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Kobe Bryant with his daughter Gianna at the WNBA All Star Game at Mandalay Bay Events Center in 2019. Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports/File Photo
THERE ARE TWO VIDEOS that sum up Kobe Bryant’s life for this NBA junkie. In between these videos are the NBA titles, MVP awards, Olympic golds, the 81-point night, the 60-point final game, even the rape case that got settled out of court and must be mentioned in any summing up of Kobe’s life.
The first video is a record of the first time many people took notice of the future superstar. He won the 1997 slam dunk contest as an 18-year-old rookie, flexing his muscles and pouting his lips after his victory in a swagger that foreshadowed his impending dominance. “Showboat” was what crossed the mind, in a mix of awe and annoyance – the same word his hulking Lakers teammate Shaquille O’Neal would famously call him, before their basketball divorce sent Shaq packing to Miami.
The second video, the one shared after his death last Sunday in a chopper crash with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, shows him after retirement mentoring Gigi, who didn’t look much taller than five feet, on an indoor half court at home, with framed Lakers jerseys hanging on a wall. They were barefoot as Kobe was teaching her how to shoot against a 6’6” defender. She used the ball to gently push off Kobe and create separation before hitting a jumper.
The first video was Kobe the unreachable, the player with a limitless offensive repertoire with a defensive tenacity to match, the legend who often humiliated my favorite teams in the 20 years that I watched him play.
The second video though, Kobe the barefoot father with an adolescent child, was me. Or at least the Kobe that I and perhaps millions of other fathers around the world could identify with. He had dreams for Gigi, who had dreams of her own to build on her father’s hoops legacy. The crash that killed them both was a devastating blow to the basketball world, but it also broke the heart of any father who has ever played ball with their child.
My son spent a big part of his childhood playing soccer, then he went through a ping-pong phase. But soon after he hit his teens, he suddenly became taller than me, and took an interest in everything basketball – playing it, watching it, and learning about its icons like Kobe Bryant, even though he had never actually seen Kobe play except on old videos on YouTube.
Residents at a housing project in Taguig pay tribute to Kobe and daughter Gianna a day after their death. Danny Pata
When we moved to a new home in Quezon City to be nearer his school, one of the first things I installed was a backcourt with a rim, squeezed into a small outdoor patio with an upper ledge that would block wayward jump shots. We spent countless hours playing each other in that cramped space, trash talking as if we were archrivals. He would regularly fake a drive and pull up for a shot, but not before shouting, “Kobeee!”
Now on the cusp of adulthood and studying overseas for a year, he has been sharing his grief via messaging, and I’ve been sending him videos of Kobe in his prime, but also that video of the retired Kobe teaching his daughter, who finds a way to shoot over her giant of a father.
I also sent my son a photo of our rim at home, the plywood backboard now warped from too many rainy days and from the pounding of countless shots attempted in the name of a father of a child who also played hoops.
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