On The Death Of Kobe Bryant
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I’ve never particularly been a huge sports fan in general, but I’ve always loved basketball. I loved to play it, I loved to watch it, I loved to study and analyze it. There was a time when I would watch every single NBA game broadcast on television, even meaningless games between subpar teams.
I was drawn to Kobe Bryant the person when he first emerged as a seventeen year old early entrant into the NBA draft. I saw Kobe as being someone like me—a seemingly sophisticated Black kid who spoke a second language, scored high on the SAT and had planned to attend Duke, which was the first college I had my eye on in middle school. Kobe was intelligent and well-mannered, which was atypical at the time. Nearly all NBA stars are bright and articulate today, but back in 1996, when the NBA was made up of more urban escapees than today’s crop of second-generation pro athletes who grew up with multi-millionaire fathers, this was more unusual.
It’s funny to recount now that early on I was NOT impressed with Kobe Bryant the basketball player. As I watched him make one appallingly stupid decision after another, I thought that he wouldn’t make it, and that fans and even NBA insiders were just blinded by his acrobatic dunks and stylistic similarity to Michael Jordan, resulting in his preposterous 1998 All-Star selection. Though he had some great games here and there, I wasn’t really impressed with Kobe’s play until 2002. But after that, I was beyond impressed.
Around 2007, on the internet and in barber shops, I began to make the unpopular argument that Kobe was better than Michael Jordan. This was usually somewhat tongue-in-cheek as my true feeling was that the three greatest players of all time were Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain and that fair arguments could be made for each. I now feel that LeBron James has surpassed them all and stands alone as the greatest player of all time.
But I was irritated by the persistent Jordan myth-making, typified by the false legend that he was cut from his high school team, when in fact his school just had a rule that underclassmen could not play varsity. People acted like Jordan was a perfect player, when in fact he had many limitations that were exposed by other great teams. Jordan didn’t finally beat the Pistons because he got better. They got old. And he never beat Larry Bird even one GAME in the playoffs, 0-6.
On top of this, people hammered Kobe for his personal shortcomings while it seemed to have been forgotten that Jordan was a gambling addict that flew to Atlantic City between playoff games and punched teammate Steve Kerr in practice. And as is often pointed out about one of my heroes John F. Kennedy, in the modern sports media culture, we’d have likely heard a lot more dirt on Jordan than we did.
I didn’t really think Kobe was a better player overall, but because of the similarity between Kobe and Jordan, and the fact that Kobe was definitively better in some areas (outside shooting, for example), it was easy to use Bryant as an example to rattle the cages of Jordan worshippers with facts and statistics to prove that Jordan was not head and shoulders above everybody else as was the unquestioned consensus for over a decade.
I say I didn’t think Kobe was better, but there is an asterisk to that. When we talk about greatest players, we tend to be talking about career accomplishments rather than how good they were in say, their best single season. I maintain that in 2006 and 2007, Kobe played the best basketball I had seen until LeBron in the 2015 Finals. I even thought Hakeem Olajuwon was better than Jordan ever was in the 1994 and 1995 seasons, and statistical evidence and regular season results suggest Jordan and the Bulls escaped a couple of NBA Finals ass-whippings at the hand of the Rockets thanks to Jordan’s baseball vacation.
Jordan be damned, I’d never seen anything like Kobe 2007. But as I warmed to Kobe the basketball player, I cooled to Kobe the person. Early on, I thought that reports of his struggles getting along with teammates and other NBA players was due to his being “above” the neanderthal locker room culture, the same thing that had kept me from putting more effort toward playing organized basketball. But as the years passed and I heard more and more stories, and saw more and more of Kobe’s antics for myself, I began to accept what most people around the NBA seemed to feel: Kobe Bryant was a very hard person to get along with for almost everybody.
It is interesting now to reflect on a conversation I had with my sister in 1998 when Kobe was a media darling. He was being interviewed in the tunnel either before or after a game, and I remarked how impressed I was with him, and she said, “I don’t like him. I think he’s a phony.”. Maybe it was women’s intuition, or perhaps she already knew something from the most accurate source of information there is. Not the internet—the “femi-net”.
Eventually, sometime in the early 2000s, I accepted that Kobe was just a jerk, but it did not detract from my enjoyment of his play, and my feeling that he was ultimately right on the basketball side of his conflicts with Shaq and Phil Jackson. But while I was able to separate Kobe the player and Kobe the person, others seemed unable to do so. He received preposterous criticisms of his brilliant on-count performance from people who didn’t like his personality, while fans who loved him as a player whitewashed a host of reports of truly disturbing personal behavior.
I think a lot of the criticism of Kobe as a player was simply personal criticism wearing a basketball disguise. Adrian Wojnarowski, who does great work as an NBA insider today, made some absolutely absurd claims in his efforts to criticize Kobe’s play back when he was reporting for Yahoo. Perhaps it was his hammering of this widely hated figure that ingratiated him with the rest of the league to the point that he knows what’s going on before commissioner Adam Silver does.
But Woj was not alone. I think people called Kobe a selfish basketball player, an allegation for which there was truly no objective evidence (certainly not if you don’t think Jordan was selfish!), when what they really wanted to say was that he was a selfish PERSON. Kobe could do no right on the court for those who disliked him personally, and could do no wrong off the court for those who idolized him as a player.
While in jail awaiting trial, I wrote a letter to Kobe. My initial thought when I started it was that Kobe might have a willingness to help someone facing the same situation he had faced who was a part of his extended social circle (at the time, my niece was going to an exclusive Los Angeles private school with the kids of then Laker general manager Mitch Kupchak). I never sent the letter because I realized that to help me would be asking for a public relations nightmare, and I assumed that (intelligently) Kobe would never consider it. But beyond that, I felt that it would be disingenuous for me to send it given that I no longer thought so highly of Kobe as a person. I’d written it only out of desperation because my family and friends weren’t helping me.
In prison, I read Roland Lazenby’s scathing biography of Kobe, “Showboat”. While I felt the book exhibited what I would characterize as an anti-Kobe bias, it nonetheless contained some quite shocking stories of Kobe’s personal behavior that I don’t think a publisher’s legal department would have permitted to go through if they didn’t check out. It painted a picture of Kobe as a borderline sociopath that there might be good cause to worry about if he didn’t have basketball.
Ultimately, however, Kobe Bryant is our fault. It is a real problem in this society that we empower talented people to be jerks. This is especially true in sports, though less today than in the past, but it is also true in other areas of entertainment (q.v. Harvey Weinstein), and in business. Another highly successful person whose talent I admired and who also died young, Steve Jobs, had a similar notoriously abrasive personality.
It shouldn’t matter how much talent a person has, we as a society should say, “We have minimum standards for civility and if you don’t like it, take your ball and go home”. I loved watching Kobe Bryant play, but the NBA would have been fine without him. I love my iPhone, but I’d give it up and deal with Android’s bullshit to live in a world where people universally treat one another with respect.
A notorious jerk died and we’re acting like it was Mother Theresa. And it isn’t like it was Steve Jobs who was still at the height of his career. Kobe’s career was over. I’m very critical of our society’s tendency to paint everyone’s history in a positive light in the wake of their death. I think this is a dangerous practice that prevents us from making accurate assessments of what kinds of traits we should encourage in society. The message that is being sent is that the way Kobe Bryant lived his life was okay, and the way Kobe Bryant lived his life was NOT okay. That is, unless you only care about money or only care about the Los Angeles Lakers (and Kobe’s ultimate impact on the Lakers’ franchise can even be debated—more on that later).
While it is certainly awful for his family and his (reportedly small) circle of friends, I’m not sure Kobe’s death is a tragedy for society. In fact, I wonder whether it was a tragedy even to Kobe himself. I believe Kobe Bryant would have chosen just this kind of exit, a death befitting someone who so craved to be a legend.
I don’t believe Kobe Bryant would have enjoyed the next twenty-five years of being Kobe Bryant. Kobe’s death could almost be viewed as an escape. He died before LeBron and Anthony Davis could win any championships with the Lakers, an event that would have diminished Kobe’s significance in Lakers history. He died before Laker fans could begin to consider the profound contrast in character between Kobe and LeBron. LeBron establishing himself as a Laker great, while Kobe was still alive, would have led to reflection on the fact that the reality of the post-Shaq Kobe-led Lakers was two championships, three great seasons out of a dozen, bracketed by years of mediocrity, ending with the worst years the franchise has ever had, with the widespread disdain for Kobe preventing other stars from joining the team, and with Kobe’s self-centric behavior wreaking havoc on management.
Kobe died before the eventual surfacing of his accuser to talk about what happened in Colorado and how it impacted her life, and the inevitable point where reporters would insist on asking him tough questions about it. He died before any of the current or future NBA stars after LeBron could nudge him further down on the all-time greats list, to possibly see himself almost forgotten as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, once considered by most to be the greatest, is so often forgotten by younger fans today.
I did not foresee Kobe Bryant building any significant post-basketball career as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has done as a writer or as Magic Johnson has done as a business mogul, and I think he made too many enemies around the NBA to have a future role in the sport.
Perhaps Kobe might have done some interesting things as a filmmaker, but I was surprised, knowing a little bit about how the Academy operates, that they handed him an Oscar for his first effort. I don’t know how good “Dear Basketball” was or wasn’t. I never watched it because I saw Kobe’s whole career first-hand and knew enough about his personality to know that he wasn’t going to speak to any of the questions I would have wanted him to answer. Perhaps in a sense the award was the Academy’s clever way of punishing Kobe: give him an Oscar and leave him nothing to work toward, no motivation to stay with it because he immediately received his always-longed-for validation without the years of work basketball required. Perhaps it was a kind of bribe to stay away from the industry.
As I often say these days when celebrities die, there is no reason to weep for Kobe Bryant because had the rare, cherished opportunity to live out his dreams. Other than surpassing Jordan, he got everything he wanted. And he did in a way ultimately surpass Jordan—he went out in a blaze of glory, young enough for the second half of his life to be colored in with imaginary might-have-been achievements. He doesn’t have to give an awkward Hall of Fame speech. He won’t become an unsuccessful NBA owner. He doesn’t have to face the world as he fades.
Of the nine people who perished on that flight, Kobe’s death is the LEAST tragic, the smallest loss. Kobe Bryant already gave us all he had. He truly left it all on the court, his every game preserved on video for eternity. The death of his young daughter and another young girl, the death of an entire family, the death of a pilot who I’m sure did all that he could to try to save their lives—these are all greater tragedies than the death of Kobe Bryant. A young mother losing one daughter and left to raise three others on her own is a greater tragedy than a wife losing her rich, philandering husband and becoming a half-billionaire widow...perhaps a billionaire widow depending on what type of life insurance policy Kobe had.
It is weird to see someone with such widely reported personal shortcomings being regaled as hero this past week, but the hagiography of Kobe Bryant began long before his death. I was shocked in recent years that the fact that Kobe Bryant had been a jerk to most of the people around him for two decades seemed completely forgotten, and suddenly he was the most beloved athlete in Los Angeles when I could remember the early 2000s conflicts with Shaq when the majority of Lakers fans didn’t like him, and the mid-2000s when he was probably the most hated athlete in all of sports. It seemed that once he won a couple of championships without Shaq, all was forgiven and Kobe’s warped worldview was validated in the eyes of the sports world.
There have been two disturbing stories in the news about Oprah Winfrey’s friend Gayle King and a school administrator in Southern California receiving death threats for making reference to Kobe’s sexual assault case. This is indicative of the kind of Kobe fanaticism that has taken over the Los Angeles sports world in recent years, even as an aging Kobe and the Lakers were playing horribly. It sometimes made me so sick that I wanted to disown my admiration for Kobe as a player to distance myself from the fans fawning over him. It is almost as if a whole swath of Lakers’ fans were run out of town with Shaq, leaving only the delusional Kobe-worshippers behind.
I was reading an excellent, thoughtful article in the Washington Post about the extent to which Kobe’s sexual assault case is being ignored in his obituaries. While the article is good, I would add a little nuance to its view. If Kobe was a person of otherwise blameless character, accused in that single incident that was ultimately not prosecuted, I think it would be fair to him to avoid extensive discussion of that incident now. But the bigger issue than the sexual assault case being ignored is the fact that the sexual assault case is indicative of a long-standing pattern in Kobe’s life of being insensitive and inconsiderate of those around him. That doesn’t mean he was guilty of rape, but that should be talked about. It’s important. The sexual assault case is part of a larger pattern in Kobe’s life—he tended to have a negative effect on those around him.
As I see it, ESPN and the other sports networks should go all-in with coverage of Kobe’s phenomenal accomplishments as a basketball player. Indeed, from a sports perspective, Kobe is one of the most awe-inspiring athletes of all time, and that should not be forgotten no matter his personal character. But the news networks, and the serious journalists in sports, should be talking about Kobe’s failures as a human being, and what it says about our relationship with sports as a society that he got away with so much. Kobe’s human shortcomings should not be forgotten no matter how many incredible game-winning shots he made, no matter how many championships he won, no matter how many thousands of points he scored.
Observing this transformation in the public perception of Kobe in the past several years, I felt deeply conflicted emotions. On the one hand, it gave me hope seeing someone who had been accused of a sexual assault being forgiven and embraced again by society. But yet, unlike Kobe, I’d always made an effort in life to try to treat people the right way before and after my sexual assault case, and even though society embraced Kobe, I never felt that his fundamentally insensitive ways had changed. The “new Kobe” to me was just a selfish, antisocial person who had figured out how to appear more personable. I believe in redemption and forgiveness, but I felt Kobe was being forgiven MORE than he deserved given how he had handled the situation.
Beyond that, the fact that he never talked in any meaningful way about having learned any lessons from the Colorado incident made me suspect that he still didn’t get that he had done anything wrong. It went well beyond the issue of whether there was consent or not. Go read Kobe’s own account of what he said and did in the police report. It is appallingly callous, socially tone-deaf behavior, the kind of thing that I’d have told any guy, “If you treat girls like that, you’re going to get yourself in TROUBLE!”
But unlike Kobe, I hadn’t just been accused of this kind of crime. I’d been convicted. I would think to myself that the case against me was far shakier than the case against Kobe, and that if I’d had his legal team, the charges against me wouldn’t have stood for fourteen hours, let alone fourteen months. But then my instinct to be accountable and refuse to make excuses would kick in and I would tell myself that I had no right to complain, even though I did believe I had a right to complain.
So when I read the articles about the school principal’s comment that “karma caught up with a rapist”, while I didn’t think it was necessarily wrong to say on a personal social media page, it bothered me because I foresaw women celebrating my death when it comes. It all comes back to the great big problem we have as a society of how to handle sexual assaults and allegations of sexual assault. The question is, how do we deal with the fact that, yes, we can gather various types of evidence, but in a great many cases, only the two people who were in the room really know what happened. And perhaps, given the way sex can make some of us crazy, maybe they don’t always both know.
There are two solutions we need. The first and most important one is that men, starting when they are boys, need to be taught to be more aware, considerate, respectful and careful when dealing with girls, and furthermore we need to reduce the amount of gender segregation in our society so that boys have a better opportunity to learn from girls themselves how they want to be treated. This is the core of the problem.
But beyond that, when these situations do occur, we have to examine them in a more thorough and careful way. I would even suggest that we should consider establishing a special separate court to handle sex crimes. If we’re trying to figure out what happened in a room, and the physical evidence doesn’t tell us conclusively, we must consider how the individuals that entered that room treated others in their life before to give us our best chance of making a just judgment about how to handle a claim of assault. If the problems Kobe’s accuser had in her life were going to be considered, Kobe’s history of insensitive, and according to one story in “Showboat” violent, behavior should have been considered also. Should we have trusted Kobe’s word in that situation when it did not appear that the majority of those around him felt he could be trusted away from basketball? But we can’t just listen to people and try to decide who “sounds more credible”. There are too many great actors and actresses in the world for that to work.
Should Kobe Bryant have gone to prison? I don’t know. I don’t think prison as it is today is a solution anyway. Should he have been punished legally? It was a complicated matter and that’s a hard thing to say. I won’t even fall back on “that’s what juries are for” because if we’re honest, we all know juries in America get things wrong all the time. But I do think that what Kobe did endure was a fair price to pay for even his self-reported behavior. People have lost more for less.
Ultimately, I believe we can make major in-roads into reducing the frequency of these incidents and making a safer world for girls if we do something that I’m willing to do, but that it doesn’t seem that any of the high-profile men accused of sexual assaults will. That is, I believe that after some amount of time has passed, we need to bring accuser and accused together, in a public forum with appropriate professionals present and talk about what happened, perform a true post-mortem on the incident and try to figure out what went wrong—what the man should have done better, what the woman should have done better, if anything, and what society should have done better.
Lots of men have served long portions of their lives for crimes they didn’t commit, and sexual assaults are disproportionately represented as a crime where this happens. I’m convinced there are probably a thousand rapes for every wrongful accusation, perhaps ten thousand, but it does happen and not addressing this issue is damaging to the cause of women, not just to the innocent man who suffers.
Innocent men do go to prison for rape. It is rare but we know it happens. But most of those men are people with no power. It is rare that a man of my pedigree goes to jail for a sexual assault he DID commit, let alone one he didn’t. Rightly or wrongly, I can’t help feeling like I’ve carried the cross for a bunch of high profile men accused of crimes far worse than what I was, and with far fewer valid questions to be asked about the allegations.
When I consider that Jeffrey Epstein died having served less prison time than I have despite being known as a predator with dozens of victims for years...when I consider that Brock Turner received a fraction of the time I did even though he was caught in the act of a sexual assault far worse than what I was convicted of...when I consider that Brett Kavanaugh is today sitting on the Supreme Court when the accusations against him were remarkably similar to the accusations against me...when I consider that somewhere around half of White female voters voted for the Grab-Em-By-the-Pussy President...these facts fill me with despair. And even though it looks right now as if Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein may die in prison, I’m waiting for the turn of the card where they get off easy too, because I know how the world works, and the role money and power play.
I feel like my record in life with regard to how I’ve treated women is one of the best, but yet my life was destroyed by what one woman said that I did one day, while I’ve watched habitual abusers of women escape with light or no punishment, not all of them rich or famous. I must be guilty, and my record before that must not have been as good as I thought, or else this never would have happened. Because women could never make a mistake like that...could they?
As I was reading the quote from the school principal that Kobe’s death was karma finally catching up to a rapist, I felt an emotion that has become all too familiar to me in the past seven years: I felt like I wanted to die, too. If this man who was never convicted still elicited this kind of criticism, it was hopeless for me. As I’ve felt so often, when I’ve heard people saying things like “All sex offenders should be shot”, when I’ve seen people celebrating the murders of convicted sex offenders in prison, I thought, “Well, if that’s how the world feels about me, I might as well do them a favor and die, because I can never be the person I wanted to be now.”.
I’m not going to kill myself. I made the decision some time ago that I will not do that, mainly because the potential results are too unpredictable to risk. Sooner or later, things will change, one way or another.
My views on death have gone through many changes over the course of my life. I used to think that when you die, that’s just the end, though I never felt certain of that and had somewhat of a spiritual view even back then because I recognized that the impact of our actions lasts forever. Today, I say what so many religious leaders, scientists and philosophers refuse to say: I really don’t know. Maybe it’s true what Scarlett said in “Lucy”—we never really die.
There is a theory in physics that every possible universe exists. If that is true, then each time we make a decision, there is an alternate universe where we went the other way, and thus we all exist in an infinite number of incarnations. Perhaps death is just a point where we move between those different realities, leaving behind one world and one self and entering another one almost just like it. There are so many decisions in my life that I would make differently...but perhaps this life will still somehow work out. I’m not dead yet...
I was walking past a bar in downtown San Diego and I saw a mural painted on its wall that read, “No one ever really dies”. Maybe right now seventeen year old Kobe Bryant is walking into the Lakers locker room for the first time, looking across at a seven foot tall giant and thinking, “What can I do to make this work?”, while the part of Shaq that lies awake at night asking himself the same question, is looking back at him thinking the same thing. But we all know what would have happened if Shaq and Kobe had been able to get along—something like what happened with the Boston Celtics in the 1960s. That thought of where Kobe might be now is just the basketball fan in me. That universe is boring. The human being in me has a different idea...
There are all these stories in sports of star athletes that have developed unlikely real-world friendships with fans. We know from the information that was unfortunately leaked that the girl involved in the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case was a troubled young woman. What she probably needed most, like so many attractive troubled young women, was a man of substance to take an interest in her without trying to have sex with her. What if Kobe had done this? What if he had brought her to Los Angeles to come to a Laker game and meet his family, tried to help her find a better course for her life, become a mentor for her? What if he had helped her channel her interest in him along some more positive path than to be a late-night hotel hookup? That could have made a tremendous difference not only in her life, but perhaps in Kobe’s as well.
But the entire point of this universe’s version of Kobe Bryant was that he was so self-centered that thoughts like these probably never crossed his mind. That he loved his wife and his children is an insufficient alibi—egotistical men base a part of their own self-centric worldview on telling themselves “I’m the best father/husband in the world”, just as Kobe based so much of his ego on being the best basketball player in the world. It’s being what you want to be to others, not what they want. The evidence is overwhelming that Kobe Bryant’s primary motivation in life was his own success. And that was his problem.
Sometimes the universe gives us a chance to make turning points, and perhaps it was that kind of chance for Kobe when this incredibly vulnerable young person crossed his path. And then as always, Kobe was only thinking of what he wanted, even by his own account of what happened. And whether he raped her or not, that was his crime.
So many people like to think of those who have done bad things dying and going to hell. I think a God that paid back some years of mistakes with an eternity of punishment would be an unjust God. I believe we get more chances than that, though you never know which chance will be your last...
Perhaps now Kobe Bryant is sitting in his hotel room in Eagle, Colorado, lonely and bored, hearing that knock on the door, given another chance to do what we can all agree he didn’t do the first time: the right thing.
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