Kobe Bryant: a basketball great
“Of all sport’s icons, it is a vanishing few who ever grasp the distinction of being known by their first name alone,” said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Kobe Bryant was one of them. It is “impossible to overstate” the impact that his death on Sunday, in a helicopter crash which also killed his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, will have on basketball. In his 20 years at the Los Angeles Lakers, the club at which he spent his entire career, he electrified the game, winning five national titles. He was, without question, one of the greatest players in the sport’s history: at his best, he was “a giddying force of nature on court”.
Even as a teenager, Bryant was “a basketball phenomenon”, said Ian Whittell in The Times.
At a time when the traditional route to going professional included a stint in college basketball, he took the bold decision to skip that step – making him only the sixth player in NBA history to do so. Bryant modelled his style on Michael Jordan, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. Like Jordan, he was a master of the fade-away, a shot taken while jumping backwards, away from the basket. And he had an incredible knack for scoring in the dying moments of a game, “surrounded by opponents aware of his audacity but unable to prevent it”. His record speaks for itself: he was the first player in NBA history to score 30,000 career points, and the first to have 6,000 career assists; the only player to be picked for the All-Star Game, featuring the league’s 24 best players, in 18 consecutive seasons. In 2006, he scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors, the second highest total in a game in NBA history. And a decade later, in the very last match of his career, he scored a remarkable 60 points.
Bryant leaves a “glittering” but complicated legacy, said Marc Stein in The New York Times. He clashed with Shaquille O’Neal, another Lakers legend. A “relentless competitor”, he would shoot whenever he had the chance, often at the expense of his side, missing more shots in his career than any other player in NBA history. And a sexual assault allegation in 2003 “would change how many people saw Bryant”: the case was dropped because the accuser was unwilling to testify, and Bryant later settled a civil case out of court. A “genius on the court”, and a sometimes flawed character off it, Bryant seemed to be solving the problem of “life after sport”, said Tom Fordyce on BBC Sport. Jordan, for instance, has struggled to “find anything that satisfies him as much as the first act”. But Bryant was dedicated to Gianna’s promising basketball career, and he even wrote an Oscar-winning short film, Dear Basketball. He was “navigating the second act, becoming something that all around him hoped would last”.