Rest easy, Kobe Bryant

Jan 28, 2020 Editorial

It is as if they had to have the last laugh, which brings the first of our tears, many tears. He came to us young, straight from High School, a mere stripling youth. Now he is gone to basketball heaven almost as young, but leaving echoes of the footsteps of a player, a competitor, a performer, a leader, who along the way became a man of rare calibre, as befitting his extraordinary talents.
That is one of the words – the many glittering phrases, with which basketball legend, Kobe Bryant, will be remembered and immortalized. There is no need for him to be mythologized, as he had done that on the court, the yards of life, and the annals of man. The myths and wonder of it all, of him and his swaggering, swashbuckling persona, will leap and soar to new heights from that flame strewn wreckage, that ash-laden hillside from a foggy midmorning in golden California.
The Mamas and the Papas sang of California Dreaming. Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers lived it at the heights.
To be so young and so gifted, made many, almost all, forget that he was black. It did not matter. Oh, he received his share of passes, from the mistakes he made.
A hotel in Colorado was one, and his succumbing to the wiles of the flesh and the eternal weakness of man. But he learned and moved on, without looking back, without revisiting the memory and story of a very public lapse in judgment, in responsibility, in what he had to come to represent and embody to family, and to a world that adored him, that fell at his feet each time he lifted off and went into orbit through elevation and hang time that defied the dictates of gravity.
Kobe operated in a zone peculiar to him, and which few are gifted enough and committed enough and driven enough to inhabit. Only the rare good ones, the exceptional ones, can understand that, live there, and flourish in that demanding universe, which knows neither restraint nor discretion, only the heroic virtue of valour. That was what he brought in buckets, night in and night out, in the grueling crucibles of endless seasons and for many of them.
Many a time his teammates, who did not fully understand nor appreciated the special thoroughbred in their midst, were left behind, bemoaned the scanty pieces with which they were left to be contented. It was the same way for his coaches who, on occasion, shackled him from roaming free in the majesty of his sightless will, and that breathtaking instinctive genius summoned so effortlessly.
But Kobe was always about growing, of being ever so slightly ahead of his peers, his times, even himself. His was a call to get there in a hurry, to deliver the astounding gifts with which he was blessed so abundantly. It is not surprising that, in life after basketball (if there could be such a contemplation for this superstar) he became an ambassador to youths trapped in hazes of their own making, to communities imperiled by troubles that burden, to his people bowing before the weights of a harsh, unforgiving world, and before an approving world that watched him grow beyond the courts and come of age, while advancing to an age that most do not even know existed.
Kobe Bryant lived the stuff of dreams realized, the American Dream in full technicolour and at supersonic speed. There would be no restful retirement for his unflagging spirit, to relish the rewards of his toils that thrilled countless many globally, who embraced basketball as a universal phenomenon and crowned him one of its youngest kings.
He did stride like a king among men made pale by his long shadow, leaving many of his conquests scattered on the field of battle, as they tried to chase him, and failed to catch him.
Now time and destiny did catch him on a Sunday morning in the West as the sun was rising. His star will rise still more, as he leaves the moves and memories for which there will always be hush and awe. Rest easy, Kobe Bryant. Thanks for the grand times.