Italian town where Bryant lived as a boy mourns

For a city already familiar with losing a basketball hero, Kobe Bryant’s death made a particularly strong impact in the Italian town of Rieti.

Nicknamed “the center of Italy” for its geographic location amid the Appenine Mountains, Rieti was the first stop on Bryant’s sevenyear childhood tour of the country.

It’s where Joe Bryant, Kobe’s father, made his Italian basketball debut in 1984 when Kobe was 6.

“He was just a little kid,” Giuseppe Cattani, the president of the Rieti team and a former teammate of the older Bryant, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday.

“He had a unique vivaciousness. He followed his father around and would go out onto the court to shoot around at halftime and after his games,” Cattani added. “There were other kids, too, but you could already tell that he was going to be a great player.”

As Joe Bryant jumped around from team to team in Italy — he also played in Reggio Calabria, Pistoia, and Reggio Emilia — Kobe picked up the language and spoke fluent Italian into adulthood.

Kobe, an 18-time NBA All-Star who won five championships and became one of the greatest basketball players of his generation during a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, died Sunday with his 13year-old daughter, Gianna, in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, California. He was 41.

“It’s tragic when you lose these champions,” Cattani said. “It felt like we lost a family member last night. The entire city.”

The headlines of the newspapers in Rieti on Monday read: “The city is in mourning. Kobe Bryant, who grew up in Rieti, is dead.”

“It’s like we’ve lost our superhero,” Cattani said. “He was an icon to us, like Spider-Man or Superman. One of these superheroes who can’t die. On the basketball court, they’re immortal.”