JOHANNESBURG – I got to see Kobe Bryant play live in Toronto in 2016.
It was the NBA All-Star game, the first time the event had been held outside the United States and it was also Bryant’s 18th and last one, in his final season as a pro.
I was never a Bryant fan, but that had more to do with my dislike of the Los Angeles Lakers (I’m a long suffering New York Knicks fan) than anything against him personally.
In fact as a player, I thought he was magnificent, but would only admit that through gritted teeth as was the case for many non-Lakers fans. In that final season, everyone was pulling for him. The Lakers weren’t challenging for the NBA title as they did for the majority of Bryant’s stellar career. In fact that season was a kind of a farewell tour for Bryant. NBA arenas were sold out when he and the Lakers were in town, and those who had only showed him grudging respect became effusive in their praise of him and what he meant to the NBA.
It was the case in Toronto too. That city’s team, the Raptors, were on the receiving end of Kobe’s career-high 81-point performance in January 2006. However that didn’t stop the fans inside the Toronto Arena that Sunday night from chanting his name. “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe.”
Those chants defined that season.
Bryant’s legacy is, as Marc Stein pointed out in the New York Times yesterday, a brilliant and complicated one. There is the basketball - the five NBA championships, the re-establishment of the Lakers as a global brand, the two Olympic gold medals and all the statistics.
In 2003, Bryant was arrested in connection with sexual assault after a complaint was laid by a 19-year-old employee of a hotel in Eagle, Colorado. The accuser said Bryant raped her in his hotel room. Bryant claimed the sex between the pair was consensual. The charges were dropped a year later when the accuser refused to testify at the trial. Bryant settled privately with the accuser after she filed a civil lawsuit.
That incident proved chastening. He would mend fences with his wife Vanessa, with the pair cancelling their divorce and Bryant throwing himself into various charity initiatives.
Los Angeles Lakers forward Kobe Bryant waves to the fans after his introduction before the start of the first quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Utah Jazz, in Salt Lake City. Photo: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
His Mamba Sports Academy, where he was headed to along with his daughter Gianna on Sunday night, had, after his family, become one of the central aspects of his life.
That his and Gianna’s lives would be tragically cut short as they were headed to a basketball game in which she was due to play, somehow makes it all seem worse.
Bryant, was complex but special. There are athletes described as transcendent - Serena, Tiger, Messi, Ronaldo, Lebron, Usain - you know who they are by one name. Kobe was one.