The Complicated Legacy of Kobe Bryant (1978–2020)

We cannot erase Kobe’s mistakes, but we dare not reduce him to them either…

“WHENEVER YOU THROW SOMETHING IN THE TRASH, YOU YELL KOBE. I don’t even know his last name. Just Kobe. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Kobe. That’s it. I’m sad.”

I found out from my sister. She doesn’t even follow sports, but she knew who he was. She instinctively knew just how important he was, how important he must be to me, to everyone.

Kobe Bryant died Sunday.

I can’t believe I just typed those words.

Kobe Bryant is gone.

I suspect this is one of those moments we’ll all remember where we were when we first heard the news. Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement comes to mind. MJ’s (first) shock retirement. The Tiger car accident. Princess Di. Michael Jackson. For older generations, JFK.

And now, somehow, Kobe.

Close your eyes for a second.

Can you still picture the smile? Can you see the silhouette of his fadeaway jumper? Do you see the competitive scowl? The signature leaping fist pump? Can you hear his voice in your head?

I can.

Kobe’s lasting legacy was obvious Sunday as his face was splashed across every channel on TV. CNN and CNBC carried daylong Kobe coverage. There were live cut-ins on every major network. All 25 Twitter trending topics were Kobe-related. Neymar, Nadal, Obama, and countless others around the world paid tribute.

The games went on, of course. Life always carries on, cruelly or not.

Never has a day of basketball results felt less significant. “Good game, tough loss, who cares?” were Gregg Popovich’s succinct postgame notes. Emotion was written across the face of every player. Tears flowed as teams took 24- and 8-second violations at the start of the game in Kobe’s honor.

I wished they’d let the NBA rest for one day. Only 81 games this season.

If you’re like me, you kept scrolling through social media most of the day in disbelief.

How?

The game is still so young. Only two other NBA MVPs (Wilt and Moses) have passed on before Kobe.

Why?

It’s not fair. Kobe had just begun his second act as a father, a husband, a writer, a producer, an Oscar winner, so much more to come.

This can’t be real.

But it’s real. Kobe Bryant is gone.

And he leaves a long and complicated legacy in his wake.

We always framed Kobe the basketball player in light of someone else.

Kobe was the closest we ever saw to Jordan. He was the bridge from Jordan to LeBron. Kobe was The Greatest Laker (vs Magic) and the second best shooting guard ever (vs West). We compared Kobe with Vince. Kobe and TMac. Kobe and Iverson. Kobe and Duncan.

There was Kobe and Shaq, then Kobe and Pau. There was Kobe versus Shaq, too. Kobe versus the Celtics. Kobe versus the media.

Kobe was almost never just Kobe.

More than anything else, we compared Kobe to Jordan.

It was impossible not to. All it took was a working set of eyes to see that Jordan was the standard Kobe held himself up to every day of his life. As someone who grew up watching MJ and then Kobe, videos like this always haunt me:

Some superstars recognize they are writing their own legacy before our eyes. Kobe and LeBron are like that.

In the 90s and early 00s, we always talked about who “the next Jordan” would be. Kobe knew who it would be. It was him.

Sometimes it felt like everything Kobe did was a shadow of MJ. Oh, the moves, sure. We all tried the moves in our driveway. But it’s not just the wiggle and the shake and the fade. Look closer. It’s the tongue wag. It’s the way they run. The way they carry themselves after what they know is an iconic moment.

The final shot of that video is the most haunting. All his life, Kobe chased an NBA championship. In the moment he finally reach that pinnacle, how did he react? By perfectly echoing Jordan’s celebration. I don’t even think it was on purpose. I honestly think it was just ingrained into his being at that point.

Legacies get complicated when they are framed in light of another one.

Kobe was not Michael Jordan.

No one else was Michael Jordan. And really, we always knew there would never be another MJ.

But that’s the thing.

Jordan. Tiger. Brady. Federer.

Those guys are untouchable. They’re capital-G Great.

We’re in awe of their Greatness in a way that seems inaccessible and unknowable.

We revere those names because they always felt like sports gods among mortals. They just kept winning and winning, with cutthroat precision. Year after year, they won, in ways so dominant we took it for granted. They won because they were just better than everyone else.

In a way, it made us underappreciate their greatness. How can we truly appreciate something that simply makes no sense?

Humans can’t understand superhumans.

Oh, we tried. Like any good superhuman, we fixated on their origin stories. We know all about Jordan’s high school team, about Tiger and his dad, about Tom’s 6th-round draft status.

But we never really got to know them. As part of their godlike status, they stayed removed from us mere mortals. They kept their distance.

Kobe was never like that.

Kobe was a flawed superstar, almost from the start. He always felt just a little lower than that highest of upper echelons — and that’s a good thing. Kobe was just barely below the immortals in a way that felt accessible.

MJ was untouchable. What made Kobe such a unique superstar is that he was not.

We knew Kobe.

We knew his family. We knew him as a father. We knew what he was like in the locker room. We knew what he was like as a mentor. We knew what Kobe was doing before he balled. We knew what he’d been doing since retiring.

And knowing Kobe the human so well adds a whole other layer to his legacy.

Kobe the basketball player was flawed.

Kobe the human was flawed, too.

I’m going to tread lightly here. This is not an area of expertise for me or an area I have any special insight into, and it’s a trigger warning for anyone familiar with the Other Thing in Kobe’s life we don’t want to talk about. But you should know that for many survivors of sexual assault, yesterday was not a day of celebration and mourning but another unwelcome reminder of pain and trauma.

June 30, 2003. A Colorado hotel.

Her name was mistakenly released to the media but I will not print it here, not to mute or gloss over it, but out of respect for the then-19-year-old woman.

Kobe was accused of sexual assault. He admitted to the sexual encounter — he was already married to Vanessa at the time — and admitted recognition after the fact that she did not view the encounter consensually as he had.

I’m not here to mitigate or mute this incident. It is a terrible thing, something that has followed Kobe for 17 years since happening.

It cannot, and should not, be erased. It too is part of his legacy.

But it is not his sole legacy.

No matter how great a triumph, no accomplishment is big enough to gloss over a horrible mistake like that. But no matter how great a failure, no human deserves to be judged by only their worst mistake either.

There are other women whose names I will print here.

Vanessa.

Tatiana. Bianka. Capri.

Gianna.

The thing about Kobe’s life is that it did not stop after June 30, 2003, nor after he stepped off a basketball court for the last time.

We saw Kobe as a husband and as a father. We watched him morph from a ruthless basketball machine into a family man and doting dad. We saw the girls celebrate with him on the court and in retirement. We saw him coach them, in sport and in life.

We know Kobe was with Gianna when the helicopter went down yesterday, en route to one of her basketball games, and we know he was there to comfort her in their final moments together.

How do we reconcile Kobe the family man with Kobe the accused rapist?

The answer is that we don’t.

We can’t.

The two do not need reconciling. Both can be true. Both were true.

Life is complex. Legacies are complex.

Basketball greatness did not render that Colorado incident obsolete. But Colorado did not take away from everything else Kobe did either.

His mistake cannot be erased. But he cannot be reduced to it either.

Something seemed different about Kobe these last few years since he retired.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but it feels like maybe it’s because Mamba Mentality finally retired too. Finally, it was no longer Kobe versus the world anymore, no more Kobe spending every second of his life in Jordan’s shadow, trying to live up to a godlike status he could never attain.

Finally, for the first time ever, Kobe was just Kobe.

His own legacy, complete on the basketball court.

I will be the first to admit I have scoffed at Kobe’s basketball legacy over the years, with more than my fair share of jokes. But I too watched that final 60-point finale in awe and appreciation of who Kobe the basketball player had become. I saw a man finally released from a life of torment living in the shadows. Kobe was finally just Kobe.

When we think of Kobe, we remember the winning shots. We picture the fist pumps and see him hugging the Larry O’Brien trophy.

But the truth is that we think of the good and the bad with Kobe, even the basketball version.

Part of what makes Kobe’s legacy so complicated is that there won’t ever be another Kobe. Kobe was the king of the mid-range game. He was the hero of hero ball. He sneered at his teammates and kept them in line. He dribbled out the clock and took the final shot.

We have policed most of those things out of the modern game. The mid-range jumper is mostly dead. Hero ball is all but gone. There won’t be anymore 20-year careers in the same jersey. Player empowerment has come, and guys beckon friends to come join them now instead of pushing them away to do it on their own.

If you think about it, Kobe’s basketball legacy is about success and failure. We remember the 60-point finale, but if we’re being honest, we also remember the 50 shots it took him to get there. We remember the painstaking final season of clang after clang on that elongated retirement tour.

Every fan remembers 6-for-24 the night Kobe won Finals MVP. We remember all those air balls in Utah in that early playoff run.

We remember those blemishes because Kobe was always more of a demigod than supernatural. He did push Shaq away. He did miss those game-winning shots. But then he kept shooting anyway, and he did so with the confidence that he would always make the next one.

Kobe’s failures defined him too, because he refused to succumb to them.

We have to remember Kobe’s failures, because his failures are what framed his success.

In the end, perhaps that’s how we’ll be forced to remember Kobe off the court too.

That Colorado trial cannot be forgotten, and that woman was not simply part of Kobe’s story like some poorly written television drama. It’s a terrible, stinging memory and one that will forever taint Kobe’s legacy for many — and for those that feel that way, they have every right to.

But that moment was only one part of Kobe’s story, and his story deserves the rest of the details as well.

Gianna is part of his story, too. So are Vanessa and the kids. So are the girls he coached, so too hundreds of NBA stars that spent their childhoods looking up to Kobe as the generational player they aspired to be one day. For many of them, Kobe was a mentor. For some of them, a dear friend.

For all the outpouring on social media, it’s notable to me one person we have not yet heard from: LeBron James. His silence is deafening, and not in a pejorative way. Magic and Bird, Jordan, Kobe, then LeBron. James has the generational mantle now. I can’t imagine how he feels in this moment. He deserves this time to process, just like anyone else. Like Kobe, LeBron knows exactly how he is shaping his legacy. And LeBron knows he is the Lakers now.

But in many ways, Kobe is bigger than just the Los Angeles Lakers. ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne noted that many people don’t talk about Kobe Bryant as their favorite basketball player; they talk about him as their hero.

That hero worship was always what got under my skin.

Kobe was capital-G Great too, but he could be Great without being lumped in with MJ and LeBron in every GOAT conversation.

Like many, I reacted to the Kobe hero worship by making him an anti-hero, deriding his accomplishments and scoffing at the legacy talk. And all that hero worship was especially stinging for many who could not forget the Big Mistake he made off the court in Colorado.

Heroes don’t make Big Mistakes. But humans do.

Where does Kobe rank among the all-time greats? That’s a conversation for another day, and one we’ll have for 5 and 10 and 50 more years. But there’s no questioning anymore where his basketball legacy rates. That much is clear.

8. 24. 60. 81. 5. 20.

So many numbers alone are imbued with meaning thanks to Kobe.

Love him or hate him — and I think what some of us learned yesterday is that we loved him and hated him all at once — Kobe Bryant’s legacy will carry on.

I still can’t believe we have to add that second parenthesis next to Kobe’s name now. It’s far, far too soon.

We’re never going to get that Hall of Fame speech. No Inside the NBA drop-ins, no more Detail episodes. No sit-down interviews with Rachel Nichols and Doris Burke as Kobe takes on the role of basketball historian and looks on today’s NBA and the league that is to come.

For me personally, I think that’s what hurts the most. I’ll miss Kobe’s voice.

We’re also not going to get any more shots of Kobe talking hoops with Gianna on the sidelines, nor watching her ball out in the WNBA.

That hurts, too. Life isn’t fair.

Life is hard and complicated. Kobe’s life was complex, and his legacy is too. We cannot reduce Kobe just a list of championship rings and numbers anymore than we can reduce him to the NBA-record 14,481 shots Kobe missed in his lifetime.

We cannot forget Colorado. But we also cannot forget Gianna, Vanessa, and the other girls. We can’t forget what Kobe did for the game of basketball and for women’s hoops, what he’s done for so many current NBA stars. None of those things serve as penance for what happened in Colorado. Nothing ever could. But we don’t get to pick one part of the legacy and erase the other.

In the end, Kobe Bryant might have been your hero, but he was actually just a human who happened to play basketball really well, and human beings are flawed and prone to disappoint.

We cannot forget Kobe’s mistakes, but we dare not reduce him to them either.

Mamba out. ■

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