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Bryant spent 20 years playing in Los Angeles. His legacy there is as segmented as the city itself.
Kobe From Downtown
by Tyler Tynes •
Bryant spent 20 years playing in Los Angeles. His legacy there is as segmented as the city itself.
LOS ANGELES — Kobe Bryant ended a singularly illustrious career in the only way he could — with a 60-point performance that recalled his most magical, but with none of the stakes. His last season was a lame duck period punctuated with a flashback, after which he reflected on the Los Angeles fans who’d followed him through each dramatic turn.
“It makes going through the years of losing, and not leaving, it makes it all worthwhile,” Bryant said of growing up in front of Los Angeles. “Standing here, taking the good with the bad, and the fans embracing and understanding that we ride together, that’s a love that you can’t break, man.”
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But love is an all-encompassing emotion. And in Bryant’s case, the bond between player and city — one built over 20 years — is one as nuanced as the city itself. During his career, Bryant mainly focused on basketball, distancing himself from anything else.
While the ad campaigns, wall-to-wall media coverage and weepy TV interviews from a month ago fueled the assumption that LA residents have a universal adoration for Bryant, the reality of the city’s feelings about the star, their star, are varied and complicated. Now that the fanfare is over, he is both remembered in his splendor and dismissed with repugnance. His achievements are unquestioningly venerated or begrudgingly placed among the Laker greats.
Angelenos’ understanding of Kobe Bryant is rooted in their race and ethnicity, exacerbated by their lived socioeconomics and cratered by a vast generational gap. True to form Bryant neither championed or acknowledged any of those distinctions on his last night. But his legacy will continue to engage each section of Los Angeles, community by community.
Shortly past 10:30 a.m on the Friday before Bryant’s last game, University Cuts, a barbershop perched behind iron bars, served its regulars in the neighborhood surrounding USC.
Old-heads and O.G.’s in colored sweatshirts bounced in the corner to beats from Nipsey Hussle and Ice Cube. Some toted one chains on their necks or dabbed in Jordans while standing adjacent to emptied gold bottles of Moet. The comedy stylings of Redd Foxx aired on a flat-screen near the door.
A mutter about one of the city’s legends uncorked an outpouring of memories from the mouths of the black men in the shop.
“Aye Reggie, you gonna miss Kobe?” one man chirped between the psychedelic beats.
“Fuck no. His time is up. He had a great career, but the last three years have been horrible. Good riddance,” Reggie Johnson, a 60-something black man in Converse kicks, transition shades and an all-blue sweatsuit, exclaimed.
Johnson has been a Lakers fan forever. He vividly remembers the “Showtime” Lakers era. He’s walked in 10 Lakers parades. And, as he colorfully put it, doesn’t respect the Los Angeles Clippers’ rise to prominence. He remembers the Lakers three-peat. Those drunk nights. The parties and the cars that were subsequently set ablaze from the raging.
His memories of Bryant are one example of how black Angelenos of a certain age remember the man’s career. Of course, people of color don’t behave monolithically. But those who were around for the eras before Bryant and the beginning of his reign are — based on their anecdotes — more likely to be his enemies than his fans.
“Kobe was stuck up. He was self-centered and it was all about him,” Johnson said. “The only good part is that he was a winner. Even though he snitched on Shaq.”
That sentiment was common around the shop. Men spoke of a dislike of Bryant due to his arrogant attitude and non-revealing demeanor. Trayvon Nellum, a 30-year-old black man, remembered when Bryant tried his hand at a rap career.
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What made Bryant’s attempt notable even among the many athletes who attempted music careers, however, was how inauthentic it seemed because he tried absorb a “lifestyle” he never lived.
Bryant spent weeks in New Jersey in 1998 with Steve Stoute, the president of urban music at Sony Entertainment, to do just that. Their collaboration ultimately resulted in an ostentatious record with supermodel Tyra Banks that opens: “What I live for? Basketball, beats and broads.”
“That shit was weak,” Nellum said. “Kobe didn’t have that same image as Iverson. That’s why white people loved him. He was spoon-fed and more relatable for white people. He wasn’t really ‘street.’”
Those in the shop believed Bryant never truly embraced black culture. Throughout his career Bryant was expertly marketed to other ethnicities but tripped up when asked about issues pertaining specifically to the black community, as he did with his 2014 comments about the Trayvon Martin shooting.
“I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American,” Bryant said. “That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, we’ve progressed as a society, then don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.”
Others take issue with Bryant’s more personal life decisions, which, viewed from their perspective, amount to a further distancing from them.
“To a certain degree, the black community here didn’t like that he didn’t date one of us,” Johnson recalled. “What woke him up was [the 2003 rape allegation]. That’s when he remembered he was a black man. That’s the moment when he knew he could go to jail like any one of us.”
Bryant’s redemption lies in the fact that his game — the last-second shots, the rings, the MVP award—carried an authenticity that his persona never did, Todd Boyd, the Chair for the study of race and popular culture at the University of Southern California said.
“With Kobe there was a split. When he was doing interviews, it sounded like he had studied Jordan’s interviews and could recite back the clichés. He didn’t seem authentic at all,” Boyd said. “But when you watched him play basketball it was a different story. It was like watching the best of that street-ball tradition.”
The way that Bryant pirouetted through the lane and glided to the rim, how calmly he breezed past guards and smashed dunks over men the size of trees before protruding his jaw toward cameras for the world to see, the prodding jab step before an ice-blooded jumper, those were all moves that Bryant honed through study and mimicry, sure, but he unleashed them with a virtuosity and a demeanor that were all his own.
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He improvised something original. Bryant’s frequent, aggressive, remarkable exploits wowed crowds across all races in such a way that negated his perceived character flaws.
“Seeing him go out like this is disappointing,” Johnson admitted. “Kobe done spoiled us (over the years), man.”
“At the end of the day,” Nellum said, “you gotta pay respect and give props where they due. You do that because of the impact of him staying here (for 20 years).”
Over that stretch, Bryant’s play created a generational gap between the old-timers in the black community who carry the historical record of Kobe’s offenses and the younger guard.
The ’90s babies and millenials aren’t familiar with his piss-poor relationship with O’Neal, Colorado, the time Phil Jackson called him “uncoachable,” the homophobic slur he uttered in 2011, or the bevy of other dark marks on Bryant’s career. They can’t grasp for their own memories of Michael Jordan so they cling to Bryant as the second-best thing.
Keera Gordon, a 22-year-old postal worker, began watching the Lakers with her grandparents at a young age. Their home was laced with all types of purple and gold paraphernalia. Gordon said she doesn’t watch the Lakers anymore, given their “sorry” status in the lowly rungs of the NBA.
But that changed for Bryant’s last game, however. Her co-workers took off work in advance but she was stuck working the late shift that night. If not for that paycheck, she’d have been in the rafters with her friends. Because, she said, who else has a final send-off like Bryant?
“Our generation loves him a lot more. That’s all we know. And that’s all I know when I watch the Lakers,” Gordon said. “Even though I think he’s great, he’s not the greatest Laker ever. But in a way, Kobe was my Jordan.”
In 1996 when Bryant arrived, Angelenos had been enamored with ebullient Lakers Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal, whose outsized personalities clicked across the city’s diverse ethnic groups.
Los Angeles is just under 10 percent black and nearly 23 percent of its residents live in poverty. Less than half of Los Angeles’ residents are white. That racial mix runs in stark contrast to the rest of the United States, where white Americans total over 62 percent of the population, according to census data, and black Americans account for a slightly higher portion of the national makeup (13 percent).
Among this melting pot, the gangly teenager from the Philadelphia suburbs was a tougher sell.
“Shaq was always in your face, a real jovial guy. It was hard to miss him. And Kobe had on a totally different persona,” Boyd said.
Boyd, a black man who once said former Vice President Dick Cheney had more “street cred” than Bryant, noted that Angelenos saw a difference in behaviors from Bryant before and after O’Neal was booted from the team in 2004. Black people in Los Angeles became split on Bryant.
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“Kobe just didn’t come across as, necessarily, you know, a black guy,” Boyd said. “For black people watching basketball, you don’t need a lesson on whether someone is authentic. Kobe didn’t come off — early on in his career — as authentic.”
Nationally, people didn’t know much about Bryant when he entered the NBA. Locally, people dismissed him due to the disconnect and isolation he initially showed to his new city — infamously, Bryant was cast as selfish and unwilling to be a team player, despite playing with the game’s best center.
Moments before Bryant’s last game, former Lakers general manager Jerry West was addressing a crowd at USC’s Annenberg School and got hit with a question about early era Kobe.
“Once he matured and learned how to play with other people, despite their skill set, he became one of the greatest players of all time,” West told the crowd.
Bryant’s isolation, both because of age and personality, coupled with his unrivaled need to win became toxic to his image. He wasn’t relatable, a sin in this personality-driven city.
“He didn’t seem like a team player. He never passed. It was run-n-gun. That put a lot of people off and a lot of his teammates off,” said Miki Turner, a black lecturer at USC who covered Bryant at ESPN in the early 2000s.
“Nobody liked dealing with him,” Turner recalled. “It was either that he’s got some sort of OCD idea of perfection or he’s just an asshole.”
Bryant’s passion and work ethic eventually became cemented as heroic parts of his game. But they didn’t help how young he was interpreted, particularly in LA’s black community of NBA die-hards, which didn’t lack for stars to align with.
“If you’re comparing him to others … people on the Mount Rushmore of black athletes, the people inherently everyone loves and the black community loves, their love there comes first,” said Louis Moore, a black associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University that specializes in sports, black and gender history.
“It’s organic. It’s not forced on us,” Moore continued. “Even if they don’t have the best personality, they were ours.”
On Crenshaw Boulevard, where a horde of black and hispanic communities with impoverished household incomes collide, you’ll find Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, where the city is attempting its next piece of gentrification.
The folks who frequent this mall — mainly black and brown — hold these halls as their stomping grounds. This isn’t the Beverly Center, Third Street Promenade or The Grove, this is where communities of color come to spend what they can afford.
“This isn’t the big time LA mall. This the hood, bro. People don’t have money like that,” Eddie Varela, a medium-built Chicano man said.
Varela stands behind a desk at Pro Image Sports, a memorabilia shop at the back of the mall, yapping with a customer for nearly 20 minutes. He switches with ease between Spanish and English, the same way Bryant does in his press conferences. That’s just one reason Los Angeles’ Hispanic community loves him.
Add his Mexican-American wife, Vanessa, his love for soccer and his epic performances during the NBA’s Noches Latinas and one can understand how Bryant was the perfect star at the perfect time for the town’s ballooning Hispanic community.
More than 10 million people inhabit Los Angeles’ metropolitan area. Nearly half are Hispanic. California and Los Angeles county have the largest Latino population of any state or county in the nation.
“Hispanic people love him. He gave his life for the game,” Varela said. “He was willing to give up everything to play basketball. Everyone ain’t like that.”
Varela’s ardor isn’t atypical. U.S. Latinos tabbed Bryant as their favorite athlete in a TSN/ESPN Deportes survey from 2009, the same year that the NBA began their Hispanic Heritage nights. In 2015, the ESPN Sports Poll revealed that LeBron James remained the NBA’s most popular player for a third straight year—except among the Hispanic demographic, where Bryant maintained the throne.
“The ‘Los Lakers’ jersey sells extremely well. It’s gone through the community in such waves that it’s been great,” said Sean Ryan, vice president of merchandising at Anschutz Entertainment Group, whose marketing branch has been associated with Bryant since 1999.
Ryan said sales have been tremendous for the Lakers this year, especially considering their win-loss percentage, they had the No. 2 sales in the NBA and the day of Bryant’s final game, the Staples Center sold $1.2 million in Lakers merchandise, a single-day world record.
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“We’ve only increased year-over-year about 15 percent, because the Lakers are an iconic brand,” Ryan said. “We started off slow in the beginning of the year but it picked up dramatically. This year the bump has been 35 percent compared to last year and it’ll be a lot more after (Kobe’s last game).”
As in the Hispanic community, Bryant has also been deified in Asian markets, where ads have stretched his reach far beyond his own ethnicity. Outside of Jordan, Yao Ming and Stephon Marbury, no other NBA player has so dominated basketball marketing to specifically Asian audiences. Chinese brands Alibaba, Weibo, Sina have all aligned with Bryant over the years and Ryan said those ties have made Bryant more popular than Jordan there, too.
Picking up some conversational Mandarin also didn’t hurt.
“They look at him like a God over there. Nike knows that. It’s on another level. It’s on some Michael Jackson shit,” said Gerald Flores, editor and chief of Sole Collector, a popular sneaker magazine, noting how Nike focuses heavily on the Asian market when pushing Bryant’s product.
(Spokesmen from Nike declined to comment for this story.)
But inside Los Angeles, Bryant’s run among Asian-Americans doesn’t hold nearly the resonance it does in the city’s Hispanic community. Outside the Staples Center prior to games you can see the reverence and adoration. Men and women sell tortas, tamales and other food at silver carts underneath the arena’s gaze.
This NBA market has a Latino arm of their television broadcasts like Time Warner Cable, a landmark 2012 partnership giving the Lakers the first Spanish-language regional sports network in the NBA. That partnership may struggle to survive without Bryant as a draw.
In Bryant, Varela and others see a workhorse who combined his craft and passion into a skill that’s unrivaled. Varela has a son, Adrian, a high school baseball player who he instructs to follow Bryant’s model for wholehearted commitment to a sport.
In Varela’s telling, if Adrian can teach himself to be better than anyone else at his sport, it’s possible to break the chain of systemic poverty plaguing a neighborhood of color like Crenshaw.
“(Kobe) didn’t do it for the money. I tell my son to be like that. If you really love something do it for that. Dedicate your life to something. Kobe was married to basketball.”
That dedication wedded Bryant to communities outside his own.
Once the final horn sounded just past 10:30 p.m on Bryant’s final day, Jack Nicholson gyrated and generally lost his damn mind on the Staples Center sidelines.
But what happened in the arena crowd seemed choreographed compared to what happened over three hours at Barcito, an Argentine-inspired pub blocks from Staples, where fans without tickets gathered for Bryant’s final send-off. The bar’s patrons had none of the controlled frenzy of Nicholson and the rest back at the arena.
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People here, having turned a third-date-type restaurant into a makeshift sports bar, aligned themselves around the two or three living-room sized TVs, chugging rounds of stout every time Bryant scored. Stuffed into the bar corners, the unticketed were free to yell and hug and drink and emote in celebration of a retiring athlete’s last hurrah on a team that didn’t win 20 games.
Inside the walls of the prim pub was pandemonium, anarchy and - somehow - bliss.
Bryant is a man that some Angelenos loathed and others loved. A man who made as many mistakes as he did contested jumpers. A black man who rubbed black people the wrong way but still captured their attention and was unquestioningly welcomed by other minorities in the city of Angels.
To Adrian, Eddie Varela’s kid, Bryant’s final game was another chance to watch a role model. Hopefully, Keera Gordon, the postal worker, caught a glimpse of the historic chaos on her smartphone after she finished the night shift. Maybe Reggie Johnson, the old-timer at University Cuts, allowed himself to still feel spoiled.
For three hours Bryant was as universally understood by Los Angeles as he’d ever been. Those final 48 minutes on “Mamba Day” between 94x50, Bryant was the city’s most beloved black man.
Credits
Author: Tyler Tynes
Editor: Elena Bergeron
Lead Image: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images
Design & Development: Graham MacAree