On Kobe, Pain, & Love
BIG GAME JAMES
I’m told I called a pair of plastic sunglasses “Big Games James goggles.” I was three years old and believed that, when worn in combination with “the scary hat” (a metal colander), they helped me look like “Big Game” James Worthy, a high-flying Lakers legend at the tail end of an illustrious career. It wasn’t just Worthy, though. I was enamored with the Lakers in their entirety. I dressed in a satin Lakers jacket, dunked a miniature basketball on a hoop created by my father’s outstretched arms, and, when we weren’t fortunate enough to be given a pair of my grandparents’ season tickets, I was dutifully parked on the couch during KCAL9 broadcasts, awash in cathode ray light and the sounds of Chick Hearn and Stu Lantz.
In some regards, little has changed. I have a fairly obscene collection of Lakers attire and memorabilia, I practice my jump shot more often than a sawdust-kneed 29-year-old should, and, though Chick Hearn is standing beside the Great Refrigerator in the Sky, dutifully monitoring the gyrations of a jello mold, Stu Lantz remains among the living, his head shaved, his mustache no less fulsome. But the Lakers no longer play on basic cable. And my octogenarian grandparents, season ticket holders for fifty-plus years, tired of the rush hour slog from the Westside to Downtown and gave up their second-row seats. And my Parkinson’s- and stroke-stricken father, who taught me basketball and precious little else, cannot feed or bathe himself, speak above a faint, mumbled whisper, or tell you where he is. Thus I cannot tell him the Lakers’ guard rotation is shaky, or that LeBron James is leading the league in assists, or that Kobe Bryant, the man for whom he’d shake his head in wonderment and exclaim “Fuckin’ Kobe!,” is dead.
EDDIE JONES
I only had eyes for Eddie Jones. I was told the rambunctious, teenaged Bryant was a prodigy, but the lithe, long-limbed Jones, who once helped to stop John Chaney from murdering John Calipari, was a fully-realized All-Star, a lockdown defender who’d dunk your silly ass into the Great Western Forum hardwood. On the 1997–1998 team, he, Nick Van Exel, and Shaq were the grown men and thus, in my adolescent mind, unassailable. I liked Kobe’s shoes, found his Slam Dunk Contest performance thrilling, and admired his wearing Oakleys for his Upper Deck rookie card shoot, but he was 19 years old — just 12 years older than me, hardly old enough for the physical, moral, and stylistic instruction I wanted, needed, and so desperately lacked.
But, after a 61-win regular season, those Lakers flamed out in the Western Conference Finals, swept by the Utah Jazz’s egregiously uncool trio of Karl Malone, John Stockton, and Jeff Hornacek. (That team, which included lightbulb changers like Adam Keefe and Gregs Foster and Ostertag, was crackerdom epitomized. No one on that squad fucked.) It was the end for that Lakers core.
During the ensuing offseason Van Exel, who’d clashed with Shaq, Kobe, and head coach Del Harris, was traded to the Nuggets for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue — a laughably awful haul. (Battie, who Dan Issel nicknamed “El Busto,” never suited up for the Lakers and was traded to the Celtics for Travis Knight, a man determined to use all six fouls allotted to him as quickly as possible; Tyronn Lue’s Lakers career was defined by his worm’s eye view of Allen Iverson’s swaying testicles.) When the Lakers started slowly in 1998–1999 — a strike-shortened 50-game season — Del Harris was fired and Eddie Jones was traded along with Elden Campbell to the Hornets for Nautica endorsee and one-time Sarah Palin lover Glen Rice and the acronymical duo of J.R. Reid and B.J. Armstrong, the latter of whom was immediately waived. Like the year prior, the Lakers were swept out of the playoffs, this time in the conference semifinals by a monotoned seven-foot-tall rookie from the Virgin Islands and his mentor, a Naval admiral chiseled from stone.
Two sweeps in a row were unacceptable. So Kurt Rambis, a bespectacled former gritlord last seen grousing about Jonny Flynn to a cardboard standee of Jeannie Buss, was demoted from his interim coaching position and an older bespectacled former gritlord — albeit a more zen, stoned one — was hired. It was Shaq and Kobe’s team. Phil Jackson tried to keep them from killing each other. And it worked. Mostly.
THE PAINS OF BEING A DICKHEAD
As a young adult, I understood that there was something different about Kobe. At the time, I’d have mumbled some vague descriptor like “He seems like an asshole.” But, in retrospect, it was social awkwardness and somewhat constructive monomania masquerading as brash sociopathy — he was preposterously famous, fabulously wealthy, prodigiously talented, and entirely unequipped to deal with the expectations heaped upon him. In a post-Jordan league whose aesthetic was defined by the flame-throwing insouciance of Allen Iverson, Kobe’s comparatively cloistered childhood, spent largely in Italy, marked him as an outcast. No one has ever looked worse in a Mitchell & Ness jersey.
It was logical that this version of Kobe — a mini-afro’d twenty-something failing to meld unearned street savvy with Michael Jordan’s unbridled dickheadedness — and Shaq would clash. On the court, they were a natural pairing: Kobe, shit-eating grin plastered on his angular face, took fiendish pleasure in reducing opponents to puddles of piss; Shaq was inevitable, a freight train barreling through the chests of the human sacrifices placed in his path. But, off the court, they were oil and water. Kobe turned down the role of Jesus Shuttlesworth in He Got Game to work out during the summer; Shaq was in Blue Chips, Kazaam, and Steel. Kobe released a lone, execrable single featuring Tyra Banks, “K.O.B.E.”; Shaq recorded songs with the Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, DJ Quik, Warren G, Mobb Deep, Method Man and RZA, Redman, Big Pun and Fat Joe, Erick Sermon, Phife Dawg, Rakim, and Bobby Brown. Kobe was sullen grump prone to bad mouthing teammates to the press; Shaq had an easy smile and a pervasive, contagious sense of childlike wonder.
Shaq was also perennially fat. He’d lumber through early season games, working his way into shape, and, likely due to a mixture of weight and the remarkable strain of professional basketball on his titanic physiology, would annually miss 10 to 15 games. For Kobe, anything less than 4:30 a.m. wake-ups, wheatgrass enemas, and hours sprinting the dunes in Manhattan Beach was unimaginable — to not maximize every minute of every hour of every day was a failure, a shocking moral abnegation. To him, nothing hurt worse than losing, and no sacrifice was too great.
I’ve grown to appreciate Kobe’s basketball monomania. It requires ironclad will and monastic self-discipline to push your body past its breaking point not just once, but as ritual. The image of Kobe shooting free throws with a torn Achilles tendon — and not, as is far more common, screaming, crying, passing out, or some combination thereof — is indelible. But routine pain runs far deeper than a single career-altering injury.
People who haven’t played relatively high-level basketball don’t understand the toll the game extracts. Compared to blacktop, hardwood is a forgiving surface — it has some natural give and spring. Some. Most of each sprint, jump, pivot, slide, close out, and pinpoint change of direction is created and subsequently absorbed by the bones, muscles, and joints from the toes to the core. For basketball’s devout — the top three-ish percent who play beyond high school varsity — excellence is about accepting and silencing the resultant aches and pains.
I know them intimately.
My knees audibly creak when I squat. The cartilage in my right knee is worn so thin that, when I run, you can hear it clicking. I retain a sizable Osgood-Schlatter bump below my left knee, which is prone to bouts of tendonitis. For reasons I cannot explain, my right hip pops. Sometimes the right side of my jaw does, too. My left wrist sounds like a cement mixer. I struggle to breathe through my nose because, through repeated elbowings and headbuttings, my septum has been rendered an impassable, jagged mess. It no longer bleeds when it breaks. It’s grown weary of the drama.
But I’m 1/20th the player Kobe was — maybe 1/10th during my brief “prime.” I imagine he, third all-time with 57,278 NBA minutes played, got out of bed very slowly for much of his adult life. Not only are the strongest bodies ill-equipped for such an intense degree of punishment, the strongest minds are, too. And it was his mental fortitude — the “Mamba Mentality,” if you’re given to marketing speak — that ultimately set him apart from more naturally levitating Jordan heir apparents like Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady. He had a sadomasochistic hell drive that allowed him to squeeze juice from the rind long after others had quit. Pain was a distraction he had no time for. There were buckets to get.
SONNY AND JELLY BEAN
My father, like his father, is named Lewis. To differentiate Lewises senior and junior, my dad was nicknamed “Sonny,” an appellation still used by the precious, dying few who knew him as a child. But “Sonny” was more than a nickname. It was a lifestyle.
Lewis Sr. had lived a Horatio Alger tale: raised in almost cartoonish poverty during the Great Depression by an erratic single mother, he’d pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps, playing leatherhead football, joining the Air Force during World War II, then, honorably discharged, building a lucrative business selling bread ingredients at commercial scale. A good times drunk terminally obsessed with luxury, Lewis Sr. was intent on coddling his four children in ways he could hardly have dreamt of when, as a youth, he laid down to rest in a snake-infested cabin in rural Oregon. Sonny, the first born, was unimpeachable.
Suspended for riding a horse into school? Boys will be boys.
Totaling a brand new Chevy Bel Air? There’s other cars.
Arrested during a civil rights protest, forcing my grandfather to soak in the glares of Dallas’ segregationist business elite? Well, shit, son, the negroes can come over to swim in our pool but you’re being a royal pain in the ass.
Getting kicked off the football team for being vomitous drunk on a plane ride back from an away game? Hell, you’re the starting quarterback, but basketball season’s coming up.
And the basketball court is where Sonny shined. With a stocky build inherited from Lewis Sr. and a game modeled on Oscar Robertson and Bob Cousy, Sonny dominated the other flat-topped honkeys of the North Texas plains. But my father, secretly a denizen of blues clubs south of the Trinity River, knew the trophies, plaudits, and school scoring record came with an asterisk: though there was mutual interest among the players themselves, games between Black and white high schools were strictly forbidden. Still, colleges came calling. Sonny snubbed Stanford — hardly a basketball power at the time — for Princeton, coached by the legendary Butch van Breda Kolff and led by a young Bill Bradley.
Until my mid-20’s, my father never admitted that he felt overwhelmed by the talent on display at Princeton, a national powerhouse who, in what would have been my father’s junior year, demolished Wichita State in the national third place game. He merely told me that, fascinated by beatnik poetry and disinterested in taking squeaky clean Bradley’s holier-than-thou shit day in and day out, he’d quit after his NCAA-mandated freshman season on the junior varsity.
The burden of expectation was passed on to me.
When I stepped on the court, I wasn’t just playing against the pimply pituitary cases standing opposite, I was playing against my father’s legacy. And there he was, in the flesh, pacing the sidelines or sitting in the stands, shouting “Come on, Torii!” at each turnover. I was, despite my petite frame, undiagnosed clinical depression, and unearned reputation for being “difficult,” zealously determined to play college basketball, to match or better his accomplishments.
And I did. But at a great physical and emotional cost, for which I am still accounting.
So, to some degree, I understand what it must have been like for a young Kobe. His uncle, the hysterically-nicknamed John “Chubby” Cox, played seven games for the Washington Bullets and was enshrined in the University of San Francisco’s Hall of Fame. His father, Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant, backed up Julius Irving and George McGinnis on the 1977 Philadelphia 76ers, who blew a 2–0 Finals lead to the Portland Trailblazers. Despite his eight years in the NBA followed by another eight in Italy, Jelly Bean is generally agreed to have been an underachiever. A 6’9” forward with ball handling skills, he jokingly referred to himself as “Tragic,” a man with the skills of Earvin “Magic” Johnson but without the remarkable achievements to match.
I imagine that, in Shaq, Kobe saw shades of his own father, of unfulfilled promise, of the lassitude that landed Jelly Bean in a basketball backwater thousands of miles from the greatest players of his generation. Jelly Bean, who believed himself miscast as a center rather than as a decade-defining Magic-style point-forward, acquiesced when told to bang with the back-to-the-basket brutes of the 70’s; to Kobe, who Phil Jackson called “uncoachable,” acquiescence was unimaginable — who in the wide world of sports would dare tell Kobe, a self-styled Galactus in Nikes, what the fuck to do, where the fuck to be, or how the fuck to play? For Kobe, a young man driven by anger and alienation, the near-sociopathic means justified the glorious ends: exceeding his estranged father’s achievements on his own terms. It was the ultimate “Fuck you.”
LIFE WITHOUT KOBE
On June 26, 1996, the Hornets selected a skinny kid from Lower Merion High School with the 13th pick of the draft.
Fifteen days later, on July 11, the Lakers traded Vlade Divac, their cigarette-stained starting center, for Kobe. Kobe claimed Dave Cowens, then the Hornets’ head coach, told him they had no use for him; Jerry West, the Lakers GM who’d watched pre-draft workouts in which Kobe mopped the floor with eventual Knicks first rounder Dontae’ Jones and booted a retired-if-still-feisty Michael Cooper into the AARP, was thrilled.
I was 6 years old on July 11, 1996. My memories from before Kobe are so scant — a track suit that made me feel like Oscar De La Hoya; the Northridge Earthquake; the entrance to the Forum; fishing in rural Texas — that they’re hardly memories at all. In essence, I have only known a world with Kobe. He was the Laker, the purple ’n’ gold personified, a talisman for some of my fondest memories and, for better or worse, my youth.
Millions of other Angelenos share that experience. From the moment he arrived in Los Angeles, he was ubiquitous — television, newspapers, billboards, murals, sneakers, his name and number on shirts and jerseys. In a city segregated by race and class, he was a rare cross-cultural icon. In a literal sense, Kobe was a wealthy black man; in a practical sense, he was a mononym, an idea somehow bigger than his self-mythologizing allowed. His sporting triumphs and store-brand ayahuasca bromides became an essential part of the city’s self-definition and self-image. He represented the existential Angeleno contradiction: practiced flippancy, grace through gritted teeth, tie-dyed wisdom born from pain. The city’s a dystopia, but a fairly pleasant one, and who better for our languid land than an oft-sullen alleged rapist who, when needed, could distract with a smile as bright as the Larry O’Brien trophy? We have all been lotos-eaters for the dopamine generated by his fadeaway jumpers.
LOVE
I have loved people I shouldn’t have.
I do not love people I should.
I loved watching James Worthy, Magic Johson, Vlade Divac, Sam Perkins, Eddie Jones, Nick Van Exel, Shaq, Robert Horry, Lamar Odom, Pau Gasol, Trevor Ariza, Adam Morrison, Smush Parker, Metta World Peace, Julius Randle, D’Angelo Russell, and Brandon Ingram.
But I never felt that swooning stupid unabashed goo-goo joy about Kobe after July 2003. Kobe claims the choking and penetrative sex that drew blood were consensual; a 19 year-old Edwards, Colorado hotel staffer disagreed. She was harassed, shamed, defamed, received death threats, and had her name leaked to the press. Understandably, she declined to press criminal charges, instead settling out of court. Kobe apologized, but admitted no guilt.
Someone to whom I am very close is a rape survivor.
I suspect they’ve never fully reckoned with the long-term effects of it.
The perpetrator, never caught, created a void within them they have yet to fill.
Though I’d like to believe otherwise, to preserve a boyish understanding of good and evil, to see sports stars as infallible superheroes both within and without the arena, Kobe was probably a rapist. He created a void and walked away seemingly unscathed.
Still, I can’t force myself to hate Kobe. The task of parsing and compartmentalizing Kobe The Person and Kobe The Athlete is too difficult, my period of acquisition too young. Just as I can’t rid myself of disgust at his actions in Colorado, I can’t rid myself of the awe I felt watching him glide up, over, around, and through forests of limbs. In sum, I feel ambivalence.
But right now, at this very moment, I feel sad and baffled. After learning of his death I sat at my desk for hours, refreshing Twitter, staring into space, my abject horror somehow deepening when reputable news sources confirmed the demise of GiGi, his 13-year-old daughter. The accident feels like a highest-order perversion of an otherwise tender ritual: taking your kids to practice, watching them grow into the physical and mental demands of the sport, imparting what little wisdom you’ve managed to accrue during the cosmic strobe light flash that is your time on earth. To Kobe, and to my dad, that seemed to mean everything.