Like millions of people yesterday, I found myself visibly shaken. I felt disoriented, distraught, confused. When I heard the news that Kobe Bryant had tragically died in a helicopter crash, along with his 13-year old daughter Gianna, and seven other people in Calabasas, California, I felt such a deep sense of sadness that I had trouble comprehending it all.
I spent the entire day reminiscing about Kobe, eyes and mind glued to the coverage on ESPN, absorbing this tragedy over and over and over again. I watched the tears stroll down the cheeks of some of the world’s greatest athletes reflecting on Kobe; I read the poignant words of some of our most salient sportswriters share their memories of him. Hour after hour I consumed this media, grieving and feeling such a profound sense of loss. After hearing an ESPN anchor read Shaquille O’Neal’s tweet about Kobe, tears welled up in my eyes, too.
Why was I so sad? Why was I so distraught? Why did it feel like I lost a tiny part of me? These were the questions I kept asking myself. It didn’t make sense. He was not the first celebrity to die; not even, sadly, to die in such a tragic way. Yes, to be sure, Kobe was an extraordinary human. He was one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the NBA; a person who transcended sport, became a tireless advocate for women’s athletics, a rising storyteller in media and film, and by all accounts—and most importantly of all—a wonderful father to his daughters. (He was also, as I’ll get to, a very imperfect man.)
However, I am not a sportswriter—and the purpose of this essay, a form of personal therapy for me, is not really even about Kobe. It’s about us—about who we are and all that makes us human. In truth, while I idolized Kobe growing up as an athlete and found inspiration from him, I did not know Kobe Bryant any more than I did the other eight victims (including his daughter) who also died yesterday. It is a sad truth—the reality of a life where pain and suffering are core elements of the human experience—that we lose people all the time. Unspeakable and unexplainable tragedies litter our news feeds each day. And, the loss of life of the other victims on that helicopter are just as sad: husbands, wives, and children whose lives had just as much value as Kobe and his daughter. I could fill in the gap of any tragedy or loss of life that happens all around us, each moment. Why was this tragedy—the death of Kobe Bryant, a flawed athlete of all people—leaving such a personal impact on me on a scale that differed from these others? Why did I not feel this same magnitude of grief yesterday and in countless days prior for other tragedies that brought me a much more restrained sadness? I have often believed that who we choose to remember and cherish in our society—think: often famous people, and not the humanitarians who may in fact do copiously more good for the world—speaks volumes about our lack of priorities on the qualities that matter. Yet, here I was, mourning a famous athlete in ways that cut straight to my heart.
This awareness and internal questioning, and just my own consciousness about life and death stung me all day. So, I went to sleep last night, saddened by it all—and shaken by life’s preciousness and fragility—but hoping tomorrow, a new day, would bring more clarity to an event that made no sense. I hoped the new day would bring clarity both in terms of this particular tragedy for the nine lives lost, but even more so, in regards to why this event had shaken my inner foundation and the foundation of so many others that I saw in the loop of images around Los Angeles and around the world.
Yet, when I woke up this morning, that pang in my chest still remained. I still felt uncommonly morose; I still felt almost ill about Kobe Bryant, about this man I never even knew. And, in reality—and perhaps what I had known all along—was that, it was like I did know him after all. The reason why it hurt so bad, was, as Bill Plaschke poignantly wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “gone, too, is a little bit of all of us.” He could not be more right.
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As many of you know, I sometimes try to write about the complexities and purposes of life—I think we all ponder about these elements, at some level, consciously and unconsciously. It’s been a while but in the past, I have written about the importance of always dreaming, the power of kindness, the essentialness of love, about the death of a loved one, and the need to cherish life’s little moments (a timely sentiment in light of this horror). And, after thinking about Kobe’s death and why I was so crushed—and why it was not just me, but my students in class today, millions of working-class people in Los Angeles, and people all around the world with no connection to this famous athlete—I realized that it is because Kobe represented inspiration, personal satisfaction, relentlessness, and joy. He represented the qualities that define not the cruelness of our humanity, but the goodness of it.
What else is life than striving to experience joy? Than to hope to experience love and personal satisfaction? To find inspiration for living? To those that followed him, Kobe was that to all of us. We, somehow, someway—perhaps not even knowing it—looked to this person in ways that answered all of these questions about what we are all looking for each day. We saw Kobe do it in his singular fashion: the patented scowl, the unending relentlessness, the unique swagger. It was simply mesmerizing to watch. He made people believe in themselves and in others—and that’s no small feat! The championships he brought to Los Angeles were certainly exciting—I remember where I was the moment when he won them for the city. He gave the people of L.A.—again, a diverse, often disconnected and disjointed city—hope and a strong sense of unity. This joy and excitement was real and I have always believed in the power of sport.
Yet, the real reason why his loss has led to such emptiness is because Kobe was more than these things and his accolades. For all of the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, at its core—like any place—its working-class people trying to do the best they can. (As ESPN’s Ramona Shelbourne said: You cannot tell the story of Los Angeles without Kobe Bryant.) Kobe epitomized that working spirit. The physical and mental anguish he would put himself through was truly legendary. To hear the stories of his workouts, the personal tribulations that he underwent to be great, his singular focus on his craft—and the way in which he went about his work with such meticulous detail—was actually stuff of legends. And, in this way, his impact on people was not about the championships at all—in fact, it never was. His ethos, his spirit, his demeanor represented more. The people of Los Angeles related to that. I related to that—I’m not even sure I knew it at the time. Every person who watched Kobe strove to be “the Kobe Bryant” of whatever was meaningful to his or her life: “the Kobe Bryant” of his or her profession or “the Kobe Bryant” of reaching a certain goal. (Fittingly, John Altobelli and his wife and daughter, who were just as tragically and horrifically lost in the crash, was described by a colleague as “the Kobe Bryant of junior college baseball,” changing the lives of hundreds of athletes and young men over his remarkable 30-year career. That short phrase said all there was to say about the type of person and coach that he was.) It was not that people wanted to “be” Kobe—a refrain that is common with regards to many celebrities—but that, instead, people wanted to be the best version of themselves because of Kobe. And he did that, creating a whole ethos—“Mamba Mentality”—of what being so relentless to improve a certain craft looked like in actuality. He was like our Rocky—but he was real. It is these reasons why one of my dearest former students, someone who grew up in L.A., left her cherished high school jersey at his memorial as a way to pay her respects to someone who not only inspired her play basketball, but to strive for greatness. When she told me this, I understood her pain—I understand why this was what she had to do to grieve someone who had such a momentous impact on her life. The way he resonated with so many people was truly unprecedented—I’m not sure we’ve ever seen an athlete transcend sport with the level of breadth and depth that he did, particularly in L.A. I’m not sure we ever will again. At the same time, for me personally, I acknowledge the irrationality of feeling this emotional connection to a person I have never met. It’s silly, even. I know that. And I keep telling myself that. But, yet, I can’t seem to shake why I was so moved to tears by his passing.
It is this short impromptu interview by a fan at Staples Center last night that sums up Kobe’s impact—real, rational, or not—about inspiring us, normal people you could say, to be the best we can be:
This was perfectly, authentically stated #KobeBryant pic.twitter.com/na3RlDqAM0
— Jeff Pearlman (@jeffpearlman) January 26, 2020
Still, we also loved Kobe and could relate to him because of his flaws—and mostly, because he grew from them. Kobe was very imperfect. From his sexual assault case to his on-court homophobic slur to his chastisement of his teammates, Kobe made many mistakes. He was complicated and it does his legacy no favors to gloss over these moments in his life. But we all make mistakes (even if, admittedly, not always to that same magnitude). And, like we all should do (but too often do not), Kobe learned from them. He apologized, acknowledged, and worked, internally and through self-education, to became a better person—constantly learning and growing. Marc Lamont Hill, a professor who knew Kobe well (and ironically, someone I once played a memorable game of pick-up basketball with at Columbia University), writes eloquently about this part of Kobe that we all, too, could relate to. For all his mythic qualities, he was so deeply human, too. And perhaps it is his untimely death that makes him the most human of all—because it is his death that makes us question our own lives: what we live for, why we live, how we can be the best we can be, and, how, when, and why we choose to feel when we do, rational or not.
In conclusion, I am certainly not the first person to state these thoughts about Kobe Bryant. The seemingly countless poignant tributes by talented writers who knew Kobe and followed his life arc can say more about him infinitely better than I ever could. But, beyond accessing or celebrating (or critiquing) Kobe’s legacy, is my interrogation of how I have struggled to comprehend this nine-person tragedy (and the daily tragedies around us): why literally the whole world—and myself—has been in constant mourning over this one athlete. (As Michael Wilbon tweeted tonight: “we are all underestimating the enormity of Kobe’s death on an international level.”)
And, so, life is so messy. And death is even more so. To mourn somebody like Kobe’s death is complicated in the scope of life and constant tragedies all around us, some we know of, many more that we do not. The fact that we mourn tragedies differently hurts. It’s unfair. It’s painful. Perhaps it’s not right—perhaps it’s even wrong. I acknowledge this. I struggle with it. I am deeply confused by my feelings of sustained pain for Kobe’s death. But what I can say is that it is these feelings, this constant battle to understand it all, that make us so authentically human—and Kobe’s life, and the way he lived, and maybe even tragically the way that he so cruelly died—represented these feelings perhaps better than anybody than I have gotten to “know” in my (and I suspect others’) lifetime. This is why, to me, his death hurts so much. It gets at multiple layers of feelings—about ourselves—that are deeply uncomfortable and raw.
Ultimately, all I can say is that, to me, Kobe’s death illustrates the depths of our human experience of living. The unfairness of it: the sheer cruelty of his death, his daughters’ death, the death of the families with him. Conversely, his death also highlights why we live: to be inspired, to work relentlessly at our craft and to be the best we can, to find joy in life’s moments of laughter and cheer. And, the unexplainable confusion of why we mourn so heavily for one person we only know from a TV screen in a world where we are constantly surrounded by see-able tragedy. If you are having trouble coming to grips with all these things—for why you feel this puzzling emptiness about Kobe’s untimely passing like I do or maybe even the guilt about feeling so—perhaps because it all embodies the enigma of life, the answers we do not have, the feelings we cannot quite explain. I certainly do not have answers for all of these questions—or the proper way to reflect about Kobe, about the other victims, about (another) shooting in our neighborhoods. You are not alone in feeling this sense of loss—this confusing, pain-staking sense of loss that does not, and perhaps will not, ever make sense.
Through another night of reflection—and, yes, re-watching the joy and awe of his athletic prowess and gutty performance of his 60-point final NBA game—is that it must be okay to feel this way. It is us striving to be the best version of ourselves by reflecting, probing our hearts and souls, and trying to find meaning in a world where that meaning can seem so unclear. After all, it’s what Kobe did every day: strive to be his absolute best and inspire others. In his memory, I ask of myself—and of you—to try and always do the same.
