The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
Kobe is undoubtedly the star, the book also focuses on the impact Kobe’s rise had on everyone around him. We hear a lot from his coach, Gregg Downer, from a slew of high school classmates and competitors, even from his teachers. The Internet was just getting started in the mid-90s, so Kobe was one of the last of the high school hoop phenoms not to have his every utterance and accomplishment recorded by social media. Some of the book’s best moments are when Sielski describes something he’s watching on tape, like this end of the state semifinal in 1996, Kobe’s penultimate high school game:
By Mike Sielski; St. Martin’s Press.
“Kobe caught up to the ball just inside the foul line and didn’t take another dribble, and when he leaped, the baggy white T-shirt he wore under his tank top billowed like a skydiver’s flight suit.”
The book bogs down a bit when the focus turns away from Kobe’s exploits on the court. There’s too much about LaSalle’s employment of Joe in hopes that he'll recruit his son to play for his alma mater. Readers will also gloss over the scenes with Sonny Vaccaro, the sports marketing executive who was consumed with landing Kobe as an Adidas client to get back at his former employer, Nike. In the end, they’re just moons in orbit around Kobe, proof that his gravitational pull was extraordinary, but not nearly as interesting as the phenom himself.
“The Rise” ends in the summer of 1997, after Kobe’s first NBA season concludes with a loss to the Utah Jazz in the Western Conference Semifinals.
Our hero is still just 19, with all his professional accomplishments yet to come. But all that we’ve read to this point leaves him no doubt about how to move forward. After missing the potential gamewinner at the end of regulation, he calls his agent’s assistant from the plane on his way home. His request? “Have Palisades gym open for me. I want to go shoot.”