RIP Kobe Bryant

Apparently Kobe had stick legs and was given to wearing cargo shorts.

 

There has to be a good, usable image of LeBron.

 

With or without his spray-on hairline? This would be the one I'd use. It's the first one that came to mind.

 

There is a lot of revisionist history with Kobe that he was savvy enough to engineer and ESPN et.al. were sycophantic enough to accommodate.

He was a selfish player, poor leader, and an all-around jerk. He had a well-earned reputation for being a chucker and me-first guy from his 2004 Finals performance, to his no-show in Game 7 against Phoenix to demonstrate how garbage his teammates were, and all the way to that 60-point final game that saw him take *50* shots. Pick-up players don't exclaim "Kobe!" for no reason when taking a fuck-it jumper.

For all the anecdotes about his voracious curiosity about leadership, the primary benefit seemed to be creating the perception that he was a deep-thinking renaissance man because the lessons learned never seemed to translate to the floor.

He tried mightily to be the heir to Jordan's throne and all the credit in the world to him for trying and getting as close as anyone could have imagined. Similar to Tiger Woods, in the effort to be like Mike, he became all too much like Jordan. The single-minded pursuit of one's own excellence, desires, and appetites reveals sociopathy that would not be celebrated in anyone you know or in any other walk of life.

Woj had an excellent point in his podcast the other day when he said that our society substitutes victory for virtue and that the biggest difference between Kobe and Tiger was that Tiger didn't win again.

 

Yeah, the idea of a leaguewide jersey retirement needs to be squashed hard.

 

Christmas will now be held on August 23

 

Tiger won the Masters a few years ago and has been in the running for other majors lately.

 

He won last year after 11 years in between majors.

That's not the point Woj was making, though. Kobe won again in 2009 and 2010 and this athletic redemption was conflated with personal redemption (the 2011 divorce filing aside). Tiger did not have a real opportunity for this conflation until his win last year.

 

I believe this picture of Kobe, which is accurate, started to change after he retired. Maybe some of it was an act, clothing himself in feminism. But there did appear to be a kind of softening in the last couple years.

I've also long found if you're good to the media, and Kobe, in his way, was - they'll grant you nuance.

If he'd died going 117 miles an hour in car, the eulogies would have been different from the jump. It's how he died, and who with, and where they were going, that shapes the initial response and the long-term memory. 50 years from now "great basketball player who died in a helicopter crash with his daughter" will be the one line people know.

 

Nuance? Shit, they are making Kobe into a Basketball Buddha. Imbued with wisdom and paternal majesty. There’s a reverential tone when talking of his legacy. I’m surprised ESPN isn’t having Rachel at the funeral home on the 3rd day awaiting the Resurrection