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HAMMER: Growing Up With Kobe Bryant

   DailyWire.com
VINCENT LAFORET/AFP via Getty Images

I am not from Philadelphia, where the late Kobe Bryant achieved high school basketball superstardom after growing up mostly in Italy. Nor am I from Los Angeles, where he ultimately attained global status as a sporting and cultural icon. For that matter, I am not even a Los Angeles Lakers fan.

But in many ways, I feel like I grew up with Kobe.

For those basketball fans right around my age, Kobe was the guy. When Michael Jordan completed his second three-repeat with the Chicago Bulls and retired for a second time after that vaunted championship-clinching jumper over a dizzied Bryon Russell, I was only nine years old. My childhood friends and I all loved the film “Space Jam,” but we were too young to experience most of Jordan’s prime years in Chicago. By contrast, by the time LeBron James truly hit his stride and took his first Cleveland Cavaliers team to the NBA Finals, I was on the precipice of graduating high school.

Instead, during my formative years as a sports fan and lifelong basketball lover, I grew up with Kobe. He graced the cover of the second basketball video game I can recall purchasing, the eponymous “Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside” for Nintendo 64. Alongside longtime teammate and fellow identifiably one-word superstar Shaq, Kobe won three straight championships with the Lakers right around the time I became a devoted fan of Dr. James Naismith’s sport.

For people right around my age, Kobe seemed like the obvious successor to Michael Jordan. Michael was the clearly superior defensive (and certainly still superior offensive) player, but the similarities in their playing styles were downright scary.

Offensively, as LeBron himself discussed the night before Kobe’s fateful helicopter accident on Sunday, the Laker great could do no wrong. Kobe, who had a famously rigorous workout regimen, could shoot the outside ball. He could drive to the hoop and draw contact like few others. He was an exceptionally gifted athlete, a ball handler par excellence, prolific dunker, and perhaps the last truly great mid-range jump shooter before the modern game began phasing out the mid-range jump shot as a statistically outdated relic of a bygone era.

But even more similar than Kobe and Michael’s on-court substantive offensive styles were their demeanors: Both exhibited a once-a-generation drive, tenacity, grit, and sheer willpower that could overpower opponents by brute force of nature. Overall, as Yahoo! Sports wrote in 2013: “From the gum chomping to the arched eyebrows to the actual inflection of his voice, you can tell that Bryant clearly watched tape after tape of Jordan while growing up in Italy.”

Playing pick-up basketball in middle and high school, it was commonplace to yell “Kobe!” while shooting — a way to call your shot before it went in. Heck, we would even do this in high school while “shooting” crumpled up pieces of paper into the garbage bin. While coaching my younger brother’s local recreation league basketball team (to the championship, if I may self-congratulate) in 2004, I remember using Kobe as the model for the quintessential basketball dual threat: Guard him too closely and he’d blow right by you, but give him too much leeway and he’d quickly pop a lethal jump shot.

During my sophomore year at Duke, I remember staying up to the wee hours of the morning to watch Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team — nicknamed the “Redeem Team” after the lackluster 2004 Olympic result — win back the gold medal. Kobe was the captain of that team, and he and Krzyzewski forged a famously close relationship.

Kobe was, like all of us, a flawed human being. He committed adultery at least one very public time — perhaps more than that one time, according to divorce filing paperwork. And it is in the eye of the beholder whether that one very public time was, in fact, much worse than “mere” adultery.

But Kobe matured as he grew older. He was, by all accounts, an exceedingly devoted and loving father. By the time of his premature death, he had also become a devout Catholic. He spoke fluent Italian and was generally hailed as being more worldly and sophisticated than most NBA players of his era. So as I have matured myself over the years, I felt even then that I was growing up, too, with Kobe.

Kobe was set to do much good in his second, post-basketball act — if only he had not been taken from us far too soon. He was a basketball (81 points in a game!) and cultural (Academy Award winner!) icon. To me, he will always be a legend.

May his memory be a blessing.

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