It’s impossible to sum up Kobe Bryant’s dedication to basketball in just one anecdote, but there’s one small incident that comes close to doing it justice. No, it wasn’t one of the countless famous achievements from his 20-season long NBA career. Instead, it was within a picture he posted on his Instagram just a few months before his untimely death in a helicopter accident on Sunday.
Bryant posted a picture of himself standing aside his Mamba Sports Academy youth basketball team. The girls, all roughly middle school age, look uniformly glum while holding trophies that marked what was, for them, a disappointing fourth-place finish. When Bryant first posted the image, which dated back from two years prior, his caption included the following statement: “The 7th player (not in pic) missed this game for a dance recital so that should tell you where her focus was at this time.” As Deadspin’s Giri Nathan noted, Bryant felt the need to edit his comments to explain himself slightly better and added the following: “meaning she enjoyed dance more than ball which is fine. Now? She eat sleeps and breaths the game.”
Knowing what we know now, that both Bryant and his daughter would lose their lives en route to the Mamba Sports Academy, there’s a sad postscript to the image. At the time Bryant posted it, however, it made the social media rounds as a humorous reminder of his single-minded passion for the sport. With any other famous athlete, this would have been an opportunity to earn some easy goodwill: here was this living legend, who had won five NBA championships and two Olympic gold medals and was the all-time scorer for the Los Angeles Lakers, in his new rule as a youth coach. Instead, it was a sign that he was bringing the exact same mentality he had winning titles with the Lakers to his new position. it didn’t matter if you were a Hall of Fame teammate or a young dance enthusiast, Bryant was going to demand the most from you.
He called it the Mamba mentality and he even wrote a book about it. “I liked challenging people and making them uncomfortable,” he wrote in an excerpt published on the Players’ Tribune. “That’s what leads to introspection and that’s what leads to improvement. You could say I dared people to be their best selves.” It was not a trait that led himself to any popularity contest, he was a notoriously difficult teammate during his playing years. His former head coach Phil Jackson once wrote a book where he called Bryant “uncoachable”. Bryant didn’t exactly argue the point.
Yet, he was phenomenally successful, because as much as he demanded from you when you were on the same side, he subjected his opponents to much worse. Bryant would be the first to admit that he took after Michael Jordan, as did every single NBA player of his generation. In his playing style, he took Jordan’s legendary competitive nature to its logical endpoint. Where Jordan hid his sociopathic approach to the game behind a bland, genial persona manufactured by Madison Avenue, Bryant took the opposite approach and played it up, practically being fueled by the boos. When you’ve named yourself after a poisonous snake, you’ve decided that you’re not going to be the smiling protagonist of a Warner Bros cartoon. “I always aimed to kill the opposition,” Bryant wrote in the Mamba Mentality.
Let’s not forget the reason why he took on the Black Mamba identity in the first place. As the Washington Post’s Kent Babb paraphrased in a revealing piece on the shooting guard, Bryant felt that playing this role was “the only way he could move beyond the events of Colorado”. Those “events”, of course, led to a 2003 sexual assault charge and subsequent trial. The criminal case against him was dismissed after the accuser declined to testify and a civil suit was later settled out of court. In Bryant’s own words after the case was dismissed: “I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”
The Daily Beast’s Robert Silverman makes a strong case that Bryant used the fact that a large segment of the population believed he was a rapist as his own personal motivation on the court. In what is an all too common story in sports, a story that begun as one about violence against women was gradually rewritten into a narrative about an athlete overcoming adversity.
In the end, the strategy paid off for Bryant. Throughout the rest of his career, Bryant was determined to be a one-man wrecking crew on the court, a Terminator programmed to get buckets. It was this iteration of Bryant that scored 81 points in a 2006 game against the Toronto Raptors, the second-highest total in NBA history. It was this Bryant who won his final two rings without the beyond the formidable shadow of Shaq. Towards the end of his career, as the league was becoming more and more obsessed with shot efficiency, Bryant even stubbornly raged against the changing wisdom of the era. He would become infamous for his high-volume shooting nights, taking and often making low-value shots at a frequency that was almost in defiance of basic math. It was extremely fitting that in his last game in the NBA he scored 60 points on a whopping 50 shot attempts.
It would have been an absurd for a lesser player to attempt, but Bryant was so good that it didn’t matter. Yes, he ended up being the all-time leader in missed shots, but he also ended up as fourth on the all-time scoring leaderboard. LeBron James, currently with the Lakers himself, passed him on the list just a day before his death. James’s accomplishment ended up being the subject of Bryant’s final tweet.
It was an uncharacteristically selfless final message, an admission that his time had come and gone. Perhaps, as some have suggested, Bryant was starting to evolve past the Mamba mentality towards the end of his career and into his retirement. Into what exactly, well, we’ll never get a chance to know.
(The Guardian)
