Kobe Bryant: Tribute to a Legend

In the long history of basketball, how many have moved as gracefully, astonishingly—even poetically—as Kobe Bryant? His 20-season, highlight reel-heavy Hall of Fame career brought five championships to the Los Angeles Lakers, winning three of them while playing the dazzling yin to his on-court partner Shaquille O’Neal’s powerful yang. But it wasn’t just the alley-oop slam dunks and off-balance buzzer beaters that made us admire Kobe; it was also that wide-open, high-beam smile. Bryant loved the game fully—and yet, he could never love it as much as he loved being a doting father to four young girls. And fans rejoiced as his 13-year-old, Gianna, the apple of his eye, grew her own burgeoning basketball career. Truly this was a sports god, a man who was, in a word, invincible. And…

When you do something you truly, truly love, you find yourself wanting to do it all the time,” Kobe Bryant once said about his early obsession with basketball. Though he rose to fame in Los Angeles as a Laker, his love for the game started in Philadelphia, where he was born the youngest of three and the only son of Pamela and Joseph. He arrived on August 23, 1978, when his dad was a power forward and center for the Philadelphia 76ers. But unlike Kobe, Joe, nicknamed “Jellybean,” didn’t spend his entire career with one team. He bounced around a lot and in 1984—when Kobe was 6—the Bryants moved to Italy and Joe spent seven seasons playing pro ball in Europe for five different teams. “[Italy] will always be close…

Although the 1999–2000 NBA season was the Lakers’ 40th in Los Angeles, it marked a new beginning of sorts for the franchise. The team left the Forum, which had been its home starting in 1967 and where it won six NBA championships before moving to the Staples Center in 1999. Of far greater significance to the team’s performance on the floor, however, was the hiring of its new head coach, Phil Jackson, who had led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA titles over an eight-year span between 1991 and 1998. Determined to add veteran presence around his dynamic young duo of Shaq and Kobe, Jackson and the Lakers signed Ron Harper via free agency. Jackson’s starting guard from three Chicago title teams, Harper turned out to be a key addition…

While success has certainly been known to breed confidence, it often leads to complacency in pro sports. That appeared to be the case when Shaquille O’Neal showed up at training camp for the 2000-2001 season out of shape, which didn’t sit well with Kobe Bryant, who had worked hard over the summer so that his game would continue to improve. So while Bryant was being lauded by his head coach for his stellar play at the start of the season, O’Neal was going relatively long stretches where he was missing more shots than he was making from the floor and shooting an abysmal 25 percent from the free-throw line. After losing only 15 of their 82 regular-season games the previous season, the Lakers lost 13 of their first 39 to…

When you’re coming off a season in which you pummeled opponents to the tune of a 15-1 record in the playoffs en route to a second straight NBA championship, you have to know teams will be gunning for you all season long. That’s precisely what the Lakers encountered in 2001-2002. Things reached a boiling point about halfway through the season in a mid-January game at Chicago against a Bulls team that came in with 20 fewer victories than the 26-8 Lakers. Fouled hard throughout the evening by both Charles Oakley and Brad Miller, Shaquille O’Neal responded to a flagrant foul by Miller in the low post late in the fourth quarter by throwing a roundhouse right that barely missed Miller’s head. The outburst would land O’Neal a three-game suspension, which…

I never, ever expected a three-point record,” Kobe Bryant said after setting the NBA’s single-game mark for that shot with 12 against the Seattle Sonics on January 7, 2003. “It’s hard to describe. You don’t really realize what’s going on. It doesn’t really sink in, because you’re just shooting them one at a time. Then they start piling up. You just feel so confident. You get your feet set, get a good look, it’s going in.” When he left the floor for good with 4:16 remaining and and the Lakers leading comfortably by 21 points, Bryant had made 12 of 18 threes and scored 45 points. He had missed his first three, then made six in a row in the second quarter and his first three of the third quarter.…