Remembering Kobe Bryant, the talented Kings nemesis who played with shock and awe
Kobe Bryant is dead at 41 and his athletic excellence is mourned everywhere the NBA is followed passionately. This especially includes Sacramento, where Bryant was perhaps the most feared player who ever laced them up against the Kings.
For those of us who covered the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals between the Kings and Los Angeles Lakers, Bryant was a central figure in a breathless Lakers seven-game triumph that prevented the Kings from winning an NBA title that should have been theirs.
We should have had a Kings championship parade on J Street. We should have a championship banner hanging from the rafters of Golden 1 Center.
Who knows what would have happened to the Kings and in Sacramento if the Lakers – and disastrous refereeing in a controversial Game 6 Lakers win – had not blocked their path? We’ll never know.
Life and fate can be cruel, as Bryant’s untimely death in a Southern California helicopter crash Sunday proves to us, as if we didn’t already know. Bryant played his final game in Sacramento less than four years ago. He hadn’t even been retired the requisite five seasons to be eligible for the Basketball Hall of Fame.
He had won an Academy Award in 2018 as the producer of “Dear Basketball,” an animated short film based on a 2015 poem he wrote his impending retirement. He was in the prime of his life. One of his daughters, 13-year-old Gianna, died in the crash with him.
He was still young, still blessed. His death seems shocking and momentous. It’s the kind of event where you remember where you were when you heard about it. I was in my home, talking to my spouse, when two friends texted simultaneously. One text contained just one word: Kobe.
He was one of those rare people known by one name. He spoke multiple languages. He demonstrated an intellectual curiosity rare in professional athletes. He symbolized many things to many people, some of them terribly fraught with different views. Some will forever believe that he got away with rape when he was a younger man and at the height of his powers.
This was before #MeToo, and it was more than disturbing when Lakers fans seemed to cheer for Bryant harder during his 2003 rape trial. Some sports media people couldn’t resist describing his stellar play during that time with the tired cliche of “overcoming adversity.”
As recently as 2018, that rape accusation was still dogging him and he was removed from the jury of a film festival because of it, Oscar or no Oscar. Bryant continued on with his life as he had in his NBA years: with his 10,000-watt smile and a look of determination that shaped his life.
In my years of living in Sacramento and covering sports, I can’t think of an athlete whose unyielding ferocity caused Kings fans and me more grief and more pain. In the lexicon of sports, Bryant was a cold-blooded killer. He was so ruthless. He just wouldn’t let us win. If you were in the same arena with him, and I was many times, you could feel his insatiable drive in every game, on every play.
To Los Angeles fans, he was already one of the all-time great athletes in their fabled history. And that city knows something about image making. To Sacramento fans, Kobe Bryant was the man with the dagger who wounded us so many times.
Bryant famously became ill with food poisoning he picked up in a Sacramento hotel before Game 2 of the 2002 series at Arco Arena. He was so ill he was being pumped with intravenous fluids before that fateful game, which the Kings won after having lost Game 1.
My press credential afforded me a great seat that night and I watched Bryant intently as he seemed to play at 75 percent of his normal speed. He seemed to still be unwell in Game 3, at Staples Center. The Kings won again. They took a 2-1 lead in the series. Guard Mike Bibby was unstoppable, running rings around the Lakers.
But in the second half of Game 4, Bryant began guarding Bibby and he held the Kings point guard to three points in the second half after scoring 18 in the first. Game 4 will forever be remembered as the game Robert Horry hit a buzzer-beating shot to lift the Lakers to an amazing comeback win that prevented the Kings from taking a commanding 3-1 lead.
I’ll always remember it as the game Bryant had recovered from the food poisoning. He was at full strength. Bryant scored 30 points in Game 5, 31 points in Game 6 and 30 points in Game 7.
Lakers win. And there was Kobe, his handsome features projecting malice and certainty, raising his arms on the Arco Arena floor. The Kings never got that close again, Bryant became a basketball legend.
He taunted the Kings in 2002 by saying their rivalry wasn’t really a rivalry because the Lakers always won. He was more gracious in 2016, on his last visit, speaking glowingly of those great games and times in Sacramento.
It was all part of the same picture, the same contradictions, an athlete remembered by some for rape allegations, by others as a loving family man. He was the ultimate Laker, often trashed by his main partner, former Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal.
You wonder how O’Neal feels today? Or Bryant’s most fervent critics? Or his many fans? Or Kings fans who watched Bryant with a sense of dread every time? Or his devastated family?
His death is sad and shocking. And one more contradiction, it is also part of life. We’re not promised anything, even the most blessed among us. RIP Kobe Bryant. It was way too soon.
This story was originally published January 26, 2020 at 2:39 PM with the headline "Remembering Kobe Bryant, the talented Kings nemesis who played with shock and awe."
