Dear Kobe,
Dear Kobe,
Dear Basketball has never not made me cry. You don't know me, but even if you did this wouldn't surprise you. I’m a natural crier. I cry while watching movies and reading books, through joy and through pain. My best and worst moments have this truth about me in common.
I don’t want this to diminish the way Dear Basketball resonates with me on an emotional level. I may cry easily, but my most sincere tears have almost always been shed in response to this game that you loved harder than anyone.
Like the rest of the world, I’ve spent the last 48+ hours trying to figure out how to process this. What to do, what to feel, what to say, and maybe not say anything at all. It wasn’t shocking to find myself crying through Dear Basketball once again hours after the tragic news that shocked the world. I could easily have entrenched myself in a loop of your endless highlights, but your words have always found a way to strike me more so than your game ever did. Mamba Mentality bled off every court you played on and onto every page you wrote. Of course you’re an excellent writer. Only a fool would have expected less from you.
The legacy you leave behind is sprawling and complicated. You’re one of the biggest champions of the women’s game, and also a symbol of our society’s unhealthy relationship with rape culture and who gets to be forgiven for what. I don’t want to even begin to presume I have something to add that hasn’t already been said, but you’re too important to the game we both love more than anything else to stay silent. Like many fans my age, I have few memories that predate your time in the league when you came in with that legendary draft class in 1996. Like many fans of the 29 teams you didn’t play for, for so long I thought of you with anything but love on my mind. For so long, I fucking hated you.
The number of fourth quarters I watched my beloved Timberwolves build a lead against you was staggering. I somehow always found the naiveté to believe we were going to win. I believed in 2003 when we had home-court advantage for the first time. To this day, every time I go to sleep I believe I’ll wake up on the morning of Game 6 of the 2004 Western Conference Finals and Kevin Garnett still has a chance to bring a title back home to our city, the city where your storied franchise began. Every time I believed, and every time, no matter how cold you had been shooting, no matter what defensive scheme we threw at you, nothing stopped you from turning into an ice cold assassin in winning time and blasting a torpedo through our hearts.
Yet I still believed you could be vanquished, but you never were. If ever an athlete convinced me they were immortal, it was you. Maybe that’s why we all feel so disoriented right now.
The last time I saw you win in Minnesota was the night you passed MJ to take over 3rd place on the all-time scoring list. You hit the free throws. They stopped the game and gave you the ball. I stood up with the rest of the crowd and we gave you as much love as we possibly could, while never forgetting all of the times you sent us home heartbroken. Basketball is beautiful in that way.
A lot has been said about you since Sunday afternoon. I loved the story Allen Iverson shared from his rookie year when you asked him what he was going to do one night after the two of you had gone out to dinner. “I’m going to the club,” he told you. “What about you?”
I loved what Charles P. Pierce wrote about you in Esquire, comparing you to the two players you were always compared to the most. He called your game more fluid than Michael’s, less bullish than LeBron’s. The three of you have been debated forever. He summed it up perfectly in less than a paragraph.
Yet the words that have touched me the most in the last couple days came from Meghan Maloney-Vinz, our managing editor here at the Under Review. As we texted throughout the day she told me, “Love him or not, we all started to see him like the sun around basketball. His game, his very being was so bright. Turns out we were worshipping a comet. How do we regain normalcy when what we thought was the sun, streaking across the sky for so long, tragically crashes to the earth?
“We’ll be okay, but our center will never feel the same again. Go to the Wolves games. Watch ball. Find the sun again. And marvel at what a spectacular comet he was.”
I love basketball, Kobe, and for so many years you were basketball personified. I think this is why I have cried and will cry every time I watch Dear Basketball, because even though I never ran out of a tunnel, never hit game-winning shots in the Great Western Forum, never held a championship trophy in a shower of confetti, I always felt that love too.
I’ll never understand how I feel right now. Nine people are dead and none of them should be. Parents, daughters, partners, loved ones, it feels fucking irresponsible to talk about a game during a time like this. But we do need love right now, and for you, for me, for so many others, the game has always been love. Love is how it always starts. A love that is not only real and true, but also important, no matter how many points you score or how many numbers are retired for you. You showed us our love was important and I think that’s why I always cry when I watch Dear Basketball.
You are the one and the only Black Mamba. But you are just one of millions who picked up a basketball and fell in love. Every single one of us will always be with you, as that kid with the rolled up socks, garbage can in the corner, :05 seconds on the clock, ball in our hands. 5...4...3...2..., and before the buzzer sounds in the Great Western Forums of our imaginations, as the ball floats through the air, making its descent towards the goal, that moment of hope, optimism, clarity, love, right before we know the ball is about to go in, we’ll all sing that gargantuan four-letter word together...
“Kobe!”
Swish.
Rest in peace, legend.
Sincerely,
Terry