The memory of Kobe Bryant: successor to Michael Jordan, NBA legend and trapped by a tragic death

Mauricio Codocea

08/23/2020 - 8:01

• Clarín.com
• sports

It's not another day for the basketball world. It is a day when millions of fans of this sport will feel a void when they remember that this Sunday, August 23, was Kobe Bryant's birthday. A man who became a legend  and who became (more) eternal when he died tragically on January 26 when the helicopter that was transporting him with Gianna, one of his daughters, fell. He was supposed to be 42 very young, but he's gone.

If millions feel that emptiness, that absence, it is because if the Black Mamba did something, it was precisely to fill boxes that were believed to be blank.

The weight of Michael Jordan's final retirement fell hard on the NBA's shoulders. Just when the Internet was coming, when globalization took a communicational leap on scales unimaginable long ago and when the world was heading to pulverize the distances, the best basketball in the world lost the guy who had done all that without the facilities of technology.

Of course, the league's image and popularity were never in jeopardy . How to recover that individual strength and the drag that Jordan's figure caused? How could they imitate him, yet match him, ever? It wasn't just a matter of finding someone who wanted to do it: someone who could with that burden had to show up .

And there was Kobe Bryant.

A young Kobe Bryant, in a photo session in 1999 AFP Photo

The confidence the Italian-raised escort had in himself did not make him a denier of reality. So he got as close to Jordan as he could. I wanted to learn from the best. Sometimes I loved him too much.

"He was like my little brother , " the greatest in history defined him at the public funeral held in February at the Staples Center. And he exemplified: "The younger brother always wants to get into his things. And Kobe used to text me at 11:30 p.m., 2 or 3 in the morning."

Bryant asked him for advice, asked him everything. "At first it was irritating. But later it became a passion. This boy had passion, one that I had never seen, " acknowledged Jordan, who ended up being a great friend.

"When someone says to me: 'You would have beaten him in a one-on-one' , I think that (in reality) everything they see of me is because of him," Kobe acknowledged in the filming of The Last Dance, the documentary series about Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, which debuted after the death of the Philadelphia-born.

The Pennsylvania boy ultimately managed to fill that void . Not in the same way, which would be as unfair to claim as impossible to achieve, but it did. For those boys born in the early '90s, for whom it had been chronologically very difficult to follow Jordan, the maximum reference was (and is) Bryant.

Wilt Chamberlain , Elgin Baylor , Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , Jerry West , Magic Johnson. Five illustrious names in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers to which George Mikan could be added if the time in Minneapolis is counted. Pure history, of the good, of the great ...

The kind of story and the kind of cracks that led us to think that there wouldn't be many more like them. Until a little guy picked up from a humble thirteenth place in the draft , traded with Charlotte, and changed everything.

The "24" and the "8". The two Kobe Bryant jerseys that the Lakers removed AP Photo

The Lakers went 18 years without winning an NBA title between 1954 and 1972. It was the longest drought they had, though not the most cruel. In those nearly two decades, they reached multiple finishes, most lost to Red Auerbach's dominating Boston Celtics .

The nearly ten seasons that passed from the 1991 ring to the early 2000s were worse for two reasons: In most of those years, there were not even endings but early eliminations, and furthermore there were no iconic names from the hierarchy to the top. that the purple and gold franchise was used to.

AC Green , Vlade Divac , Eddie Jones , Cedric Ceballos ... It is impossible to place those names at the same level as those that marked Laker's life . Until Kobe Bryant arrived.

It will be a matter of taste, but Black Mamba , in short, won as much as the biggest: five champion rings , like Magic or Kareem in Los Angeles; 18 All-Star selections , in history behind only Abdul-Jabbar; third top scorer of all time, until LeBron James, a day before the accident that killed Kobe, surpassed him and placed him fourth.

Bryant, after all, was the face of an absolute re-founding of the Lakers, who were once again the cream of the NBA in his hand. His injuries and eventual retirement left such a hole that the franchise fell into its worst sporting years. No recovery cost the Los Angeles team as much as recovering from the end of Kobe's career.

The same thing caused in the United States National Team, the country that owns basketball, which hit rock bottom when an unknown team called Argentina made it kiss the canvas twice and caused its maximum international failures.

Bryant picked up the glove and revalued the once-called Dream Team , which had lost the magic, the glory, and the gold. Because nothing that USA Basketball faced with coach Mike Krzyzewski at the helm could have been possible without him, the top figure in the NBA, committing himself the way he did.

Kobe Bryant, along with Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James, in London 2012. AFP Photo

He led the Redeem Team ("Redemption Team") that regained first place in the 2008 Olympic Games and revalidated gold in 2012, but before that he even played the 2007 Las Vegas Pre-Olympic, despite being with class B teams. it would have been enough for the United States to win the ticket to Beijing.

It doesn't seem casual. Although he was no longer in Rio de Janeiro 2016, the National Team was once again toad internationally: seventh place in the 2019 World Cup was the worst in the history of American basketball.

Kobe Bryant spent it bringing life back to the environments in which he developed. On the contrary, no void and no absence have been as noticeable and painful as those left by his tragic death . Sadness everywhere in the NBA and in sports, that this Sunday, August 23, becomes a little more acute because he was supposed to celebrate his birthday as a family. Neither he nor his daughter Gianna will be with Vanessa, Bianca, Natalia and Capri.

Physically, of course. They'll be walking around somewhere, smiling at each other, and probably poking a ball.

HS