The Loss of a Myth and a Man

Yesterday, Kobe Bryant could watch LeBron James pass him on the NBA’s all-time scoring list and send out a note of congratulations—perhaps in spite of some part of himself. He could plan his Sunday around attending a youth basketball tournament with his daughter, Gianna, held at his skills academy in Newbury Park. Today, both are gone. Bryant and Gianna were among the nine killed Sunday in a helicopter crash, survived now by the remnants of devastated families.

Bryant said that it was Gianna’s interest in basketball that brought him back to the NBA game after retiring in 2016. They began to pop up on sidelines from L.A. to Atlanta, where Bryant, 41, would introduce his 13-year-old daughter to some of the league’s best young players. Kobe doted on his four daughters, and those in the NBA fawned over Kobe. During one of their visits, Trae Young was thrilled to learn that he was one of Gianna’s favorite players. “It’s kind of crazy,” Young said, “because I’ll be watching her highlights, too.”

There is tragedy in those clips now, which capture the last time this teenage girl will ever channel her father’s fadeaway jumper. It wasn’t long ago that Bryant was swaggering on about Gianna’s WNBA dreams on national television. “This kid, man,” Bryant said proudly, shaking his head as he launched into a story about his daughter carrying on his basketball legacy. For the Bryants, this is a heartrending day. Vanessa lost her husband and daughter. Natalia and Bianka lost their father and sister. Capri, not even a year old, lost the chance to ever really know her family as whole.

To the outside world, there is another kind of grief. Kobe Bryant was a legend—not just so famous as to seem larger than life, but so revered to the point of actual mythology. There are tales that Kobe would sleep for only a few hours at a time. A run of air balls against Utah became a Campbellian trial. His story took on a life of its own: the five rings, the late-game daggers, the persistence through injury, the ruthlessness on the court, the 81-point game, the fabled work ethic, the mechanical brilliance, the Mamba Mentality™, the torn Achilles, and the 60-point farewell. A player who did everything he could to fashion himself after Michael Jordan managed to capture his most ineffable quality. It is impossible to even have a conversation about Bryant without first pushing through the aura that surrounds him.

An entire generation of players and fans grew up in the light of that aura. Bryant’s influence on today’s NBA is staggering. After Kyrie Irving hit the biggest shot of his life, he went back to the Cavs’ locker room and called Kobe, champagne still streaming in the background. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George grew up watching Bryant, played against him for years, and then went to pick his brain when Kobe hosted a group of NBA players last summer. On Sunday, a procession of former teammates and friends came to comfort DeMar DeRozan, a Compton native who built his own game after Kobe’s, as Kobe did Jordan’s. Some who took the court on Sunday did so in tears. Not only had they lost a friend and mentor, but the player whose poster hung on the wall of their childhood bedroom.

There is an acute pain that comes with the death of a loved one, the kind that can hollow out a person and leave them to drift aimlessly for weeks and months and ages. For many, the death of a public figure, like Bryant, registers differently. The vast majority of those who felt Sunday’s loss didn’t know Kobe. They just knew that he had always been there and what he had given them along the way. Sports are predicated on a commitment to something larger than ourselves, whether a striving team, a civic identity, or the simple magic of shared experience. Kobe was that: a religion unto himself, through which friends, families, communities, message board posters, reluctant admirers, AAU players, and legions of fans across the world could find comfort together. Perhaps now they can find catharsis, too.

This is the kind of loss you cannot escape. For some, that means reckoning with Bryant’s 2003 rape case, for which criminal charges were dropped and a civil case was settled out of court, with Bryant making a public apology to the victim. For others, the very mention of that case feels like an affront upon Bryant’s death. Both of these reactions are understandable and valid; we don’t choose what strikes us on days like today. But how can we process the death around us without coming to terms with the mythologies we create? Bryant is everything that he has ever done, with all of the painful complexity that entails. What was admirable about him can still be admirable. What was troubling can still be troubling.

Legends are simple, and most often reflections of the qualities we wish we had. People, however, only come flawed and complicated. Bryant could be cruel to his teammates by his own admission, and yet many still swore by him. His genuine curiosity was tangled in alpha machismo. Kobe was the kind of athlete whose play became inextricable from his on-court persona—somehow both brash and methodical, living out his career in complete contradiction.

We may never see his kind again. There are still great players in the league, some even better than Bryant. One even plays for the Lakers. Yet the biggest stars of today’s NBA are almost too tangible; nothing dispels a myth like a smartphone camera or a Twitter account. There are fans and players who grew up watching Kevin Durant or Stephen Curry, but even those superstars don’t enjoy the same cult of personality. Kobe always knew how to give us just enough to grow his legend. It made him an icon. An inspiration. It changed the basketball world. Yet on his final day, Bryant wasn’t the Black Mamba. He was a father on his way to his daughter’s game, both taken far too soon.