Kobe Bryant

• 1. Introduction

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  Kobe Bean Bryant scored 81 points on the 22nd of January, 2006, the second-highest total in a single NBA game in the history of the sport. He did it wearing number 8 for the Los Angeles Lakers, against the Toronto Raptors, in a 122-104 victory. The crowd in the Staples Center watched him outscore the entire opposing team by himself in the fourth quarter of earlier contests. They watched him play through a complete tear of a ligament and a fracture in his finger without seeking surgery. They watched him take shots no coach would call and no defender could stop.

  The questions the record raises are harder than the record itself. How did a kid who grew up watching NBA tapes mailed to him in Italy become the defining player of his generation? What drove someone to train with an obsession his own coaches found difficult to contain? And what does it mean that the same man who earned five championship rings and an Academy Award died at 41, along with his thirteen-year-old daughter, in the hills above Calabasas?

• 2. Italy and the Formative Years

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  When Kobe was six, his father Joe Bryant retired from the NBA and moved the family to Rieti, Italy, to continue playing professional basketball professionally. Over the following years they relocated to Reggio Calabria, then Pistoia, then Reggio Emilia. Kobe took to the new country. He learned to speak fluent Italian and grew especially attached to Reggio Emilia, which he later described as a loving place where some of his best childhood memories were formed.

  From 1987 to 1989, Joe Bryant played for Olimpia Basket Pistoia alongside former Detroit Pistons player Leon Douglas. The young Kobe worked the games as a ball and mop boy and, at halftime, took the court himself. Douglas recalled the scene plainly: "At every one of our games at halftime, it was the Kobe show. He'd get out there and get his shot up. We'd come out of the locker room at halftime and have to chase him off the court." His grandfather mailed him VHS tapes of NBA games from America so he could study them. He watched European sports films for additional technique. He also played soccer in Italy and his favorite club was A.C. Milan.

  During summers he returned to the United States to play in basketball leagues. By the time his family moved back to Philadelphia when he was thirteen, he was multilingual in English, Italian, and Spanish, and had spent years practicing a game that most American kids his age were only beginning to take seriously.

• 3. Lower Merion and the Leap

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  At Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, the freshman Kobe Bryant played on the varsity squad, but the team went 4-20 that year. Over the three seasons that followed, Lower Merion compiled a 77-13 record with Bryant playing all five positions. By his junior year he was averaging 31.1 points, 10.4 rebounds, 5.2 assists, 3.8 blocks, and 2.3 steals, and was named Pennsylvania Player of the Year.

  He considered playing college ball at Duke, Michigan, North Carolina, and Villanova. The decision changed when Kevin Garnett went in the first round of the 1995 NBA draft directly out of high school. Bryant had an SAT score of 1080, which his coaches said would have gotten him admitted anywhere, but he never visited a campus officially. At the ABCD Camp in the summer before his senior year, he won the 1995 senior MVP award while playing alongside a teammate he would later know well: Lamar Odom.

  Then-76ers coach John Lucas invited Bryant to scrimmage with the professional team while he was still in high school, where he played one-on-one with Jerry Stackhouse. His senior season ended with Lower Merion's first state championship in 53 years. Bryant finished with 2,883 points, surpassing both Wilt Chamberlain and Lionel Simmons as the all-time leading scorer in Southeastern Pennsylvania. His coach Greg Downer called him "a complete player who dominates" and praised his work ethic. Bryant was named Naismith High School Player of the Year, a McDonald's All-American, and a USA Today All-USA First Team player before he ever stepped into a professional arena.

• 4. The Draft and the Early Lakers

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  Bryant declared for the 1996 NBA draft as the sixth player to go directly from high school to the professional league, a decision that drew significant attention when prep-to-pro transitions were still rare. Before the draft, he worked out in Los Angeles and scrimmaged against former Lakers Larry Drew and Michael Cooper. Then-general manager Jerry West said Bryant "marched over these people."

  The Charlotte Hornets agreed, the day before the draft, to trade the 13th pick to the Lakers in exchange for center Vlade Divac. The Hornets had not previously considered drafting Bryant; the Lakers directed them to make the selection minutes before the pick was announced. The trade was briefly threatened when Divac said he would rather retire than be moved from Los Angeles, but he relented. Because Bryant was a minor, his parents had to co-sign his three-year rookie contract worth $3.5 million.

  His first Summer League game in Long Beach drew a standing-room-only crowd. In his rookie season he was the second-youngest player ever to appear in an NBA game at 18 years and 72 days old, and became the youngest starter in league history at 18 years and 158 days. He mostly came off the bench behind Eddie Jones and Nick Van Exel, averaging 15.5 minutes per game. During All-Star weekend he won the 1997 Slam Dunk Contest, the youngest champion in the contest's history at 18. In a Western Conference semifinal against Utah, he fired three three-point attempts in overtime with the game on the line, all of them missing. O'Neal said afterward that Bryant "was the only guy who had the guts at the time to take shots like that."

• 5. Three Titles and the Feud

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  Phil Jackson arrived in 1999 and brought his triangle offense, which he had developed during his time with the Chicago Bulls. Bryant had to sit out the first six weeks of the 1999-2000 season with a preseason hand injury, but when he returned he was playing over 38 minutes a game and leading the team in assists and steals. The Lakers won 67 games that year.

  The partnership with Shaquille O'Neal was productive and combustible. The two led the Lakers to championships in 2000, 2001, and 2002. During the 2001 Finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, Bryant played 29.4 points, 7.3 rebounds, and 6.1 assists per game; O'Neal declared him the best player in the league. In the 2002 regular season, Bryant scored a then-career-high 56 points against the Memphis Grizzlies on the 14th of January. He claimed his first All-Star MVP award that year with 31 points in Philadelphia while the crowd booed him throughout, a reaction stemming from a comment he had made to a heckler in the Finals the previous year. At 23, he became the youngest player in history to win three championships.

  The tension between Bryant and O'Neal was well documented and never fully resolved while they shared a roster. After the Lakers lost the 2004 Finals to the Detroit Pistons in five games, Jackson's contract was not renewed and O'Neal was traded to the Miami Heat. Bryant signed a seven-year, $136.4 million contract and became the franchise's focal point. Phil Jackson later wrote in a book that Bryant was "un-coachable," a characterization that inflicted lasting reputational damage during an already difficult period that included an arrest for sexual assault in 2003. The charges were ultimately dismissed, and Bryant settled a separate civil lawsuit and issued a public apology while maintaining the encounter was consensual.

• 6. The 81-Point Night and Back-to-Back Titles

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  On the 20th of December 2005, Bryant scored 62 points in three quarters against the Dallas Mavericks. Going into the fourth quarter, he had personally outscored the entire Dallas team 62-61. The final tally that night was not even his personal best for the season.

  That came on the 22nd of January, 2006, against Toronto: 81 points on a 122-104 win. The total was the second-highest in NBA history, behind only Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. Bryant also broke the Los Angeles franchise record of 71 held by Elgin Baylor. For the month of January, he averaged 43.4 points per game, the eighth-highest average for a single calendar month in league history. He finished the 2005-06 season with a scoring average of 35.4, the fifth player ever to average 35 or more in a full season, and set franchise records for most 40-point games in a season (27) and most total points scored (2,832).

  The back-to-back championships came in 2009 and 2010, both times over different opponents and both times with Bryant named Finals MVP. In the 2009 Finals against the Orlando Magic, he averaged 32.4 points, 7.4 assists, 5.6 rebounds, 1.4 steals, and 1.4 blocks per game, becoming the first player since Jerry West in 1969 to average at least 32.4 points and 7.4 assists in a Finals series. The 2010 title came against the Boston Celtics in seven games, and Bryant said it was the most satisfying of his five championships. He finished that deciding game with 15 rebounds, tying an NBA Finals record for a shooting guard. On the 2nd of April, 2010, he signed a three-year extension worth $87 million.

• 7. The Final Seasons and the Farewell

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  On the 12th of April, 2013, Bryant tore his Achilles tendon against the Golden State Warriors. He had been playing nearly 48 minutes a night during a stretch where the Lakers were fighting to secure the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. He was averaging 38.6 minutes per game, the most in six years, and general manager Mitch Kupchak had spoken to him about his workload. Bryant insisted it needed to continue. He had surgery two days later.

  The injuries accumulated. He fractured his left knee in December 2013, returning six games after his Achilles surgery. He tore his right rotator cuff in January 2015. He underwent season-ending surgery each time. On the 29th of November, 2015, he announced his retirement through The Players' Tribune, in a piece titled "Dear Basketball." He wrote that he had fallen in love with the game at six years old.

  His final game was against the Utah Jazz. Bryant was 37 years and 234 days old. He scored 60 points on 50 shots, the most attempts in a single game over the preceding 30 seasons, and outscored the Jazz 23-21 by himself in the fourth quarter. He set the record for the most points scored in a final regular-season game. After the buzzer sounded at the Staples Center, he addressed the crowd: "I can't believe how fast 20 years went by. … What can I say? Mamba out." The Lakers finished 17-65 that season, the worst record in franchise history.

  In 2017, the franchise retired both his numbers, 8 and 24, on the same night, December 18th, making him the only player in NBA history to have two numbers retired by a single team. In 2018, Bryant won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Dear Basketball, becoming the only person to hold both an Olympic gold medal and an Oscar.

• 8. Loss and Legacy

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  On the 26th of January, 2020, Bryant and his thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna were among nine people killed when a helicopter crashed in Calabasas, California. Bryant and Gianna had received the Eucharist together at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church in Newport Beach just hours before. The tributes that followed included murals throughout Los Angeles, the renaming of the NBA All-Star Game MVP trophy in his honor, and the establishment of Kobe Bryant Day, commemorated on August 24th.

  At the time of his death, Bryant held career averages of 25.0 points, 5.2 rebounds, 4.7 assists, and 1.4 steals per game, with 33,643 total points placing him fourth on the league's all-time scoring list. He was the first player in history to accumulate at least 30,000 career points and 6,000 career assists. His 18 All-Star selections ranked third all-time. The NBA named him to its 75th Anniversary Team in October 2021. His formal Hall of Fame induction, elected soon after his death, was held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption; his wife Vanessa delivered the acceptance speech.

  On the 2nd of August, 2024, the Lakers unveiled a statue of Kobe and Gianna Bryant outside Crypto.com Arena. The pose had been requested by Bryant himself before he died: his finger pointing toward the sky, drawn from a photograph taken after the 81-point game.