Kobe Bryant and a business associate have a running bet on the staying power of the pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Bryant, who wears self-discipline like a badge, has long favored the more predictable Perry’s odds, and found in Bieber’s recent tabloid episodes hints of a looming implosion: talent spurned. As he and the associate walked into the dining room at the Four Seasons, in downtown Miami, in late January, the associate, a Belieber, mentioned that Bryant had been giving him a hard time about it for years. He seemed almost ready to concede. That morning, elsewhere in Miami, Bieber had been caught drag racing and booked for driving under the influence.
Bryant was a child star, too. In 1996, fourteen years before LeBron James earned infamy by announcing, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach,” young Kobe stroked his chin theatrically for the cameras in the gymnasium at Lower Merion High School, outside Philadelphia. “I’ve decided to skip college and take my talent to the N.B.A.,” he said, with a pair of shades perched above his brow and a thin mustache sprouting above his upper lip. He had reason to be cocky: Lower Merion’s games attracted ticket scalpers. A few weeks later, he took the singer Brandy to his senior prom. He needed his parents to co-sign his first contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, that summer, and he was still living with them when, the following February, he won the slam-dunk contest at the N.B.A. All-Star weekend.
Bryant is now thirty-five, and staying power is seldom far from his mind. The Lakers, a fading dynasty, were in town to play James’s Miami Heat, ascendant royalty. The night before, Bryant had attended a college game between Duke, a school he once considered attending, and the University of Miami, and had the “very humbling experience,” as he put it, of hearing his name chanted by the student crowd. Bryant has logged more N.B.A. minutes, including the post-season, than all active players, and ranks fifth in the all-time clock punchers’ leaderboard. Very few of those minutes have come lately. Last April, in the fourth quarter of a game against the Golden State Warriors, Bryant ruptured his left Achilles tendon. He told me that the pain was so immediately intense that it was as if someone were holding a blowtorch to the back of his head, but his first instinct was to try yanking the recoiling tendon back down with his fingers. He then insisted on taking his foul shots—both of which he made, in spite of precarious balance, tying the game—before limping to the locker room, acquiescing to surgery, and vowing to rehab more quickly than anyone believed possible. The same Achilles injury ended the career of Isiah Thomas. Only Dominique Wilkins recovered from it well enough to remain an All-Star. Wilkins was two years younger than Bryant at the time of his hobbling, and had pestled the joints in his knees, elbows, and ankles for about half as many minutes.
Bryant committed to a restorative diet of bone soup and tweeted his recovery process amply. By early June, he was walking without crutches. In July, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was “far, far ahead” of schedule. He sat on a stage in August, with Jimmy Kimmel, in front of five thousand paying guests, and dangled the possibility that he’d be ready for opening night, at the end of October. Not quite. He made his triumphant return to the Staples Center, where the Lakers play, on December 8th, against the Toronto Raptors, whom he once lit up for eighty-one points—a modern record. This time, he scored nine points and committed eight turnovers in a losing effort, for which he gave himself an F.
“Seven months, he came back from the Achilles,” Gary Vitti, the Lakers’ head trainer, said. “But, theoretically, twelve months is better than seven months.”
“I was kind of hoping that he would take that year—take a whole year before he tried to come back,” Jeanie Buss, the team’s president and co-owner, said.
Those remarks were made with the benefit of hindsight, after Bryant had broken his left knee. That second injury—a fracture in the lateral tibial plateau—occurred on December 17th, during a victory over the Memphis Grizzlies. The heroic comeback had lasted six games.
Now, in Miami, Bryant confessed that what had been diagnosed initially as a six-week setback was likely to take longer—a rare instance of his underperforming expectations. “It’s been slow,” he said, after easing his six feet six inches into a booth at the restaurant. “It’s a weird injury, because I can walk around completely normal, but the fracture is still there.” He was dressed in a gray warmup suit that featured a Y-shaped logo—his own, meant to evoke the sheath of a samurai sword—and had on his feet a pair of his new signature sneakers, Kobe 9s, high-tops that resemble boxing shoes. A hood over his shaved head partially obscured a “haircut” for which Nike, his chief sponsor, had reportedly paid more than eight hundred dollars, and there was a hint of nasal in his usual baritone. He had woken up with a stomach ache, he said, and politely declined a waiter’s attention. “I’m good with the liquid crack,” he said, clutching a Starbucks cup.
It was the eighth anniversary of Bryant’s eighty-one-point night against the Raptors, and in a few hours he’d be down at court level, speculating, with the kind of graciousness that often eluded his younger self, about the possibility of someone like Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant eclipsing his mark. (“He’s a phenomenal scorer,” Bryant said of Durant, who had recently tallied fifty-four. “He can do virtually everything.”) But here he dwelled a little longer on the battle scars as a source of motivation. He pointed to a lump of scar tissue that remains on his right index finger and recalled, of 2009, “The finger fracture, that was a bear, man, because I had to play essentially the whole year with a splint on.” He’d been forced to abandon his lifelong habit of using both index and middle fingers to follow through on his shots—at no apparent cost to his accuracy. “About 2000, 2001, I started getting really bad tendinitis in my knees, just having jumper’s knee, and then I tore cartilage in my knee in 2003,” he went on, referring to his right knee—the intact one, sometimes called his “cyborg knee”—for which he began travelling to Germany several years ago, to seek experimental stem-cell therapy. “Shoulders as well. I’ve had shoulder surgeries before.”
Magic Johnson had recently joined the chorus of Lakers fans calling for Bryant to give up on the idea of returning before next fall, but Bryant was still indulging the possibility that he might be ready to suit up for the All-Star Game—it would be his seventeenth—in February. “There’s a contingent of people that say, ‘Father Time is undefeated,’ ” Bryant said. “ ‘You won’t be able to do it. Blah blah blah.’ So part of me is saying, ‘Well, I know where your threshold is. So if this had happened to you, you’d probably quit, right?’ ” He added, “That’s the thing that I think people don’t understand when they talk about Father Time, and they look at my injuries. They’re equating that to others who have come before me.”
Bryant’s singular career can be quartered, broadly speaking. First, there were the years with Shaquille O’Neal, highlighted by the three-peat, a succession of championships that came almost too easily, in 2000, 2001, and 2002. The two were, in O’Neal’s estimation, “the greatest one-two punch ever—little man, big man—in the history of the game.” And they hated one another. For Bryant, an obsessive who prides himself on a kind of basketball virtuosity (“As far as one on one, I’m the best to ever do it,” he has said), O’Neal represented an affront to the game itself: a giant so physically dominant around the rim that his indifference to mastering something as elementary as free throws was rendered maddeningly inconsequential. (Not that it stopped other teams from trying to exploit the weakness: “Hack-a-Shaq” was coined to describe a common defensive strategy that consisted of deliberately interfering with O’Neal, based on the expectation that he wouldn’t make his foul shots.) “It used to drive me crazy that he was so lazy,” Bryant told me. “You got to have the responsibility of working every single day. You can’t skate through shit.” O’Neal was a clown, and beloved for it, while Bryant, who once told Newsweek that he didn’t believe in happiness, remained aloof. “I was stubborn as a fucking mule,” he said. Bryant shunned reporters whom he saw talking to O’Neal. O’Neal, in turn, refused to accept help from the same trainers who taped Bryant’s ankles. Their desperate coach, the Buddhist, bookish Phil Jackson, wound up consulting a therapist, and at one point recommended that O’Neal read “Siddhartha.”
Then came the sullen years, after O’Neal was shipped out of town, over the objections of Jackson, who preferred the giant clown to the “uncoachable” mule. Management favored the mule, and dismissed Jackson, too, at least for a while. Free of O’Neal’s shadow, Bryant became the most polarizing star in the sport—perhaps in all sports. This period was marked by enormous individual accomplishments—not just the eighty-one-point outburst but four consecutive games in which he scored at least fifty—and little in the way of team success to match. Opposing teams designated “Kobe stoppers,” or dedicated shadows, to frustrate the Lakers’ lone weapon. He was the Black Mamba, a nickname he gave himself after watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” in which the snake, known for its agility and aggressiveness, was used as a code name for a deadly assassin. “I read up on the animal and said, ‘Wow, this is pretty awesome,’ ” Bryant recalled. “This is a perfect description of how I would want my game to be.”
The adoption of an alter ego was a way of coping, Bryant now admits, with the fallout from his arrest for sexual assault, in a Colorado hotel room, in the summer of 2003. The charges were later dismissed, and a civil settlement was reached with the alleged victim, but Bryant struggled with the perception that he was damaged goods. “After the Colorado incident, I had every major sponsor drop me, except for Nike,” he told me. “So I’m sitting there thinking, What am I going to do now? My vision was to build a brand and do all these things.” (Bryant was born a brand, named after the Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.) “Now everybody’s telling me I can’t do it,” he went on. “The name just evokes such a negative emotion. I said, ‘If I create this alter ego, so now when I play this is what’s coming out of your mouth, it separates the personal stuff, right?’ You’re not watching David Banner—you’re watching the Hulk.”
O’Neal, who won a fourth championship with the Miami Heat, in 2006, seemed to get the best of the simmering feud when, in the summer of 2008, he appeared onstage at a night club in New York and celebrated the Lakers’ recent loss to the Boston Celtics in the finals. “You know how I be, last week Kobe couldn’t do without me,” he free-styled, and then alluded to a police report from the Colorado investigation, in which Bryant was said to have lamented that he didn’t bribe his extramarital conquests with hush money, the way O’Neal did. “Kobe ratted me out, that’s why I’m getting divorced,” O’Neal continued. “He said Shaq gave a bitch a mil—I don’t do that, ’cause my name’s Shaquille. I love ’em but don’t leave ’em. I got a vasectomy, now I can’t breed ’em. Kobe, how my ass taste?” The crowd at the club joined a smiling O’Neal in repeating the zinger several times in unison while he bent over and flaunted his Barkleyesque rump.
In retrospect, though, 2008 marked the beginning of Bryant’s maturation, a phase that coincided with the arrival of a new big man, Pau Gasol, to complement Bryant’s drifting improvisation. A seven-foot Catalonian with wild hair, Gasol redeemed Bryant’s penchant for excessive shooting by gathering rebounds so effectively that the chunked fadeaways and leaners could almost be considered passes. Thus was born a new statistical category, the “Kobe assist,” meant to credit missed shots that seemed more than randomly to beget success. An intellectual rather than a rival alpha male, Gasol preferred opera to rap—he even read Roberto Bolaño’s nine-hundred-page novel “2666,” a gift from Jackson—and enjoyed Bryant’s cleverness and sarcasm, as well as his efforts to speak Spanish with him on the court. They won two championships together, in 2009 and 2010, bringing Bryant’s ring count to five, surpassing O’Neal’s.
As his body broke down, Bryant became a more efficient player, refining his volume game with better shot selection and distribution, and people began to speculate that he might stick around long enough to surpass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the league’s all-time leading scorer. He even flirted with a new nickname, suggested by his friend the adman Brian Ford: Vino, which he sometimes appended as a hashtag in his tweets. (Bryant still plays a volume game when it comes to hashtags.) Like wine, the idea went, Bryant was getting better with age.
“Last year was the best basketball I’ve played in my entire career,” Bryant said. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life to prepare for a game, in film study, quarterbacking on the floor, putting everybody in the right position, and then having to take care of my body. It was literally no life, because my body was hurting so much. I had to ice-bath, stretch, massage, elevate my legs, stretch, and then go out and play. But the results were irrefutable.” He added, “It doesn’t stop. That’s what I’m saying. It becomes life, you know? To be at that level, that’s what you have to do.”
The final phase, which Bryant has taken to calling “the last chapter” but which we might as well call the fourth quarter, began suddenly, with the Achilles injury, and was given a handy framing device last fall, when Bryant signed a two-year contract extension with the Lakers. It will expire in the summer of 2016. “Twenty years is a long time, man,” Bryant said, adding that he was “fairly certain” that that would be it. “The challenge also has to shift to doing something that a majority of people think that us athletes can’t do, which is retire and be great at something else.” He noted, “Giorgio Armani didn’t start Armani until he was forty. Forty! There’s such a life ahead.”
The extension, for nearly fifty million dollars, marked a small pay cut from Bryant’s annual thirty million, but it was enough to maintain his status as the league’s best-compensated player, a distinction he has owned since 2009. The new contract has been described in the press—outside of Los Angeles, anyway—as “terrible,” “crippling,” and “insane.” And those were the reactions before Bryant got injured again. “You pay players more often than not for what they’ve done for you, not what they’re going to do,” Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers’ general manager, acknowledged. The idea was to insure that Bryant retires as a Laker—an iconic figure forever associated with a single team, perhaps the last of his kind, owing to the strictures of basketball’s salary cap and its collective-bargaining agreement. You could even see the timing of the transaction, just a few weeks ahead of Bryant’s abortive comeback, as shrewd. The Lakers spared themselves the awkward possibility of visiting indignity on their captain by low-balling him, as the Yankees did with the aging Derek Jeter, on the ground that nobody else would want him. That ego, at that price?
Like the Yankees, the Lakers are a family business whose patriarch recently died, leaving the franchise in control of his less assured children. Jerry Buss, better known to employees as Dr. Buss (he had a Ph.D. in chemistry), bought the team in 1979, using a fortune he had amassed in Southern California real-estate development. It was the beginning of the Magic Johnson era and, with it, a flashy, up-tempo style of play that came to be called Showtime. Buss sought to re-create at the Forum, where the Lakers then played, the atmosphere at his favorite Santa Monica night club, the Horn. Borrowing from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, he introduced the Laker Girls, and hired a house band to perform during breaks in the action. Courtside seats were made available to Hollywood heroes, like Jack Nicholson, pushing the less star-powered media scribes out of view. The coach, Pat Riley, wore his hair slicked back, like Michael Douglas. As for Buss, “he was a marketing genius,” Kupchak, who played center and power forward on those early-eighties Lakers teams, said. “He always enjoyed going to a game and being entertained.”
Dr. Buss was eighty when he died, in February of 2013, from complications related to cancer. (Bryant spoke at his funeral, and recalled Buss telling him, around the time they met, “I want you to be a Laker for life.”) Management of the franchise is now split between Jeanie Buss and her brother Jim: Jim, the vice-president, tends to the basketball side, and Jeanie oversees the business. Complicating matters further, Jeanie is engaged to Phil Jackson, the on-again, off-again coach who is responsible for all five of the Lakers’ recent championships—and who nearly returned last season, for a third stint. A deal seemed all but finalized until, suddenly, Jim Buss balked, apparently acceding to the wishes of his dying dad. Instead, the Lakers hired Mike D’Antoni, an offensive-minded strategist whose high-flying style with the Phoenix Suns had led the Times, in 2007, to call the Suns “this decade’s incarnation of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Showtime.”
Mitch Kupchak had begun planning for this moment years earlier, and arranged to have most of the other Lakers’ contracts terminate at the end of this season, to allow for maximum flexibility in restocking for one last run at a championship before Bryant retires. (Maximum flexibility is a relative concept, given that Bryant’s extension accounts for nearly half of the team’s salary-cap allotment.) Several of this season’s Lakers are signed to one-year deals, and may not be back again. The official roster, as featured in the team’s media guide at the start of the season, boasted three likely Hall of Famers, in Bryant, the point guard Steve Nash, and Pau Gasol. Nash, at forty, is the oldest player in the N.B.A., and has suffered from recurring nerve damage in his back and in his legs. He has played scarcely more often than Bryant. Gasol is thirty-three, and still effective, but troubled by bad knees. And no amount of planning can have prepared the front office or the coaching staff for the plague of injuries that have afflicted even the scrubs and reclamation projects. Bryant downplayed the Lakers’ ten-and-nine start, before his return, saying, “It’s not like we were gangbusters before,” but in fact that represents the season’s high-water mark, the last time the Lakers were above .500.
The Miami game, a loss, came in the middle of an annual two-week trip the Lakers build into their schedule to make way for the Grammy Awards, which take place at the Staples Center. Bryant, though limited in his rehabbing activities to a stationary bike, accompanied the team throughout the Grammy Trip, as it is known, and found a welcome bit of slack in his schedule, for a change, which he used to begin catching up on the formal education that he missed. While the Lakers were visiting the Celtics, he dropped in on a couple of classes at Boston College, the first in international marketing and the other in banking. “Finance is always very interesting,” he said later. At the University of Miami, he joined a marketing-management class, where seniors were reviewing a case study on the launch of the Ford Fiesta. (Students posted pictures of Bryant wearing a backpack.) “I’m seeing the language of things that I’ve been doing for years,” he told me, referring to his sneaker line.
The N.B.A. requires injured players to address the media at least once before returning to practice, but Bryant, who has always enjoyed setting his own rules and standards, decided to speak more frequently while on the road, engaging in what one Lakers beat reporter termed “legacy building.” Ever conscious of his rep—his brand—he stood for questions in Chicago, Boston, Miami, and New York, while skipping lesser media towns like Orlando and Toronto. “If I’m going to do this shit, you can’t keep asking me the same questions,” he complained, early in the Miami scrum, the first I observed live, but then he indulged plenty more. Told that he looked “svelte,” he replied, deadpan, “I don’t know what that means. Didn’t go to college.”
Aside from a few weeks of practice, and those six games in December, Bryant was approaching a full year without really playing basketball. He’d become a fan, like the rest of us, and the new perspective inspired a wave of nostalgia, as he considered how much the game had changed since he entered the pros, as a teen-ager. The N.B.A. tweaks its rules more assiduously than its rival leagues, always seeking the perfect balance to suit a growing audience. A couple of such alterations, introduced more than a decade ago, struck Bryant as regrettable, even as he understood them philosophically. These were allowing a zone defense—a staple of European and amateur American basketball—instead of requiring constant man-to-man coverage; and the limits placed on “hand-checking,” a defensive action used to impede offensive flow. “I think what they’ve done has been very smart, in terms of how they’ve been able to make it such a global game,” Bryant told me. “I mean, that’s really what’s at the crux of it: a lot of big players in Europe weren’t post players”—brawny men who establish residence five feet from the hoop and play primarily with their backs turned to it. “They were skill players. So once the N.B.A. opened up the game, and allowed the zone in, now it made the game more appealing on a global scale.” He cited Dallas’s Dirk Nowitzki, a German, and Pau Gasol as welcome beneficiaries of this corporate globalization.
Still, the game wasn’t as aggressively physical as it had once been. (“Makes me nauseous,” he said in Chicago. “You can’t touch a guy.”) And he felt that the current conditions made it too easy for the merely good to appear transcendent. Ball handlers were no longer as responsible for creating their own space in which to maneuver, and an effective pull-up jump shot and decent athleticism now enabled someone like Toronto’s mildly heralded Terrence Ross, say, to score fifty-one points in an evening. By contrast, the varied tricks of naturally gifted scorers—Bryant included the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony and Durant in this category, along with himself—were no longer as useful. “I don’t care if you hand-check us with three hands,” he said, speaking now in New York, at Madison Square Garden. “If there’s nobody behind you, you’re not going to stop us. So the zone cripples some of the top scorers.”
It wasn’t just the rules that had changed. The statistical revolution that swept into Major League Baseball shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century had arrived, with a few years’ delay, in the N.B.A., bringing a greater emphasis on three-point shooting from the corners and on finding openings near the basket, for high-percentage attempts. As a result, teams were reshuffling their depth charts in favor of mobility over size. “Small ball,” Bryant (and others) called it. The kind of versatile player, like Bryant, who could shoot well from anywhere on the court was no longer so highly prized, because twenty-foot jumpers were a low-percentage gamble, by definition. “I’ve always been more interested in the creative side of the game, like how things happen, why things happen, as opposed to just the numbers,” Bryant told me. “Numbers have never felt fun to me.”
The fact that the Lakers, under the progressive regime of Coach D’Antoni, were themselves playing “small ball” was lost on no one. But, for a sportswriter, covering the Lakers requires, first and foremost, covering all things Kobe, and so Bryant’s leisurely pre-game bull sessions occupied the bulk of reporters’ attention, sometimes keeping them pinned in the bowels of the arenas, transcribing tweetable quotes (“New York’s a beautiful place, don’t get me wrong, but it’s colder than shit out here”), long after tip-off. “It feels kind of wrong, not even watching the game you’re here to cover,” ESPN’s Dave McMenamin admitted, one afternoon. Then again, the game that day pitted the Knicks against the Lakers, both at least ten games below .500. The last time they’d played one another under such mutually uncompetitive circumstances was in 1960. The question of primary relevance to a Lakers fan was whether Anthony, whom Bryant has called his best friend in basketball, could be persuaded to opt out of his Knicks contract this summer and sign with Los Angeles. Doubtful, was the consensus, in spite of Bryant’s weather-based pitch: “You know, it’s palm trees and beaches, obviously a little bit more appealing.” After headlining for so long, Anthony might bridle at accepting a supporting role.
Bryant and his wife, Vanessa, have two daughters, Natalia and Gianna, who are eleven and seven, and interested in soccer. Fatherhood has given Bryant an opportunity to consider the nature-nurture debate in terms of competitiveness, a subject of consuming interest. Natalia, he says, is “competitive but in a respectful way,” whereas Gianna is “insanely, insanely competitive—like, mean.” He recalled playing Candyland with her when she was three, and confronting the inevitable question of whether or not to let her win. “You know, it’s my move,” he said. “She obviously can see that I can win, so she’ll know that I’m not-winning on purpose. Then what’s that teaching? So I just play the game, I win—and the kid goes ape shit. She knocked the board over. ‘Baaaaaaa!’ I was, like, ‘Shit, the kid’s like me. Damn it.’ ” He flashed a toothy smile, as disarming as his glare—celebrated by fans online as the Kobe Death Stare. He added that he’d faced a similar situation with Natalia, several years earlier. She responded by giving him the silent treatment for two days and then asking for a rematch: a slower burn. “Maybe you can learn it later,” he said, referring to the quicker fuse of Gianna. But his suspicion is that “it’s not taught.”
“It’s a rough way to be,” Bryant said, of his and Gianna’s temperament. “Because all you care about is that end result and winning. It’s hard for people to put themselves in that state of mind, because, as humans, we always want to have a safety net.” He went on, “When you put all your eggs in that one basket, it can be absolutely devastating.”
Bryant believes that you can count on “three fingers, maybe” the number of players currently in the N.B.A. who burn as intensely as he does. “I’m not going to name names for these kids,” he said, when I asked who they are. “It’s not fair to them.” Identifying kindred spirits, whether in the business world or in other sports that he watches, is a favored pastime of Bryant’s, one that he occasionally commemorates on social media with the hashtag #differentanimalSamebeast. “You can feel it in a person’s energy,” he said, and mentioned that, when he meets such people, he is apt to sit with them and discuss the subject for hours, uninterrupted. He felt an overwhelming sense of camaraderie when, watching the football playoffs, in January, he saw the Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman deliver his now infamous victory rant to Fox’s Erin Andrews. (“When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get!” Sherman shouted. “Don’t you ever talk about me.”) “What you saw in Richard Sherman was the truth of athletes at the highest, highest, highest level,” Bryant said, and brought up, as a similar example, the speech Michael Jordan gave at his Hall of Fame induction ceremony, in 2009: a sad, drawn-out spectacle of score-settling, name-calling, and false humility. “It made everybody uncomfortable, but that’s him, right?” Bryant said of Jordan. “So when you see Sherman kind of just let it out, that’s been inside him from Day One. This is why he’s the best at what he does, because that’s how he feels. Now, when other people see that, it scares the shit out of ’em, right? But for people that understand that—like, I see him, I’m all, ‘Yeah, oh I think that every day.’ ”
Given the questionable frequency with which white commentators had used the word “thug” to describe Sherman, in the aftermath of the interview, I suggested that part of what scared people was the idea of an angry black man, with dreadlocks. But Bryant was unconvinced. “Even if it’s a white athlete that exploded like that,” he began, and mentioned Johnny Manziel, the Texas A. & M. quarterback who is expected to be picked high in the first round of the N.F.L. draft, in May. “The kid’s mercurial. If he did something like that, he’d get a lot of shit, too.” Bryant laughed. “That was the ugliness of greatness,” he said. “That’s what that is to me.”
Then, speaking in the language of a marketing case study, he went on, “What Sherman represents is something bigger than a kid from Compton that went to Stanford, that’s an All-Pro cornerback.” Alluding to Larry Bird, he said, “It speaks to the same kid from French Lick, Indiana, that’s a Hall of Famer, playing for the Boston Celtics, you know what I mean? That drive to overcome obstacles in your life, it’s consistent across the board. It just happens to have the face of a kid from Compton that went to Stanford.” I could almost picture the Nike commercial unspooling from his mouth, and wasn’t overly surprised to see a picture turn up, two and a half weeks later, on Bryant’s Instagram account, showing Bryant with his arm around Sherman. Caption: “On my Nike set with the champ @RSherman_25 #differentanimalSamebeast.”
As a rookie, Bryant speculated that fans were drawn to him because he was “an underdog,” and “people like to see people succeed against the odds.” A strong sense of overcoming obstacles—injuries, doubters—has remained with him throughout. But his perspective is complicated somewhat by the fact that he grew up well-off and with pro-athlete genes on both sides of his family. His mother’s brother, Chubby Cox, played briefly for the Washington Bullets. His father, Joe Bryant, was known as Jellybean, a nickname acquired on the playground courts of Philadelphia, where he developed a flashy style that he came to feel was underappreciated in the pre-Showtime-era N.B.A., during eight years with the home-town 76ers, the San Diego Clippers, and the Houston Rockets. (Kobe’s middle name, Bean, is a nod to this.) When Kobe was six, the Bryants moved to Italy so that Joe could continue his career in the European professional leagues. They remained there seven years, as Joe thrived. (Bryant once told Sports Illustrated that he remembered hearing the fans sing, in Italian, “You know the player who’s better than Magic or Jabbar? It’s Joseph, Joseph Bryant!”) Kobe had to read a Latin version of the Iliad. “And do presentations on it, in Latin, at nine years old, know what I mean?” he said of his Italian schooling. “That’s growing up a little differently.”
Bryant found the social adjustment difficult, re-assimilating as a black teen-ager used to speaking Italian, in the Philadelphia suburbs, where his parents resettled. “Combine that with blacks having their own way of talking, and I really had to learn two languages in order to fit in,” he once said. “Kids are cruel. It’s always been hard.”
He still thinks about it. “Honestly, I pinch myself sometimes, because I’m a kid who grew up in Italy, came back to Philadelphia—suburban school on the Main Line—and here I am shooting a movie or having dialogue with Mars Blackmon,” Bryant said, referring to the Spike Lee character from “She’s Gotta Have It.” Lee, who initially wanted Bryant to play the role of Jesus Shuttlesworth in “He Got Game” (he was played instead by Ray Allen), later settled for shooting a vérité documentary with Bryant, “Kobe Doin’ Work,” which was released in 2009. “I’m not supposed to be here, you know?” Bryant added, offering an unusual twist on the familiar aw-shucks trope. “It’s pretty fucking cool.”
“There is a bigger issue in terms of being an African-American athlete, and the box people try to put you in because of it,” he told me. “And it’s always a struggle to step outside of that.” When I brought up LeBron James posting online a photo of the Heat players dressed in hoodies, with their heads bowed, in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, as a political expression, Bryant seemed nonplussed. “I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American,” he said. “That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and as a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American, we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, if we’ve progressed as a society, then you don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.”
Jim Brown, the ex-running back and political activist, said on the Arsenio Hall show a few months ago that if he were to convene another summit of black athletes, like the one in Cleveland, in 1967, with the Celtics great Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor), among others, in support of Muhammad Ali’s decision to refuse the draft, he wouldn’t invite Bryant. “He is somewhat confused about culture, because he was brought up in another country,” Brown said, and Bryant responded by tweeting, “A ‘Global’ African American is an inferior shade to ‘American’ African Americans?? #hmm. that doesn’t sound very #Mandela or #DrKing sir.”
The European upbringing also accounts for Bryant’s sense of himself as a prematurely old-school basketball player, an issue of increasing importance to him now, as he embraces his role as a self-described “elder statesman,” who “communicates to these kids how the game should be played.” Isolated in the central Italian town of Rieti, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, he was cut off from the world of Amateur Athletic Union basketball, in the United States, which was increasingly geared toward showy feats of athleticism. “You know, Bill Russell and Jerry West, they were going overseas and doing basketball clinics,” he said, referring to the ex-Laker whose silhouette is immortalized in the official N.B.A. logo. “So they were teaching coaches over there how to think the game, how to play fundamentally sound. I was a by-product of all that. When we came to practice, guess which drills we were doing? We were doing Red Auerbach’s drills”—from the fifties and sixties, in other words—“thinking the game sequentially. I just came up at the right time and learned to play the right way because of it. So when I came back to America all I had to do now was put the icing on the cake, in terms of the flash and the imaginative things.”
In spite of a reputation as a loner, persistent from his early years, Bryant now takes seriously the idea of leadership, and reads up on the subject. (Phil Jackson gave him “The Tao of Leadership.”) “What I found out, particularly on this team, this year, is most of these guys don’t know how to take care of themselves,” Bryant said. “They’re willing learners, but most kids don’t grow up with that kind of structure, or that kind of thinking—which needs to be changed as well, and that’s a whole ’nother conversation. The way our kids grow up, learning the game of basketball, learning sports as a whole—we have some work to do in that area.”
“Sometimes I wonder what the message is that Kobe’s sending to the young guys,” Mitch Kupchak said, and mentioned that he was reading a biography of Ted Williams, who reminded him in certain ways of Bryant. “It’s like Ted Williams trying to help a guy in the minor leagues. There’s just no connect.” Kupchak went on, “Like a lot of guys like him, they’ve accomplished so much doing things a certain way, and a lot of times they feel that they know the only way to do it. I’d love for him to one day be a coach, just to try it for a year, whether it’s at the D-league level, or if his daughters play high-school basketball. And then, like, everything will crystallize to him—like, Holy mackerel! What was I thinking?”
Leading by example may remain Bryant’s most effective option. Eric Avar, the creative director of Nike, described a fishing trip on which he accompanied Bryant a few years ago, and which “kind of evolved into a ‘Stand by Me’ moment.” They left from the coast of Newport Beach, California, where the Bryants live, on “a fishing boat slash yacht—it was a nice fishing boat,” and proceeded sixty miles out into the Pacific. “Kobe likes these adventures,” Avar said. “We had seen a lot of dolphins and whales and sharks, so this notion of just swimming with sharks or whales, it kind of elevated to that.” Bryant pointed to the bowsprit, and said, “If I jump, will you jump?” Avar agreed. “So he just took his shirt off and hopped right over,” Avar continued. The boat’s size was such that swimming around to the stern, to get to the ladder, took some time, and Avar, at least, couldn’t suppress the images of shark fins in his mind. “You couldn’t get back onto the boat fast enough,” he recalled.
“That’s where Kobe’s competitive response kicked in,” Avar went on. Bryant pointed next to the second deck, roughly twenty feet above the water. “So we jumped off of there,” Avar said. “And then, as we’re getting back onto the boat, I can see him looking up, and there’s the radar tower up top, and I was, like, Oh no, he won’t do that. And, sure enough, he starts climbing to the top, and there’s just this little platform, and now you’re in the middle of the boat, so not only is it a thirty-foot drop to the water but you have to clear the bottom deck, because the radar’s mast is in the middle of the boat. And he went first, and he was all wet, so for me, climbing up, it was, like, slippery, and the little platform was slippery, and my heart was beating, and he’s down in the water, and he’s saying a few things to me that I won’t repeat. But I knew I had to jump, so I jumped—and it was a long way down.”
Bryant’s history of friction with teammates extends beyond Shaquille O’Neal to include, more recently, the center Dwight Howard, who signed with the Houston Rockets last summer after clashing repeatedly with Bryant. (Bryant responded on Twitter by unfollowing Howard—“Some people think that’s petty, but, whatever, that’s how I am,” he explained—and Howard has since posted a picture of himself dunking over Bryant’s head.) But when I arrived in Los Angeles, in February, and ventured into the Lakers’ locker room, I found an atmosphere of playful respect, born of mentoring through intimidation. “He’ll try you,” Jordan Farmar, a guard who had recently returned from playing in Turkey, said of Bryant. “He’ll try everybody at one point or another. Just ask Nick.”
Nick Young, a.k.a. Swaggy P., a shooting guard and sometime small forward, emerged from the trainers’ room, and caught only the tail end of the exchange. “Whatchou doing?” he asked Farmar.
“Talking about Kobe, man. Talking about how he punked you!”
“Fuck Kobe!” Young said, and then laughed. “No, I love Kobe. That’s my dog.”
Young later elaborated. “Everybody says he’s an asshole and all that. He is. But he’s—he’s a good one, for some reason, you know? And he don’t mind being called that! That’s one of the things he told me. He said, ‘Everybody focusses on being friends on the court. On the court you ain’t supposed to be nobody’s friend.’ ”
“I grew up with role models that were assholes,” Bryant said, echoing Young’s point. “I mean, you know, in a very competitive, fun way. But they were assholes! You know Michael, his tongue was sharp as a whip. Bird? Sharp, and I mean, like, personal. They were nasty. Barkley was nasty. I grew up around these guys, so when I talk trash to somebody I’m going for the jugular. These younger generations, it freaks ’em out a little bit.”
Bryant told the Los Angeles Daily News that it bothered him to see Young and others start playing cards on the team plane without first doing their “homework”—i.e., film study, a long-standing priority of Bryant’s. When I asked Bryant if he was ever tempted to play cards with the guys, he replied, “It’s not good for team dynamics. I can’t be barking at ’em all day on the practice court and then demolish ’em at a card game, and talk shit to ’em in a card game, too.”
Young, who did a memorable Black Mamba impersonation at his locker for a local TV broadcast, in January, was granted the honor of being the first person to wear the Kobe 9s in a game. “They sold out once I put ’em on my feet, you know?” Young joked. “So I need to talk to Kobe about giving me a little percentage.”
Michael Jordan, likely the most important American athlete since Muhammad Ali, has been criticized for failing to exert his vast influence on any cause greater than footwear. His Jordan Brand, at Nike, is still worth more than a billion dollars, and, even in his middle age, Jordan travels on a private jet that’s painted to resemble a sneaker. He owns the Charlotte Bobcats, a middling franchise, and, according to a recent ESPN magazine portrait of His Airness at fifty, he stays up late most nights watching Westerns that he’s already seen.
Bryant attended Jordan’s fiftieth-birthday party last year, and believes that his “big brother,” as he has called Jordan, is “happy with the challenge that he has in Charlotte,” while noting, with uncharacteristic diplomacy, that they have “different interests.” On the court, Jordan’s legacy has long haunted Bryant. “That’s the guy he wanted to play like, that’s who he wanted to play against, that’s who he wanted to be better than,” Mitch Kupchak said, and added, “I know six is the big number for him,” a reference to Jordan’s superior ring count. Yet Bryant’s ambitions are greater, and it is easier to imagine him adjusting to the off-court life gracefully. Phil Jackson, who coached both men, told me, “Their competitive level on the floor is very similar, but, off the floor, I don’t think Kobe really has the same issues.” Alluding to Jordan’s gambling history, Jackson said, “I doubt if you’ll see Kobe piling up debts on the golf course.” Bryant doubts it, too. Not long ago, a reporter teased him about the possibility of finally settling the Jordan debate once and for all, with a game of one on one. “In twenty years, when you guys are both on the senior golf circuit, you might step into the gym and do it,” the reporter suggested, but Bryant cut him off. “I don’t play golf,” he said.
Bryant’s refusal to take up golf is a point of pride, related to the box he resists being confined to, as an African-American athlete. He told me, “I get questions all the time: ‘What are you going to do when you retire?’ As if I had no life, no talent outside of playing basketball. It absolutely drives me crazy. ‘You just going to golf all day?’ I’m, like, ‘No. Who the fuck said that?’ It’s maddening.”
The European childhood inspired in Bryant a sense that there is “a much bigger world out there,” as he put it to me, and, as an adult, he travels widely in the summers, both as an extension of his brand (doing promotional work for Lenovo in Manila, say) and in order to expose Natalia and Gianna to different cultures. “We’ll just kind of set up camp in one particular city,” he said. “Take ’em to the Louvre, expose ’em to art.” Last year, he visited Brazil, Dubai, and China—where his jerseys have outsold those of Yao Ming, the country’s first N.B.A. star. (A statue of Bryant stands in the city of Guanghzhou.)
“I love watching, reading, listening to people who have done great things,” Bryant said. Asked to name some examples, he warned me that the list was “a mile long,” and then proceeded down the road: “Walt Disney, to Oprah Winfrey, to Jay-Z, to a serial entrepreneur like Mike Repole, to Michael Rubin, to Evan Williams. It just goes and goes and goes and goes.” Repole—I had to look this up—created Vitaminwater, and Rubin is the C.E.O. of an e-commerce company called Kynetic. Williams co-founded Twitter. “President Clinton, you know, we spent some time together the other day, and had a chance to kind of talk in the back about business and how he goes through the process of delegation and structure,” Bryant continued. “And that’s without even getting into the Michael Jacksons of the world, the Michelangelos of the world, the Da Vincis of the world, the Warhols of the world. We’re surrounded by people who do incredible things, and the information is right there for us to learn from them.”
Those last few names represent some of the “muses” behind Bryant’s latest product launch, which you could be forgiven for assuming is something grander than athletic shoes. His cause, for now, is footwear, too, but do yourself a favor and Google “Kobe” and “building a system,” and then watch the video of Bryant and Eric Avar, the Nike creative director, discussing a safari that Bryant once took in South Africa:
“I enjoy crafting the story of things and products,” Bryant told me. “I just have a passion for it, for marketing and all that stuff. Some entertainers love to draw. Kanye, he’s an incredibly creative person. He loves art, and he loves design. There’s certain things that we do, but the thing that’s consistent is the control of your business.” Bryant’s fanatical control of his business is such that he filed a lawsuit last year to prevent his mother from auctioning off high-school keepsakes and other memorabilia.
“With Kobe, there’s always ‘why,’ ” Gary Vitti, the Lakers’ trainer, said one day, in his office at the team’s practice facility, in El Segundo. “So if I say, or if anybody says, ‘We’re going to do this,’ then the question is, ‘Why?,’ and you have to explain it to him, not only in an anatomical but in a kinesiological way.” Vitti said that although many players around the league were becoming more interested in understanding body function and recovery methods, Bryant was unique in this respect. While the rest of the Lakers had gone low-carb, and were eating only grass-fed beef (no “wannabe cows,” as the center Robert Sacre put it), Bryant, unsatisfied with the locker-room spread of kale chips, gherkin pickles, and almond-butter paste, had hired a nutritionist from the U.S. Olympic Committee to monitor his levels more closely. “Kobe is totally involved in his approach to basketball, whether it be the medical aspect or the athletic aspect or the actual, fundamental aspect,” Vitti continued. “Those three different entities, he’s as well versed as any player, I think, that’s played any game, ever.”
Outside Vitti’s window, Pau Gasol lay stretched out on a table, resting his groin, which had recently received a PRP shot, or platelet-rich plasma therapy. “They take your blood and spin it down in a centrifuge,” Vitti said, explaining that the goal was to extract the platelets, in order to inject them at the site of an injury, thereby spiking the inflammation and triggering the body’s natural therapeutic response. “Some people think it doesn’t work. Depends who you read.”
PRP therapy, Vitti said, was often confused with Orthokine and Regenokine, rarer forms of treatment invented by a doctor in Düsseldorf, and I was reminded of the strange moment during Bryant’s onstage conversation with Jimmy Kimmel, last summer, when the former All-Pro receiver Terrell Owens stood up in the front row and asked Bryant to “share with the audience and the millions of people that are watching today how cutting-edge technology and science has played a big part in your recovery. . . . Think about stem-cell research, Regenokine, cryotherapy—these are not P.E.D.s, by the way.”
“Save it for the grand jury,” Kimmel joked.
“The Germany thing actually started in terms of us hearing about it from Laker fans that came out of Hollywood,” Vitti went on. “In particular, it was Karen Silver, who’s the wife of Joel Silver—big-time movie producer, you can look him up. Her and Ari Emmanuel, you know who he is: Endeavor. They kept saying to me, ‘How come you’re not sending these guys to Germany?’ ” The treatments, which are not F.D.A.-approved, are similar in that they involve a centrifuge, but, instead of focussing on platelets, they isolate an antagonist of an arthritic agent called interleukin. Bryant’s right knee—the unbroken one—had been degenerating, to the point where he hardly had any cartilage left, so they figured, why not. “And he had a tremendous response,” Vitti said. Bryant travelled to Düsseldorf in each of the past three off-seasons for sessions with Dr. Peter Wehling. Alex Rodriguez is a Wehling client, too, a referral from Bryant, and Peyton Manning has sought European medical relief for his creaky neck—now sometimes known as his “bionic neck.”
As Vitti was explaining the difference between Orthokine and Regenokine (which adds stem cells to the mix), Bryant appeared in the window, followed by his protégé Nick Young, who had come down with a bum knee of his own. “Is it something that we’re doing?” Vitti wondered, as he considered the mounting injuries that had left his team with too few players left to scrimmage at practice. “Kobe comes down wrong, and has a tibial-plateau fracture. Steve Blake is behind a pick and puts his arm out as a guy’s running by, the guy hits his arm, and he tears his ulnar collateral ligament. It’s a baseball pitcher’s injury! So it’s a complete fluke. Jodie Meeks goes for a jump shot, comes down on somebody’s foot, rolls his ankle. Pau Gasol strains a flexor muscle in his toe, we strap his toe down, now he changes the mechanics, now his pelvis shifts, and the load goes to his adductor—and he strains his adductor. Xavier Henry runs into somebody, and he gets knocked off balance, and he comes down in an awkward position. How’s that related to anything?” Vitti’s best guess was a kind of chaos theory, that the contemporary game had become too fast, and that the run-and-gun systems espoused by coaches like D’Antoni introduced too many possibilities for things to go wrong. “They’re constantly on that precipice of being in control, just a thread under being out of control,” he said. “Now, you look back at our triangle offense”—Phil Jackson’s system—“and don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it should be played that way or this way, but it’s a very controlled pace.”
As Vitti escorted me out, he brought up the fact that Bryant often arrives, by helicopter, at the arena late for games now that he’s no longer playing. “I haven’t yet had a chance to give Kobe shit about this,” he said. “I’ve heard every excuse in the book for why players are late: my grandmother passed away, my car broke down, I got a flat tire, my kid’s sick. How’s this? ‘My helicopter got fogged in.’ Pretty good, isn’t it?”
The Lakers won three games in all of January. For a game in Cleveland, against the lowly Cavaliers, in early February, they dressed only eight players, and fielded a starting lineup of names—Kelly, Johnson, Sacre, Blake, Farmar—that only serious fans would recognize as belonging to professional athletes. In the second quarter, having nonetheless established a sizable lead, they lost a bench reserve to a twisted knee. So then there were seven. The fourth quarter brought foul trouble. Chris Kaman, the backup center, managed to rack up six violations in just fourteen minutes of filling in for Robert Sacre, who already had four fouls of his own. Kaman, having been ejected from the game, decided to take advantage of all the empty space on the bench, and he lay down for a nap. Then Jordan Farmar went lame (cramping calf), and retreated to the sideline for an ice pack. Six minutes remained. Sacre, back in the game after Kaman’s ejection, committed another foul—and then one more. Now what? The Lakers, it seemed, were left with just four men against the Cavs’ five, like a hockey team playing shorthanded.
Not so fast. A little-noticed passage on page 15 of the N.B.A. rulebook states, “If a player in the game receives his sixth personal foul and all substitutes have already been disqualified, said player shall remain in the game.” For this, at least—for the most peculiar moment in the N.B.A. this season—we have the Lakers to thank.
Showtime it wasn’t, but there were some positive takeaways from the game. For instance, hewing to their small-ball formula, the Lakers set a franchise record by sinking eighteen three-point shots. And they won, ending a seven-game losing streak, although any victory now held dubious value, given that they had fully joined the futility chase, an annual counterpoint to the playoff race, in which teams compete for the dishonor of finishing low enough in the standings to qualify for a so-called lottery pick in the amateur draft. Jeanie Buss was concerned that one of the game’s most lasting images was of Kaman prone, post-ejection, and asked me if I’d noticed Bryant’s incredulous reaction, which pleased her, as an indication that someone still cared. (“Kaman goes to sleep on the bench—it’s, like, when big brother is not around, you start doing crazy shit,” he said.) “We’re the Lakers!” Buss said, seeming almost to fight back tears. “Not, like, the Bad News Bears. We’re not the lovable losers, where the only luck we have is bad luck.”
They were no longer certain of selling out the Staples Center—even Jack Nicholson was missing games—and, late in the fourth quarter, most nights, the home crowd would begin to chant, “We want Phil! We want Phil!,” referring to Jackson, the Zen master.
The relationship between Bryant and Jackson is perhaps not so different from that of other mules and mentors. But it is much more public, in part because Jackson has long maintained a side business as a best-selling author, sharing more than the ordinary amount of dirt.
“Was I surprised?” Jackson wrote, in “The Last Season,” of hearing the news from Colorado, involving the alleged assault. “Yes, but not entirely. Kobe can be consumed with surprising anger, which he’s displayed toward me and his teammates.”
And: “Kobe was unhappy with the type of plane that was selected; he wanted one with higher status.”
Or, in “Eleven Rings”: “It was easy to mistake Kobe’s worldliness and intense focus for maturity.”
And: “I had a dream about spanking Kobe and giving Shaq a smack.”
Bryant once threatened to sue Jackson for slander, when the coach mentioned an erroneous rumor to a newspaper columnist, about Bryant’s having dogged it in the early stages of high-school games, so that he could play hero in the closing minutes. Bryant also told me, speaking of Jackson, “It’s no fault of any other coaches—he’s just the best coach to have ever coached any profession, in any era.”
He said, “I still don’t know how the hell he managed to deal with me and all this energy, but he did, and we have an incredible relationship now, because of it.” He added, “He’s impacted my life beyond measure, not just as a basketball player but also as a person, how I am with my family, how I am with my kids: patience, compassion.”
The warm feeling is reciprocated in the Buss-Jackson household, where Bryant’s nickname has become a fond family joke. “What happens now is, if somebody makes Phil mad, I’ll be, like, ‘Watch out for the Gray Mamba,’ ” Jeanie Buss said. “Or sometimes, if my dog is barking too much at the delivery guy, I’ll be, like, ‘Careful of the White Mamba.’ ”
This all made it only more devastating when, earlier this month, a day after the Lakers had lost “not just a game but their dignity,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, in a forty-eight-point drubbing at the hands of their arena-mates the Clippers, rumors leaked that Jackson was considering an offer to become president of the Knicks.
Two weeks ago, the Lakers made official what was becoming increasingly obvious, as successive knee scans revealed limited progress in the healing fracture: Bryant would not be returning to the court this season, after all. A press conference was arranged, and a “smoldering” Bryant, according to the L.A. Times, made his first public remarks in almost a month. “I feel like killing everybody every time I go to the arena,” he said. “I’m just on edge every time.” A trade of the thirty-four-year-old point guard Steve Blake at the deadline, in late February, had inspired this Twitter rant from Bryant: “Not cool with @SteveBlake5 being gone AT ALL. One of my closest teammates and psycho competitor.” He had also lost patience with the front office’s wait-and-see approach to rebuilding. “Oh, yeah, let’s just play next year and let’s just suck again,” he said, sarcastic.
“I think we have to start at the top, in terms of the culture of our team,” Bryant said, and then singled out the Buss children. “You got to start with Jim and Jeanie and how that relationship plays out.” He was alluding to the common gripe among Lakers fans that Jim Buss was the obstacle standing in the way of rehiring Jackson. “Then it goes down to the coaching staff and what Mike is going to do,” Bryant went on. And then, more ominously: “What they’re going to do with Mike.”
Magic Johnson, who had appeared on the “Tonight Show,” earlier in the winter, and complained that D’Antoni didn’t understand defense (“The teams run the same play, Jay, on us. We haven’t stopped it yet—uh, duh!”), joined Bryant in expressing his displeasure, on Twitter. “I love Jim & Jeanie Buss, but we need Phil Jackson to be the face of our great organization,” Johnson wrote. For a brief moment, there was hope again in Lakerville, as the two biggest stars in franchise history seemed to be waging a joint campaign to force emergency action. In New York, at the Daily News, there was talk of a developing “bicoastal soap opera.”
But when I spoke to Jackson, the day after Bryant’s and Johnson’s last-ditch pleas, he made it clear that any notions of his rejoining the Lakers had ended with the decision to hire D’Antoni. “I think that the die is cast, so to speak,” he said. “Even the spectre of my being around is difficult. It’ll be a little bit of a relief to get away.”
Thinking ahead to a new gig in Manhattan (it was made formal at the Garden last Tuesday), Jackson said he was precluded from discussing the possibility of reuniting with Bryant until Bryant became a free agent, in a couple of years. But he said, “He just wants to play for something. He doesn’t want a farewell tour for Kobe Bryant.” He added, “I owe him a book, which I keep meaning to drop off.”
“The whole town is just in mourning,” Magic Johnson told me. Referring to Bryant, he said, “He spoiled us big time, this dude. Now we’re seeing what might happen when he’s gone in two years.” ♦
