Kobe Bryant: A Legacy Beyond Basketball
By KYLE KERSEY
Jan. 26, 2020: Inside a local Panda Express, my friend Alex, a Houston Rockets fan, laments the death of Kobe Bryant by comparing him to some of the NBA’s greats. “This has to be the worst day in the history of basketball,” he says. “This would be like if LeBron or Michael Jordan died.”
Truth be told, I loathed Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers growing up. Like many of you, I grew up rooting for those hyper-fun Phoenix Suns teams that always seemed to be full of young, exciting talent and yet never able to get over the hump of an NBA championship. Among the teams standing in their way were Bryant and the Lakers.
One of my earliest sports memories is watching Bryant’s two buzzer-beaters against the Suns in Game 4 of the 2006 opening round of the NBA playoffs. I remembe...