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 13th 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?