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Kobe Bryant doesn’t have any real friends. He never learnt how to make them. These are his words, not mine.
You would expect Bryant, the most single-minded, ruthless and in a way, selfish, athlete of his generation, to rationalise the lack of friendships in his life. But he doesn’t.
He calls it a weakness of his personality, perhaps his defining weakness.
Bryant grew up in Italy. He was virtually the only black kid wherever he went. His father played professional basketball and Kobe was constantly moving around the country as a child.
He had a poor grasp of the language, he was tall and black when everyone else was short and white, and he was never around for long before the next city beckoned.
He never had any friends. But he was really good at basketball.
Sport is theatre and Staples Center in Los Angeles is just one of its many stages. On a nightly basis for the past 19 years, Kobe Bryant has either been the play’s protagonist or antagonist – the delicious tension in the script comes from figuring out exactly which role he plays. It may be different for each audience member.
It’s impossible not to be intrigued by Kobe Bryant. He’s one of the most articulate and thoughtful athletes of all-time. In response to people who vilify him for being selfish and shooting too much, naturally he compares himself to Mozart.
He says that Mozart told critics that there were never too many notes and never too few; only as many as necessary. I’m not sure that contested 18-foot fadeaway jump-shots are comparable to Mozart’s Symphony in G Minor, but it’s nice that Bryant has the gall to go there.
What makes Bryant so fascinating is that it’s impossible to tell if he’s incredibly human or incredibly not. He’s either impressively self-aware and open about vulnerability or impressively crafty at manufacturing a public persona to elicit sympathy. The only thing that is certain is that he’s impressive.
Despite being articulate, thoughtful and potentially extremely self-aware, it’s almost impossible to like Kobe Bryant. His rationality is cold and unforgiving, and self-awareness, often the most beautiful thing, looks menacing on Bryant.
For everything that he might say to the contrary, I know that Bryant would rather score 50 points in a game and lose than score 15 points and win. He’d rather be a mythical success in defeat than a meek bystander in victory. I want to chastise Bryant for this and deride him as selfish, but I can’t help thinking that I’d probably want the same thing. And therein lies the rub with Kobe Bryant – he shows us a part of ourselves that we don’t like, but that we reluctantly understand.
What makes Bryant most sympathetic and endearing is that he seems to be a fundamentally unhappy person. Nobody who is that competitive, who is that driven and who strives for such validation could possibly be happy.
He has to be overcompensating. That’s what makes Bryant so compelling – the fact that he’s a 6’6 athletic freak who has earned $298 million in salary and is one of the most famous people in the world, and yet his level of happiness is probably no different to someone who cleans windows for a living. We need that in sports – we need these physical gods to be mentally flawed. And on the front of human failure, Bryant unquestionably succeeds.
Bryant encapsulates what makes sport so addictively and wonderfully absorbing. We’re never just watching the red team try and beat the blue team. It’s never just a game. At best, it’s a representation of life. At worst, it’s seriously entertaining theatre.
Every time Kobe Bryant steps onto the court he’s not just playing against the other team. In the process of competing he’s debunking (or unintentionally promoting) the merits of altruism, exploring whether or not pathological devotion is rewarding or masochistic, and whether, ultimately, success is truly fulfilling or just a temporary bandage for an unhealable wound.
On the surface it’s ludicrous to attach all this meaning to a guy who shoots a ball into a hoop. But look a little deeper and it’s really not. Meaning can be found in sport the same way it is found in literature, music, film, television and theatre. Sport, like these mediums, is just another form of narrative. Its depth is not limited to Mr. Bryant either. Just look at some of his teammates over the years.
Ron Artest is an improbable redemption story, someone who charged into the stands in the middle of a game and started punching fans, and then six years later hit the shot to win the championship. Pau Gasol is a deft, selfless but petulant artist who found a way to coalesce to Bryant’s shadow.
His rise from ‘soft Euro’ to the most fearless player on the court in Game 7 of the 2010 Finals is a masculinity study waiting to happen. Jeremy Lin is an uplifting underdog story of race transcended, as well as a depressing tale of someone whose life will forever be defined by a six-week apex and now has to live the rest of his days as a requiem to that high.
Basketball is what Kobe Bryant plays but life is what he represents. He’s one of theatre’s great antiheroes, it’s just that his stage has a JumboTron and Kiss-Cam above it. Loneliness, selfishness, the struggle of deference, the fight for relevance in old age, and supreme, transcendent physical achievement – this is Kobe Bryant’s world and these are the stories he’s given us.
The beauty of sport is that its appeal is dynamic and multiform. I am primarily drawn to sport as a form of narrative. Every season is a novel; in basketball that novel has 82 chapters, in English soccer it has 38. But as alluring as sport is on an intellectual level, it also succeeds on a raw instinctual one too. I’ve spent countless hours, maybe days, of my life watching or reading about Kobe Bryant. And yet, the power of sport is that someone who has never heard of Bryant or watched a game of basketball can marvel at this video, and the majestic, celestial arc on that second shot, on the exact same level as I do.
It’s for moments like this that we watch sport; where layered narrative and inexplicable physical achievement converge in one perfect moment of purity.
That’s what makes sport so captivating; it can take the form of popcorn entertainment or something much more meaningful. It can be Birdman, exploring Kobe Bryant’s unexpected virtue of ignorance, or it can be Mission Impossible 4, watching him scale great physical heights.
The magic of sport though, is that it can be, and often is, both of these things at the same time.