Kobe Bryant: From ashes to ashes

It was a regular day of a regular month. A gym in a school called Lower Merion High school was abuzz with a throng of media people waiting to hear the next big announcement. Amid the clamour, a young kid sat across the table and announced, “I have decided to skip college and take my talents to the NBA”.

The room erupted, for it was unprecedented. Hardly anyone thought the words had merit. Here was yet another kid all, but ready to come and falter at the biggest stage.

It was reckless but it was news fodder, important for the newspapers to keep their sports sections churning. Evidently, a kid who addresses a room full of media journalists with a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his head did not really build a very good case for seriousness.

That day announced the arrival of Kobe Bean Bryant on the NBA landscape.

He was making ripples much before that with his superb performances in high school games, but that press conference was what made it suddenly real. And that press conference was probably the only time Kobe Bryant acted his age, a teenage kid with a wealth of potential, giddy with happiness at the prospect of playing the sport he loved as a professional and trying to step in the shoes of all the legends he had tacked up on his wall as a kid. What that press conference conveyed regarding Kobe’s demeanour is what became his defining trait for nearly two decades in the league – supreme, unwavering, jaw-dropping self-confidence.

Bryant was selected 13^th overall by the Charlotte Hornets and traded on a draft day trade to the Los Angeles Lakers. And so the lanky kid arrived in the city of Angels ready to carve his career out as an NBA player. As a player out of high school he had a lot of growing up to do. The Los Angeles Lakers are a team deeply entrenched in NBA history as one of the greatest, most successful franchises. The clientele of NBA players that have graced the purple and gold is formidable. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, the names are household names for anyone remotely interested in the NBA. To be facing the prospect of filling the shoes of these players, maybe outperform them, is an idea which can easily cause anxiety issues.

The NBA as such was also entering the post Michael Jordan phase. It was not easy for anyone to digest the fact that Michael Jordan, a name so synonymous with success when it comes to basketball, would not be playing on a nightly basis. All everyone wanted was to look for the next Michael Jordan, as the void he was going to leave would be too big to contemplate. That started the inevitable Jordan comparisons, something Bryant has never shed till date. A shooting guard with the same height, the same shooting touch, the same swagger?

It was easy for the general public to mould Bryant in Jordan’s image; this made the fact that Jordan was not around a little easy to bear. It also put a different kind of pressure on the then very young, very raw Bryant’s shoulders.

Kobe Bryant kept developing, kept winning and entered the Shaquille O’Neal era of his career. Throughout all his achievements, Bryant never put a foot wrong; always respectable, very media savvy and extremely mature for someone his age. The championships that followed stoked the already burning fire comparing him to Jordan, but he developed something else that compared him to Jordan too, an ego just as big.

The ugly spat that followed and O’Neal’s subsequent departure to Miami were just the side-effects of two huge superstars not wanting to do anything with each other. The only blot on Bryant’s impeccable media image came when he was accused of sexual assault in 2003. Though the charges were dropped, the whole fiasco left a bad taste in many people’s mouths. Post 2003, with the Lakers reeling, Kobe Bryant transformed into a scoring machine putting up numbers across the board that are hard to fathom in the current NBA, doing whatever it took to will the Lakers to victory.

For Bryant, the game of basketball has always been more than the sum of its parts. Some of it has to do with the tremendous influence Phil Jackson has had in shaping Bryant as an NBA player. There is a sort of poetry in play when you watch Bryant play the game, an orchestra playing with impeccable amount of equal parts precision and grace, the sizing up of opponents, the jab steps, the pump fakes, the fade-away jumpers, it all seems like an undisturbed symphony. Bryant admitted in an interview that he feels the game of basketball is like chess. If his theory is correct, Bryant is one of the best grandmasters the game has seen, always one step ahead of his opponents.

Sure, LeBron James is the greatest player in the game today, will probably go down in history as being a better player than Bryant, but he won’t and can’t match the grace with which Bryant has operated in nearly two decades in the league.

There are different things that define NBA players. Each and every legend that has played the game had defining traits to their games that made them who they were. Magic Johnson was a basketball magician; his passes still draw awe even after nearly 25 years since his retirement. Larry Bird personified the poor white trash image; a player with athletic boundaries but an indomitable will to win and amazing passing skills to boot. Michael Jordan personified basketball itself; the desire, the sheer ferocity, the raw athleticism and that supreme confidence with which he operated on the court. For Kobe Bryant, forever set against the image of Jordan, it would be a task to incorporate all of those traits into his game.

Bryant had the same desire to win, the same tenacity, the same hunger, but would they translate into championships? Would his rampant copying of moves result in on court success? These were the questions that hounded Bryant ever since he transformed into something the people could put on a pedestal Jordan graced. And he never shied away from the pressure. Sure, if we look at Kobe, it sometimes seems he lost his individuality somewhere in between trying to live up to Jordan and trying to be better than him. In spite of all that, it was still a joy to watch him play, a man armed with an arsenal of offensive weapons that made people react from, “That’s a textbook shot right there”, to, “Jesus Christ, how did he manage to get that in!”.

Two more championships followed, cementing Bryant’s place on the basketball pantheon as one of the greatest to have ever played the game, and certainly the greatest Laker of all time. He is one of the greatest clutch players to have ever played the game, a direct by-product of the swagger with which he operates on the court. Jordan was the greatest clutch player they say?

Bryant put shot after shot through the net in crunch time to never leave a doubt in anyone’s mind that writing him off at the end of the game can be the worst mistake you can make. It didn’t matter how strong the defense was on him or how difficult the shot was, Bryant had to take it. How else would he get rid of the ghost of Jordan he had on his back since the beginning of his career?

Sometimes, amid the throng of all the basketball being played, we tend to forget the dedication, the sacrifice it takes to still be impactful in an NBA game. Watching Kobe transform has been one of those moments when you sit back and comprehend the enormity of it all, not without some semblance of admiration seeping in.

Whether you are a fan or not, some things are undeniable. The arc that Kobe’s career has taken, he doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone at this point. He doesn’t care what the perception of his words are to the general public, guessing from how he ripped into Smush Parker and his big boy pants comments to Pau Gasol.

When Bryant tore his Achilles at the age of almost 35, few people thought he could make a recovery. On the advent of his comeback, the Lakers put up a video with Bryant’s jersey in the forefront and rain, snow and wind smattering it. The video, although a little bit over the top, had a clear message – endurance.

Kobe Bryant has endured everything that a player possibly can over the tenure of an NBA career. He has been the one constant in the ever evolving list of NBA debates – Kobe vs. Tracy Mcgrady, Kobe vs. Allen Iverson, Kobe vs. Steve Nash, Kobe vs. Vince Carter and Kobe vs. LeBron James. This is probably the greatest testimony to his illustrious career. Not the championships, not the rings, not the clutch play, but the simple fact that Kobe Bryant has stood steadfast among every player debate that has occurred during the time he has played at a superstar level.

The physical limitations have set in, he can no longer jump that high or be as effective on both ends of the floor as he could be when he was say, 28, but that has not dimmed the fire, and therein lies one of his biggest strengths – the ability to adapt. Averaging 27 points at the age of 34 is a marvellous feat, but we’ve become accustomed to Bryant defying the odds. That’s what makes him so watchable, so great.

The will power to not give up, playing through the pain of a broken nose, a broken shooting finger, a broken leg, a torn Achilles tendon, taking cortisone injections on the ruptured ligament on his wrist, just so he could go out and play and help his team; limitation is not a word anyone has ever associated with Kobe Bryant, because he has, throughout his career never let a single thing get in the way in his quest of becoming the greatest of all time.

In 2005, before his two subsequent championships, Kobe told ESPN columnist JA Adande, “I hope, one day, people will look back at my career and see everything that I’ve been through, everything that my fans have been through … and I just stayed steady. I didn’t wig out. I just stayed steady, I stayed professional.”

“And at the end of the day, when it’s my last year, people can look back and say, ‘You know what? He had a hell of a career; he was a hell of a basketball player, a hell of a person.’ And then they’ll appreciate all the years prior, too.”

He has not retired. He is on the books for two more seasons, but admittedly as soon as Bryant retires the NBA will be 25% less interesting. For the first time in his career, his performance will not be evaluated on the performances of his peers. He is past that phase of his career. Now the only measuring stick to Kobe’s performance on the court is well, Kobe Bryant himself.

Time will pass and the images of Bryant’s jutting jaw, the walk to the bench with swagger, the game winners will all fade. Maybe he will go at the right time. The current version of the NBA does not match with Bryant’s mentality and his views of the game; he’s never been analytical, never kept a count of his shots, never tried to maintain an efficiency level like the current NBA players. He wanted to win, whether it came by virtue of him putting up 40 shots a game or 4. Maybe he will nail his retirement like Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan, who retired at the perfect time only to make a comeback and mess it up. Maybe he will continue stubbornly till he realizes his physical limitations are too much of a detriment to the image he has of himself in his mind.

Whatever be the case, Kobe Bryant in a few years will be a sure-fire Hall of Famer, one of the greatest players to have ever played the game of basketball, one of the only players to ever draw comparisons with Michael Jordan at the shooting guard position, and his jersey will join the jerseys of the players in the rafters of Staples Center, his number 24 retired just like all the legends prior to him. Legends he grew up idolizing.

When it is over, which will be sooner rather than later, when he dons the Lakers jersey for the last time, laces his sneakers up and walks out on the court, the greatest rush for all his die-hard fans will not be the anticipation of another clutch shot by the crunch-time maestro, it won’t be one of those customary pull up jumpers he has hit on the face of almost every player in the league, but it will be when amid all the emotion the announcer’s voice booms in Staples Center calling, for the final time:

“And the other guard, 6-6, from Lower Merion High School Kobe Bryant.”