Los Angeles Lakers: My thoughts on Kobe Bryant’s legacy

It’s been a week since a helicopter crash took the lives of nine people, among them Los Angeles Lakers great Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna.

This writer has found it difficult to express what an immense loss the death of Kobe Bryant has meant.

Kobe Bryant was the first superstar athlete that I get like a contemporary instead of a larger than life superhero.

As a huge unabashed Los Angeles Lakers fan, my earliest heroes, like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, were old enough to be my father and the mere sight of them was like being in the presence of the basketball gods.

Kobe Bryant was different. He was my age. We could have gone to high school together. While I moved on to college, Kobe Bryant was growing up into a basketball superstar.

He became my generation’s “did you see that athlete?” You would ask “did you see the Kobe threw the alley-oop to Shaquille O’Neal?”

Did you see the night a 21-year-old Bryant helped the Lakers win Game 4 of the 2000 NBA Finals when O’Neal fouled out?

Did you see Kobe score 62 points in three quarters against the Dallas Mavericks? (I did in the 300 section of the Staples Center with my late father in awe of Bryant’s shooting)

Did you see Kobe score 81 points against the Toronto Raptors? Did you see Kobe score 40 points in Game One of the 2009 NBA Finals?

For 20 seasons he was the Lakers’ hero, hitting impossible shots from impossible angles while draped by three defenders.

In that time we saw Kobe grow into a man from that boy the Lakers traded for in the summer of 1996. My life mirrored his I too grew up, just like Kobe, into a husband and father.

So when I learned the news of Kobe’s death I didn’t think about the accomplishments on the court, my thoughts immediately went to his family and how would they cope.

When the news seemingly got worse, knowing that Kobe died with his young daughter en route to her basketball practice, the tears came because Kobe died doing something I did myself being a father on the way to your child’s game.

Kobe Bryant died devoting his life to his child, something that resonates with me as a father and it made his death less about his game on the court and more about the love he had for his children and family.

Despite all the things he accomplished as a basketball player what means the most to me was that in the end, he was just being a father.

For me and perhaps for many that is the real legacy of Kobe Bryant.