Kobe Bryant: Why his basketball influences still resonate (2024)

Kobe Bryant was, of course, singularly driven as a player, and thus not usually able to do much in the way of one-on-one, long-form interviews. His focus on excelling, improving, retaining his skills and drive always was there, and his work always front of mind — the modern-day version, perhaps, of Ted Williams, of whom John Updike famously said, “Gods do not answer letters.” But as Bryant neared retirement as a player and moved into his second act of life, he eased up a little, at least sometimes, about some things.

So in 2017, I reached out to him about Isaiah Thomas. The then-Celtics’ guard was in the midst of his breakout, “back up the Brinks truck” season in Boston, when he finished fifth in MVP voting and averaged 28.9 per game in leading the Celtics to the Eastern Conference finals. A hip injury he’d played through for weeks rendered him almost useless against Cleveland, which dominated Boston en route to the gentleman’s sweep and a return trip to the Finals against Golden State. But Thomas’ greatest pain was in his soul.

As the playoffs began that April, Thomas’ younger sister, Chyna, was killed in an automobile accident in Federal Way, Washington. Thomas flew out to Washington state for her funeral just before Boston’s second-round series with Washington began, then flew back cross-country in time to play Game 1. In Game 2, two nights later, he put on what may be the single-most amazing individual performance I’ve ever witnessed in person: 53 points, including 29 in the fourth quarter and overtime, to lead Boston to victory. And during the series with the Cavaliers, Thomas mentioned how much Bryant had done for him in the last few weeks. Intrigued, I emailed Kobe, wondering why the all-time Laker had reached out to a (supposedly) hated Celtic.

He hit me back the next day.

I love his toughness and his work ethic. He just needs to stay the course.

The league has a ton of young stars emerging.

No one would have ever known had Thomas not shared that. But those were just some of the tentacles that Bryant had throughout the NBA. That did not make him unique; lots of superstars, from LeBron James to Chris Paul to Carmelo Anthony, reach out and reach back to their younger peers at moments of challenge and crisis. But it exemplifies, in life and in death, how much Bryant is still revered — not just by the all-time greats, but by most everyone who suits up, and by many who sit on the bench.

A year after Kobe’s death in a helicopter crash, and the deaths of his daughter Gianna, Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, his wife, Keri, and their daughter Alyssa, Mamba Sports Academy basketball coach Christina Mauser, Sarah and Payton Chester and pilot Ara Zobayan, Bryant’s footprints around the NBA remain, his influence still vast, its depth substantial.

“We know Kobe the basketball player, the drive and the competitive nature, and the gifts and talent and the resume and all that stuff,” said Nets coach Steve Nash, who got to know Bryant as more than a rival once he became his Lakers teammate in 2012.

“What I think is important in my eyes is his kind of career arc,” Nash continued, “from some rough moments with his personality, to how he redeemed all that and became so beloved by so many. And, for me, most importantly, he was an incredible father. That, to me, is the tragedy of Kobe passing; he was an incredible father and was just starting to embark on that chapter of his life, that I think was remarkable and something I really admired about him.”

Bryant’s many traits, endearing and maddening, make writing about him, even now, a consistent challenge. He was a lightning rod in many quarters. His pursuit of excellence, of dominance, rubbed some teammates the wrong way. (Not all, and it would be wholly unfair to suggest otherwise. He had deep friendships with the likes of Pau Gasol, Derek Fisher and others.) Yet he was also the driving force behind the Lakers’ re-emergence to greatness, with Shaquille O’Neal. They were as lethal a one-two punch as the NBA has produced on one team, perhaps ever.

The Lakers won three straight titles with the two of them leading the way, but Bryant then drove L.A. to two more rings as the sole leader of the band, in 2009 and 2010. And that decade of victory came just as the NBA’s current generation of superstars was watching as children.

Bryant’s story, with its highs and lows, was not linear. And in any discussion of his career, you have to constantly calibrate how much to emphasize the tipping point of his time in the public eye: the rape allegation against him by a hotel employee of an Eagle, Colo., resort in 2003. Charged with one count of felony assault, Bryant acknowledged having sex with the woman but said it was consensual. His attorneys aggressively challenged the woman’s version of what happened and threatened to explore her previous sexual history.

The woman chose not to testify in the criminal trial, and the charges were dropped, with Bryant acknowledging in a statement that while he believed the encounter was consensual, the woman did not. A civil lawsuit she filed against Bryant was settled in 2005.

To frame the aftermath from Bryant’s point of view would center him in the encounter, which would be incorrect. It is not what Bryant “learned” from what happened that should be emphasized. The woman, apparently bound legally from discussing what happened as part of the settlement, obviously would have been at a public disadvantage had she ever chosen to speak while he was alive, anyway – he being rich and famous and beloved, she having none of those arrows available.

Yet it would be unfair to Bryant as well to unilaterally determine that nothing changed in him afterward. People do change. They can evolve. And Bryant, who came to have three daughters with his wife, Vanessa, famously became a “Girl Dad,” as ESPN’s Elle Duncan recalled. Bryant not only championed Gianna’s emerging development as a basketball talent — she’d hoped to play at UConn — but publicly extolled the WNBA and women’s basketball at all levels. He mentored superstars like Sabrina Ionescu, helping her find the details in her already-great game while at Oregon that could make her even more dominant as a pro.

The WNBA doesn’t need men to say nice things about it for validation. But Bryant’s public allyship came at an important moment for the league, as its players led the way in speaking out on social justice issues surrounding Black and Brown and LGBTQ+ communities. The WNBA announced the creation of the Kobe and Gigi Bryant WNBA Advocacy Award, “which will recognize an individual or group who has made significant contributions to the visibility, perception and advancement of women’s and girls’ basketball at all levels,” last year.

“For whatever reason, trolls enjoy to talk about women’s basketball and say it’s not a sport and tell us all of these different things,” Atlanta Dream guard Renee Montgomery said. “But when you have one of the greatest players ever saying ‘I love women’s basketball, it’s a great sport,’ he’s wearing the orange hoodie, he’s at the games, he’s sitting courtside, you can see him fanning out over certain players. Well, that kind of confuses a lot of trolls. Like, ‘Wait, we love Kobe, we definitely know Kobe knows basketball. Well, what’s going on here?’ They start to get a little confused and have a little identity crisis because they don’t know which way to go.”

Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality,” of course, is cited frequently by players today, a catchall for excellence and drive. “It’s that ‘it’ factor,” Montgomery said. Or, as Kyle Korver put it on TNT’s “The Arena” Thursday: “He found the details, and then he conquered the details, and then he found the details in the details.”

Nets guard Bruce Brown grew up just outside of Boston.

“So I was always on the other end, watching Kobe, being a Celtics fan, not wanting him to do well out there,” Brown said.

“But, the man was different. He did everything out there. My last game, actually, going to an NBA game before I played in the league, was Kobe playing at the Celtics. He went off. For me, my personal game, he was a dog. He didn’t care about anything out there. There was no friends out there. He went out there and played hard. So that’s what I try to do every night — go out there and be a dog, don’t care who I’m guarding. I guard the best player every night at the offensive end, and go out there and try to stop him.”

Born in the late ’90s or early 2000s, many of the younger heads who are now playing in the NBA never saw Michael Jordan live, his accomplishments, to them, limited to a YouTube highlight here or there. Kobe was their North Star, the Leviathan who destroyed worthy opponents and won championships, the one whose game they emulated and tried to recreate in driveways and dirt courts. Wadding up a piece of paper and yelling ‘Kobe!’ as you tossed it into the trash became a national default for a generation of up-and-coming hoopers; Bryant’s appearance onthe 2008 U.S. Men’s Olympic team in China was one of the first catalysts in the restructuring of USA Basketball into a once-again dominant international squad.

“LeBron, at that time, LeBron was up and coming too,” said Timberwolves guard Josh Okogie. “Everybody knew LeBron was going to be great. But at that time, Kobe was like, the God. Everybody wanted a Kobe Bryant jersey. I remember my first pair of Kobes. They were Kobe 4s. I was in the eighth grade. I had a pair of white and red Kobe 4s. And when I tell you, I wore these shoes on the court, I wore these shoes to school, I wore them with some jeans. It didn’t matter where I was going; I wore these shoes. And when I put them on, I just like, I felt like, I don’t want to say the shoes gave me power, but I felt like I was the man when I had them shoes.”

Lest you think Bryant just impacted the kids, though, he got in everyone’s head.

“We had this saying (about Bryant): ‘Pick your poison, but both of them are poison,'” 76ers coach Doc Rivers said, who detailed the hours that he and Tom Thibodeau, an assistant with Rivers in Boston, spent trying to just make the same coverages against Bryant look different, just to buy their defense — maybe — an extra second or two before Bryant figured it out.

“After Game 1 (of a playoff series), pretty much, he knew what you were going to do defensively,” Rivers said. “And so we switched guys all the time. We’d come out of a timeout, Paul Pierce is guarding him. We’d come out of the next timeout, (Rajon) Rondo’s guarding him. We come out of the next timeout, Ray Allen’s guarding him. You just had to give him different looks, different people, to keep him off balance as much as possible.”

No one loved mind games more than Lance Stephenson; he lived for defensive matchups against the league’s best scorers while with the Pacers. Stephenson is from Brooklyn and attended the famed Lincoln High on Coney Island, winning four straight city titles and finishing as the school’s all-time leading scorer, ahead of the likes of Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair. Stephenson’s battles with LeBron in NBA playoff series were fierce and memorable.

And yet one guy reduced “Born Ready,” mentally, to rubble.

“When I played against him, I was on the Grizzlies, but I wasn’t on the first unit — I was on the second unit,” Stephenson recalled. “So I got to guard him some points of the game. And he was just not trying to give no type of (rest). He was going right at me. And I ain’t gonna lie. You know how you got the chills when you guarding somebody? Every time I guard somebody, I’m like going after them, trying to stop them, not caring. But when I guarded Kobe, I got the chills, like ‘I can’t make a mistake, because if I do, I know he’s gonna make the shot.’ So, like, I was guarding him super carefully. He gave me a type of chills like I never had when I was going against anyone.”

A year ago, who didn’t, among us, break down into sobs, not able to comprehend that someone who had so seemingly, deftly, turned the page on his career and moved into his next life had lost his life, at 41? It seemed impossible.

It still does. Only now do we see the skies clearing and realize that he’s still around, in the unseen places where he can still have the greatest impact.

Related Reading

Remembering Kobe Bryant: More reading

Related Listening

(Top Photo: Noah Graham /NBAE via Getty Images)