Kobe Bryant has been to the top--and hit rock bottom. Now the Lakers star is climbing back
By Sam Smith
Quote:
Kobe Bryant- On The Rise Again
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- It's almost as if Kobe Bryant is from a modern Hawthorne novel, the man who wears the invisible scarlet letter, the big red K for Kobe. Everyone has to be staring. They must be. Everyone knows about Kobe.
There were screaming headlines for months about rape, petty feuds and open sniping with teammate Shaquille O'Neal, a harsh sendoff in print from coach Phil Jackson, sponsors running away with whispered innuendo, a potential sports dynasty dead in its infancy. What could be next? How should he go on?
Kobe Bryant sits on a plank on one of the few rows of bleachers alongside the basketball court at the Lakers' training facility. He speaks quietly but firmly and without rancor. It's a little past noon, and he has spent two hours practicing with the Lakers after a long private workout of his own. His eyes are hard and attentive, making contact, neither apologetic nor indifferent.
Bryant is talking about his peers, NBA players, and where the league is going in this era. He might as well be describing his own journey.
"The message should be communicated that, yes, we as basketball players, we're people as well," Bryant says. "We make mistakes. In the public eye it becomes magnified.
"The thing to remember is a role model isn't a person who's perfect all the time or a person who's perceived as being perfect all the time. It's a person who makes mistakes, learns from those mistakes and does not repeat those mistakes or tries not to repeat those mistakes. That's what a role model truly is."
An accomplished star
Bryant is back, with Phil Jackson, with Nike in a sampling of TV ads and, perhaps, better than ever on the basketball court.
When the Bulls pull into Los Angeles on Sunday night to play the Lakers, they will be greeted by perhaps the most talented player in the NBA, a certain Hall of Famer at the height of his career. Bryant, 27, leads the NBA in scoring at 31.4 points per game, owns three NBA championship rings, has been named an all-league defensive player five times, was an All-Star Game most valuable player and is a likely participant on the 2008 Olympic team.
But perhaps there's no more ambivalent figure in pro sports than Bryant, painted with the broad brush of athletic excess and evil for his nearly two-year odyssey through the criminal justice system on sexual-assault charges in Colorado that eventually were dropped. Yet he still is a player who this month became the first since Michael Jordan in 1986 to open a season with at least four 30-point games and who, Jordan-like, lifted an inferior Lakers team over the Knicks last week with a 42-point masterpiece.
"He's actually the same age as Michael when I started coaching him," says Jackson, who returned to coach the Lakers this season in a much-anticipated reunion with Bryant, whom he had criticized in his book "The Last Season."
"He's putting an exclamation point behind everything I say. He's bringing a lot of things into fruition that I'm trying to get the team to do. This looks like the transformation of the [Bulls] when we started winning."
Well, Lamar Odom isn't quite Scottie Pippen, and Kwame Brown is no Horace Grant. These Lakers aren't coming off a conference finals loss, as the Bulls were in 1989 when Jackson took over. The Lakers had a meltdown season after the trade of O'Neal to Miami, Jackson's exit and the hiring and departure of Rudy Tomjanovich, falling near the bottom of the Western Conference.
Now they are just hoping the safety chute Jackson brings can float them safely to the playoffs.
But if Bryant isn't Jordan, he's closer than most would like to admit.
His escapade in Colorado likely will keep Bryant from ever attaining the icon status Jordan enjoyed. Bryant still languishes in public infamy, though he is pulling himself up from an abyss that seemed to have no bottom a year ago.
"The past few years have been very rough," Bryant says without elaboration. "People don't understand. I didn't touch a basketball, a weight, didn't run those entire summers."
Through the blank look on the basketball court and the businesslike court appearances, Bryant ached. No one ever will know what happened between Bryant and his accuser because she declined to testify. Is Bryant a monster? A victim?
An NBA player who was involved in a recent incident with a woman said she began screaming, "I'll make you the next Kobe Bryant."
"Last season was very difficult," Bryant concedes. "I learned how to keep a team together when you're going through a tough time. A lot of leaders in this league only know success. It's very difficult to lead after you've had success, been to the top of the mountain and all of a sudden you're at rock bottom. You have to keep everyone together, and I think we did a pretty good job of that."
Asked about being viewed negatively, Bryant shrugs.
"I don't give it that much thought," he says. "People believe what they want to believe. I've said that countless times. I'm tired of saying that. People want to blame me for Phil Jackson [leaving]. Well, if I had a problem with Phil, would he be here now? I keep my mouth shut and it's like, `Why isn't Kobe saying anything?' Well, genius, I didn't have anything to do with it in the first place. . . . I'll just keep my mouth shut, and as time goes on hopefully people will understand."
Time is said to be the great healer, as Bryant can only hope.
A flawed hero
Just who is Kobe Bryant?
Coming into the NBA out of high school, he was a prodigy who embodied what the traditionalists feared--athletic gifts and untamed spirit.
But perhaps his greatest strength was his fundamental flaw. Bryant cared more for the game than most in his generation, and he was perhaps too competitive and committed. He mapped his own road to success and fumed at the delays indifferent teammates and befuddled opponents provided. Intensely private, he was at times estranged from family and teammates, a beguiling public smile thought to be covering some Machiavellian plotting.
He was part of three championship teams with the Lakers, but it didn't seem like enough. He was said to want the credit. Others said he was really a supporting player for O'Neal. It evolved into, if not the death of his career, the destruction of his innocence. So now Bryant builds back, and one shouldn't doubt his ability to resurrect his career as well as his image.
He is in magnificent condition, a brilliant talent able to take over games like no one else. His play is more controlled, with fewer three-pointers and more timely efforts. Like Jordan in the 1980s, he's being asked to carry a developing team. He seems to have the physical and mental ability to do so. After all, what's winning basketball games after what he has gone through?
A new beginning
"I look at my career in phases," Bryant says. "This would be Phase 2. Phase 1 was great. I was a great facilitator. That's what I had to do. I felt I mastered that [triangle] system. I went through a phase with people never once calling me the best player in the league and [thinking I couldn't play] on a team like that. But we won three titles.
"I've always been very secure in my own skin. What's funny to me is all the media talk about LeBron [James] or Dwyane [Wade] or whoever and that there is some sort of tension among us. I am genuinely happy for those guys. For myself, I'm happy as well because it's a challenge. When guys are the new kid on the block you want to show that, `You know what, I can still hold down this block.' It's exciting."
"You try to keep your mouth shut--and obviously I've boiled over a few times--and then opinions start forming about you. I'm a quiet guy, really. I don't like the camera. When I was a kid I'd think how cool it would be to be famous. But some people have the personality to be famous. It's not my thing. I'd much rather just play.
"People are out there talking about you, saying things that are not true and you go about your business and opinion starts becoming a reality. But I just have to stay the course and do what I've been doing and people will come and see.
"My trainer and I have been building a program to the point where I'm 27, 28, 29, 30 years old where the physical matches the mental. I feel I'm stronger than I've ever been. I think early in my career, people kind of held it against me, that I had this silver spoon in my mouth, that I came into the league on a championship contender and it was all handed to me and now it's like, `We'll see what he's made of. Is he really going to bounce back and fight hard?' All I know is I'm training hard to get back on top. This is who I am."
sehr gutes interview mit kobe. ist zwar lang aber es lohnt sich auf jeden fall
