Kobe Bryant’s Brilliant and Complicated Legacy

In addition to making his name as one of the sport’s most relentless competitors, Bryant was known for a special ability to play through injuries.

The one that managed to slow him the longest was a torn left Achilles’ tendon late in the 2012-13 season. Of course, stubborn as he was, Bryant did not want to accept the on-court diagnosis he received from Gary Vitti, the longtime Lakers athletic trainer.

“I told him it’s ruptured and he’s done,” Vitti told The Times in December 2017. “He said, ‘Can’t you just tape it up?’”

Given the intense focus that governed Bryant’s playing career, many league observers questioned how he would cope outside the game, without an outlet for his uber-competitiveness. But Bryant was flourishing in retirement, entering the world of storytelling and winning an Academy Award by transforming a poem to announce his retirement into an animated short film (“Dear Basketball”) that he wrote and narrated.

He had also been drawn back to the N.B.A. by his daughter Gianna’s love for it. On Dec. 29, Bryant sat with her courtside at Staples Center to watch the Lakers play the Dallas Mavericks and take pictures afterward with Luka Doncic, the Mavericks’ young Slovenian star.

“My friend, a legend, husband, father, son, brother, Oscar winner and greatest Laker of all-time is gone,” Magic Johnson, the Hall of Fame Lakers guard and Bryant’s boyhood hero, wrote on Twitter. “It’s hard to accept.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/sports/kobe-bryant-obituary.html?emc=rss&partner=rss