe will always be number 8 in my mind and in my lonely, young heart. These are the things that I’ll remember when talking about Kobe Bryant in 50 years. What a sad, tragic day.
¹ Aside: this was actually the reason I bought my first Apple product ever. An iPod. Just so I had something to do — my entire music library, plus some audiobooks— on that journey.
² Not to be an actor, mind you (which is what most people probably assume when they read that sentence). Or even a writer (which is what most people who live in LA probably assume when they read that sentence). Just to be anything. To get some toe-hold in some door.
³ I couldn’t even afford my studio apartment in LA with what I was making — thank you, mom and dad for your help — let alone going to NBA games.
⁴ You didn’t really think I was going to say the Clippers, right? They were still owned by Donald Sterling at the time, after all. That said, I did go to a Clippers game once — to see LeBron James and the Cavs!
⁵ I know this because I actually have the Gchat logs saved in my Gmail, chatting with a friend — back home in Ohio — while watching the game.
⁶ The fact that he was only three years older than myself right now is a harrowing reminder of life being both unpredictable and short. Do the most you can with it because why the hell wouldn’t you? Aim to inspire others.
⁷ The passing of his young daughter and the other young people in the same crash is simply unspeakable for that very reason above. I have a young daughter. I can’t even go there. I’m sorry.
⁸ One final footnote to say thank you to number 8. RIP.
