Great 2 guard who fit the era he played in.
After that, well, that's about the only compliment I can think of for the guy.
Well, I can see your perspective. It's certainly a rational one. His legacy is complicated - undoubtedly the most complicated in this Millennium. But that doesn't explain why I've been teary eyed all day.
Kobe was a master of burnishing his own legacy. He created the "Mamba," the gunner who saved the day late in the game (the stats don't exactly agree) and the charming, charismatic, and handsome man who was tailor-made for Tinseltown. Except that was really a myth, too. See: hotel room, Colorado. And his teammates didn't exactly adore him.
Contrast Kobe with AI, who was seemingly his antithesis. And he was. Yet the press flipped the script. AI was adored by his community, and his teammates.
But it's easy to digest a ready-made script. At the Philly/LA game last night, (the same game where the cameras zoomed in on LBJ's eerily prescient "Kobe Homage" shoes) my buddy and I saw a guy embrace Mark Jackson and Van Gundy. We didn't know who it was. We were shocked when we found out it was AI. Hard to believe. He looked drastically different from his playing days.
But not Kobe. He was the first basketball superstar of the Internet Age, and for 25 years, he never appeared anything less than youthful, confident, and indestructible. Hard to reconcile the fact that he's gone.
That's why I've been crying on and off today. Especially now that I'm a parent. You want to believe that someone like Kobe, who so artfully mastered his own legacy, would be impervious to the capricious whims of fate.
But he wasn't.
https://www.heraldcourier.com/sports...e39cb09c4.html