Kobe Year Quotes

Shogo looked at Shuya and Noriko. "The winner's forced to transfer to another school where he or she is ordered not to mention the game and is instructed instead to lead a normal life. That's all." Shuya felt his chest well up inside and his face froze. He stared at Shogo and realized that Noriko was holding her breath. Shogo said, "I was a student in Third Year Class C, Second District, Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture." He added, "I survived the Program held in Hyogo Prefecture last year.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.

in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover, and Franklin Graham praised the Russian president for standing up to the “gay and lesbian agenda.” The next year, Graham met with Putin in Moscow, an occasion that prompted him to praise Putin as a defender of “traditional Christianity” while accusing President Obama of promoting atheism. In foreign policy as in domestic politics, the cult of masculinity can transform loyalties and reshape alliances.

Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current.

The hullabaloo passed, but days later an even bigger bombshell hit the Staples Center: Kobe Bryant was engaged. To be married. To another person. With a pulse. Really.

In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith. In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican.

the time Bryant moved into the NBA, in the 1996 draft, he was chosen as a Guard with the Lakers. After two years of strong performances, he was listed in the 1988 All-Star Game, and became the youngest player to be included in the All-Star team at the tender age of just 19. This

What we would think of as a beef animal had the double purpose of being a working or draught animal that could pull heavy loads. There is an old adage, "A year to grow, two years to plough and a year to fatten." The beef medieval people would have eaten would have been a maturer, denser meat than we are used to today. I have always longed to try it. The muscle acquired from a working ox would have broken down over the fattening year and provided wonderful fat covering and marbling. Given the amount of brewing that took place, the odds are that the animals would have been fed a little drained mash from time to time. Kobe beef, that excessively expensive Japanese beef, was originally obtained from ex-plough animals whose muscles were broken down by mash from sake production and by massage. I'd like to think our beef might have had a not dissimilar flavour.

O’Neal bit his tongue and said little. Years later, however, he admitted that the anger was real. “Do I hold a grudge about that? Yeah—I do,” he said. “Some fucking dickhead kept me from being the first unanimous MVP. Some asshole who doesn’t know shit gives his vote to Iverson and fucks up history. I never forgot that.

Trump effect.” Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed that “a person who commits an ‘immoral’ act could behave ethically in a public role.” The month before the election, 72 percent believed this was possible. According to the PRRI’s Robert P. Jones, “This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of ‘value voters’ is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history

when evangelicals define themselves in terms of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ, what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no prisoners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things? How one answers these questions will determine what it looks like to follow Jesus. In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith. In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and “supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy categorization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

Obama’s election had issued a warning call to evangelical leaders. Leaving nothing to chance, they made the most of the moment, working arduously to stoke further fear and resentment. By the end of Obama’s eight years in office, even as the president’s overall approval ratings had been among the highest in recent presidential history, white evangelicals remained his most stalwart critics. Seventy-four percent viewed him unfavorably, compared to 44 percent of Americans generally. Perhaps more importantly, conservative evangelicals had reinvigorated their posture of embattlement. Drastic times would call for drastic measures. When 2016 came around, they were primed for the fight. They just needed the right warrior to lead the charge. 31

And a fan. The beauty I see in the arc of a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook or a Kobe Bryant pull-up jumper with the game on the line. Twenty thousand people in the arena all hoping and praying for the same thing to happen like a giant group meditation, the expansion of time when the lightning-fast sprinting slows down into an infinite second. Like a Jimi Hendrix solo or a realized moment by a hundred-year hermetic Himalayan cave monk, all is in the now as electric happiness surges. With all this evil in our world, the cruel violence and prejudices we bring, I can always count on basketball to lift me up. Nothing more reliable on earth than a box score. The personal travails of my tattered heart rise and fall, but the poetry of movement on the hardwood has never failed me, even in the worst of times.

At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the Samisho was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki’s shipyards in Kobe, she’d begun service in 1992, and last year she’d been brought back to the yards for a retrofit. Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet. Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine’s propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The Samisho could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officers—less than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel

Pat Riley, the famous coach and manager who led the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat to multiple championships, says that great teams tend to follow a trajectory. When they start—before they have won—a team is innocent. If the conditions are right, they come together, they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal. This stage, he calls the “Innocent Climb.” After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear. The Innocent Climb, Pat Riley says, is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.” It can “strike any winning team in any year and at any moment,” and does with alarming regularity. It’s Shaq and Kobe, unable to play together. It’s Jordan punching Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, and Will Perdue—his own team members. He punched people on his own team! It’s Enron employees plunging California into darkness for personal profit. It’s leaks to the media from a disgruntled executive hoping to scuttle a project he dislikes. It’s negging and every other intimidation tactic.

Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” 6

Eric Metaxas emerged as a leading voice on Christian masculinity in the Obama era. Metaxas wasn’t new to the world of evangelical publishing, or to evangelical culture more generally. Raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, Metaxas got his start writing children’s books. In 1997 he began working as a writer and editor for Charles Colson’s BreakPoint radio show, and he then worked as a writer for VeggieTales, a children’s video series where anthropomorphic vegetables taught lessons in biblical values and Christian morality. (Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber became household names in 1990s evangelicalism.) Belying his VeggieTales pedigree, Metaxas brought a new sophistication to the literature on evangelical masculinity. As a witty, Yale-educated Manhattanite, Metaxas cut a different profile than many spokesmen of the Christian Right. If Metaxas’s writing wasn’t exactly highbrow, his was higher-brow than most books churned out by Christian presses. More suave in his presentation than the average evangelical firebrand, Metaxas was a rising star in the conservative Christian world of the 2000s. After Colson’s death in 2012 he took over BreakPoint, a program broadcast on 1400 outlets to an audience of eight million. That year he also gave the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he relished the opportunity to scold President Obama to his face, castigating those who displayed “phony religiosity” by throwing Bible verses around and claiming to be Christian while denying the exclusivity of the faith and the humanity of the unborn. In 2015 he launched his own nationally syndicated daily radio program, The Eric Metaxas Show.

In 1969, Graham sent a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon—a letter only declassified twenty years later—offering an array of policy scenarios, some of which clearly abandoned Christian just-war theory and the Geneva Conventions.

Roland Lazenby in his Bryant biography: “In the third quarter

In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and “supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy categorization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

Capa left for Japan on 11 April and was delighted with the reception he received. He travelled to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Kobe and Amagasaki, thoroughly enjoying being in a country he described to a friend as a ‘photographer’s paradise’ and unaware that mundane events would soon interrupt his idyll.

The meal was an epicurean extravaganza, the Michelin chef outdoing himself with his nine courses, each richer than the last. Maya nibbled at the fare as first-growth Bordeaux flowed like water, ten cases of Chateau Petrus from a stellar year purchased at auction in New York and shipped to Nahir’s temperature-controlled, eight-thousand-bottle wine cellar for the party. After salad, lobster bisque, and curried shrimp, a small piece of seared pork belly was followed by ostrich in a truffle reduction, which in turn was trumped by poached Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, fugu prepared by a master Japanese chef skilled in the art of preparation of the poisonous pufferfish, and the final entrée course of Kobe beef filet.

George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings

But Cleveland sucks,” Fox said—referring to both the team (which went 42-40 in 1996–97) and the city (once ranked among America’s most dangerous metropolises by CBS News). “It’s a lot of money,” Strickland replied. “Bill,” Fox said, “tell them if they wanna pay me $42 million I’ll go to Cleveland. Otherwise I’m joining the Lakers.” Rick Fox joined the Lakers.

ONE OF THE FIRST SEX SCANDALS to rattle twenty-first-century American evangelicalism struck at the heart of evangelical power. In 2006, male escort Mike Jones went public with the news that Colorado Springs megachurch pastor Ted Haggard had been paying him for sex for the past three years—the approximate period during which Haggard had been serving as head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard, the pastor of the muscular-angel-bedecked New Life Church, had at the time been lobbying for Colorado Amendment 43, a ban on same-sex marriage, and it was Haggard’s hypocrisy that prompted Jones to go public.11

On November 17, the Einsteins disembark in Kobe and travel around Japan by train. Their journey takes in Hiroshima, the city that will be reduced to ashes twenty-three years later with the help of Einstein’s equations.

A few years ago, Kobe [Bryant, duh] fractured the fourth metacarpal bone in his right hand. He missed the first fifteen games of the season; he used the opportunity to learn to shoot jump shots with his left, which he has been known to do in games. While it was healing, the ring finger, the one adjacent to the break, spend a lot of time taped to his pinkie. In the end, Kobe discovered, his four fingers were no longer evenly spaced; now they were separated, two and two. As a result, his touch on the ball was different, his shooting percentage went down. Studying the film he noticed that his shots were rotating slightly to the right. To correct the flaw, Kobe went to the gym over the summer and made one hundred thousand shots. that's one hundred thousand made, not taken. He doesn't practice taking shots, he explains. He practices making them. If you're clear on the difference between the two ideas, you can start drawing a bead on Kobe Bryant who may well be one of the most misunderstood figures in sports today. Scito Hoc Super Omnia by Mike Sager for Esquire Magazine Nov 2007

For some, the question of evangelical support for Trump had a simpler explanation: rank hypocrisy. Indeed, in the weeks between the release of the Access Hollywood tape and the election, PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) social scientists identified a curious “Trump effect.” Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed that “a person who commits an ‘immoral’ act could behave ethically in a public role.” The month before the election, 72 percent believed this was possible. According to the PRRI’s Robert P. Jones, “This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of ‘value voters’ is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history.

Defending a title is exhausting. Defending two titles is excruciating. Defending three titles - when the world is sick of your existence and people everywhere seek your demise and the hunger you once possessed has been satiated by caviar and lobster - is nearly impossible. You stop wanting it the way you once wanted it. Someone punches you, and you don't have the energy to duck. You're Mike Tyson against Buster Douglas. The upstart possesses the edge, because the upstart is edgy. The endless praise softens you. The free meals fatten you.

If there is a beauty to the three-ring dynasty that was the 1996-2004 Lakers, it's that (with rare exceptions) members of the organization love looking back, love recalling, love sharing memories of a blissful span. I also found one other thing: minimal sadness that the ride hadn't lasted longer.

The paradoxical result was that in the prewar years, as most of the countries of the world (the United States included) were turning away the desperate “prey” of Hitler’s Final Solution, it was Japan—Hitler’s ally—that was providing sanctuary, allowing them to stay in the Japanese-controlled Jewish settlement of Shanghai, China, and the city of Kobe, Japan.

I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists

THE EVANGELICAL MEN’S MOVEMENT of the 1990s was marked by experimentation and laden with contradictions. “Soft patriarchy” papered over tensions between a harsher, authoritarian masculinity and a more egalitarian posture; the motif of the tender warrior reconciled militancy with a kinder, gentler, more emotive bearing. Inconsistencies within the evangelical men’s movement reflected those within evangelicalism as a whole in the post–Cold War years. Earlier in the decade, it might have appeared that the more egalitarian and emotive impulses had the upper hand. It was a new era for America, and for American evangelicals. Rhetoric of culture wars persisted, but evangelicals’ interests had expanded to include a broader array of issues, including racial reconciliation, antitrafficking activism, and addressing the persecution of the global church. At the end of the decade, however, the more militant movement would begin to reassert itself. When it did, this resurgent militancy would become intertwined both with the sexual purity movement and with the assertion of complementarianism within evangelical circles. In time it would become clear that the combination of all three could produce toxic outcomes.

IN THE YEARS AFTER 9/ 11, MORE EXTREME expressions of militant masculinity gained traction across American evangelicalism. At GodMen revivals, evangelist Brad Stine challenged men to “kick ass,” to “grab your sword and say, ‘OK family, I’m going to lead you.’” Profanity was encouraged, “liberals, atheists, and the politically correct” were denigrated, and men were called upon to combat “the wuss-ification of America.

In January of that year, James Dobson published Bringing Up Boys. The key to understanding boys, according to Dobson, was testosterone.

Not all evangelicals jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. In 2007, nearly 300 Christian leaders signed the “Yale Letter,” a call for Christians and Muslims to work together for peace. Published in the New York Times, the letter was signed by several prominent evangelical leaders, including megachurch pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, Christianity Today editor David Neff, emerging church leader Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Rich Mouw, president of evangelical Fuller Seminary. Notably, Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, and Richard Cizik, the NAE’s chief lobbyist, also signed the letter. 15 Other evangelical leaders, however, voiced strenuous opposition. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, found no need to apologize for the War on Terror or to confess any sins “against our Muslim neighbors.” It was all quite confounding to him: “For whom are we apologizing and for what are we apologizing?” Dobson’s Citizen magazine criticized the Yale Letter for claiming that the two faiths shared a deity, and for showing weakness and endangering Christians. Apologizing for past violence against Muslims would make Christians in Muslim countries more vulnerable to violence, he reasoned. Focus on the Family urged like-minded critics to register their displeasure with the NAE and included the NAE’s PO box for their convenience. Dobson and other conservative evangelicals pressured the NAE to oust Cizik that year, both for his attempts at Muslim-Christian dialogue and for his activism on global warming. This was easily accomplished the next year, when Cizik came out in support of same-sex civil unions. 16

More than any other religious demographic, white evangelicals see immigrants in a negative light. Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling. Yet evangelicals who claim to uphold the authority of the Scriptures are quite clear that they do not necessarily look to the Bible to inform their views on immigration; a 2015 poll revealed that only 12 percent of evangelicals cited the Bible as their primary influence when it came to thinking about immigration. But this does not mean that religion does not matter. Evangelicals may self-identify as “Bible-believing Christians,” but evangelicalism itself entails a broader set of deeply held values communicated through symbol, ritual, and political allegiances.

Kobe played the game for 20 years, with no excuses.

Gus was just about finished with the chutney for the salmon cakes when Carmen leaned in. "Let's experiment," she whispered, as Porter cued them back on air. "Gus and I were just talking and we've decided to mix it up a bit," Carmen said to the camera while Gus used all her energies to prevent a scowl from forming. With a flick of the wrist, Carmen had ramped up the seasonings- a little more cilantro, some cayenne, and finally a touch of mint- and then put a clean spoon in to taste. But instead of bringing it to her mouth, she held it out to Gus. "Mmmm," said Gus, in a practiced voice, not actually paying attention. Tasting the food, after all, was the money shot in the world of food television. Then she actually felt the flavors hit her tongue: the heat of the cayenne, the fresh bite of the mint. "This is divine," she exclaimed spontaneously. And, like a stampede of seven-year-olds waiting for goodies at a birthday party, Troy, Aimee, and Sabrina rushed over immediately. "Let me try!" "Oh, this is delicious!" "I chopped the fruit that went into this, you know. I did it." Although the plating was a little- okay, a lot- sloppy, the group had set out a buffet of salmon cakes, fries, and Kobe beef sliders on toasty rolls by the end of the program.

Johnson commenced his heroic second act as a Los Angeles Laker on January 30, 1996, with the visiting Golden State Warriors in town and tickets being scalped outside the Forum for All-Star Game prices.

When Hoggard’s piece on the poll came out, O’Neal’s Olympic teammates—NBA veterans who knew the importance of getting paid—teed off. In particular Charles Barkley, the Phoenix Suns forward and resident trash talker, refused to hold back. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he told O’Neal. “You bring glory to this redneck, one-horse town, and this is what they think of you? Get out as soon as you can. Fuck these people.” It was harsh. But it was also correct.

Yo, I’m Kobe. Kobe Bryant. I’m from PA—went to Lower Merion High School, dominated everything.” (Pause.) “I just want y’all to know, nobody’s gonna punk me. I’m not gonna let anyone in the NBA punk me. So be warned.” Awwwwkward. “It was like ‘Yo, Kobe, relax,’ ” recalled David Booth, who landed a camp invite off of a strong summer league showing. “He was trying to establish himself, which I understand. But it didn’t play very well.” “Not the best way to start things,” said Blount. “But you have to remember, he was a child.

Plus, guards did not jump straight from prep hoops to the NBA. It just wasn’t something to be done. In the history of basketball, five other high schoolers had gone direct to the Association, and all five were forwards or centers. The last one to make the move, a Farragut Career Academy senior named Kevin Garnett, stood 6-foot-11 and was a rebounding and shot-blocking machine. Even with his size and strength, he joined the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1995 and averaged but 10.4 points per game. “It was,” he later said, “really hard.

If Bryant knew, it was something of a secret to those hoping otherwise. The college recruiting letters arrived by the boatload—from Duke and North Carolina, from UCLA and USC, from Delaware and Drexel and Villanova and Temple. This was the fall of 1995, and at the time Joe Bryant was in his second year as an assistant at nearby La Salle University, his alma mater. He had been hired in 1993 by Speedy Morris, the head coach, and while the official reasoning was that the program needed a replacement for the recently departed Randy Monroe, the reality was different. “Did I think it’d help us get Kobe?” Morris said decades later. “Yes. Of course. Joe was not a good assistant coach. He didn’t work hard, he didn’t actually know that much. Nice guy. But he was there so we’d get his son.

The Orlando Magic didn’t know their assholes from a hole in the wall.

Inside the Lakers’ locker room, the reaction was subdued euphoria. Ceballos was an obnoxious brat who played no defense and went AWOL. Horry, on the other hand, was a 6-foot-9 outside gunner (he was a lifetime 34 percent three-point shooter) and low-post defender joining an operation in need of long-range shooting and low-post defense. It was a trade that, by NBA standards, generated little attention. It was a trade that changed everything. Suddenly, instead of being a towel-throwing pain on an 11-24 team going nowhere fast, Horry was a coveted piece of a first-place club that sat 17 games over .500. During his first four NBA seasons, all with the Rockets, Horry had learned how to play with Hakeem Olajuwon, the 7-foot, 255-pound Nigerian center. He knew his job was to feed off the big man, and that a box score where Olajuwon scored 30 and Horry scored 12 usually meant Houston won. Now, with the Lakers, he was more than happy to acknowledge O’Neal’s place as the center of the basketball universe.

The Los Angeles coach and his assistants were befuddled by the Buss family’s willingness to kneel before a child. Around the same time as he was being accused of sexual assault, Bryant started behaving in curious ways. There were the new tattoos scrolling down his right arm—a crown, his wife Vanessa’s name, a halo and angel wings above Psalm XXVII.

Regardless, the growing chorus of Laker fans who wanted more Kobe and less Eddie was confounding, because the third-year guard was playing the best ball of his lifetime. But Bryant was on the verge of legitimate greatness—a greatness that Jones (talent be damned) would never touch.

The mythology began here. On the day. At the moment. Only nobody knew it. As the years passed and the legend grew, it became an increasingly daunting challenge to separate fact from fiction; giant from gnat. That’s what happens when we anoint our heroes with nicknames and expectations and an unusual largeness generally reserved for skyscrapers and grand canyons.

In the aftermath of his sizzling four-game summer league run, Bryant expected to join the team and immediately emerge as a superstar. Only, well, he did something extraordinarily stupid. Because Bryant was young and dumb and a 24/7 hoops junkie, on the afternoon of September 2 he visited the famed pickup courts of Venice Beach to get in a few runs. After leaping at the hoop to tip-dunk the ball, he fell toward the pavement and tried to catch himself with his left wrist. His 200-pound body landed atop his arms, and moments later he saw three knots bulging below his hand. The wrist was broken—and Jerry West was dumbfounded. He greeted the news of the malady with stunned silence, responding to Gary Vitti, the team’s trainer, with a blank stare. “He was doing what?” West asked. “Playing basketball at Venice,” Vitti explained. “Wait,” West said. “Wait, wait. Wait. What?” It would be one of the last times the Lakers didn’t include a NO PICKUP BASKETBALL clause in the contract of a rookie signee.

The Lakers regained possession with 11.3 seconds left and the score knotted at 89. During a time-out, Harris looked around the huddle and decided that the man to have the basketball in his hands would be the untested, undeserving, untrustworthy Kobe Bryant.

Here was this high school kid, and he came out dressed as if he were a member of the Rat Pack,” recalled ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap, who was present. “What the heck was going on? He wore sunglasses. Sunglasses! And they may well have been drugstore shades, but they looked Armani on him. It was hard to accept the total lack of humility and the sort of Hollywood quality to it. I’d been around Michael Jordan, I’d been around Charles Barkley, but I’d never seen anything so show-offish.

College? Who needed college. Kobe Bryant had decided to take his talents to the NBA.

The most noteworthy knock-Shaq-on-his-rear addition took place on June 26, 2002, when the Houston Rockets used the first pick in the NBA draft to select Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6, 310-pound center who had recently averaged 38.9 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in the playoffs with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association. Though he was just 21 and unfamiliar with high-caliber competition, Yao’s arrival was considered a direct challenge to O’Neal’s reign as the NBA’s mightiest big man. Sure, Shaq was tall. But he wasn’t this tall. Within weeks, a song titled simply “Yao Ming” was being played on Houston radio stations, and Steve Francis, the Rockets’ superstar guard, was being introduced to audiences as “Yao Ming’s teammate.” There was talk—only half in jest—of a Ming dynasty. Put simply, the NBA’s 28 other franchises were doing their all to shove the Lakers off their perch. If that meant copying elements of the triangle offense (as many teams attempted to do), so be it. If that meant adding Mutombo or Clark, so be it. If that meant importing China’s greatest center, so be it. And if that meant throwing punches—well, let’s go.

Basketball is a young man’s game, unkind to ancient legs.

He was asked whether he would have been willing to continue to play alongside O’Neal. The answer was no. He had said no to Jackson, no to Kupchak, no to Jerry Buss. No—he would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again play with Shaquille O’Neal. Never, ever, ever. Or . . . “That I had something to do with Shaquille leaving, that’s something I laugh at,” he said. “It upsets me. It angers me. If he’d re-signed for whatever, I’d still be here today. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out that way.” Watching from his home, O’Neal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Watching from his home, Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Had Jerry Buss extended O’Neal’s contract, Kobe Bryant would be holding up his new Los Angeles Clippers jersey at this very moment. O’Neal knew it. Jackson knew it.

That’s why, when West was asked during his team’s playoff loss to San Antonio about the possibility of hiring Jackson, he said, curtly, “Fuck Phil Jackson.” Yes, Fuck Phil Jackson.

The Lakers wrapped the season with an NBA-best 67-15 record, and while O’Neal (29.7 points per game), Bryant (22.5 points per game), and Rice (15.9 points per game) stood out on the statistical sheets, the key was Jackson. The veteran coach somehow kept a roster overflowing with egos and arrogance in one piece; somehow convinced O’Neal to ignore Bryant’s cockiness; and somehow convinced Bryant to accept life in the shadow of a larger-than-life big man. He used Rice wisely, leaned on veterans like John Salley and Ron Harper to keep the locker room happy, forbade the hazing of rookies.

You had to clearly choose. Shaq was jealous of Kobe. Kobe wasn’t jealous of Shaq. Kobe just wanted to kick everybody’s ass.

In his defense (sort of), Bryant looked around the league and saw peers firing away from all angles. The uber-athletic Vince Carter had the green light in Toronto, as did Allen Iverson in Philadelphia, Tracy McGrady in Orlando, Paul Pierce in Boston. There was an understandable sense of jealousy from Bryant, who aspired to not merely lead the league in scoring but fulfill an image he couldn’t possibly live up to. “There was a game against Toronto when Kobe decided he needed to go one-on-one against Vince,” Jackson recalled. “He had no space to operate, and he kept going right at him. Nothing kills team spirit like that.

Kobe just wasn’t cool,” said Elizabeth Kaye, the Laker biographer. “There’s no coolness to him at all.” His Adidas shoes, first the EQT Elevation, then the KB8, then the KB8 II, never sold particularly well, in part because Bryant had 0.00 percent street cred and in part because the brand wasn’t Nike or And1. (“The second Kobe shoe looked like a toaster,” said Russ Bengtson, who covered footwear for Slam. “Nobody wants to play basketball in toasters.”) One model of “the Kobe” had a depiction of Kobe’s profile on a gold coin gracing the inner lining. It was preposterous.

His level of sophistication didn’t jive with Slam,” said Tony Gervino, the magazine’s editor. “He wasn’t particularly cool; he was very polished. Slam was never polished. We were the opposite of polished.

Brian Shaw, the veteran point guard who was respected by O’Neal and Bryant, tried explaining to the kid that his words were unwise. Fox, also respected by both, did the same. It mattered not. Jackson was furious, and in a closed-door meeting he told the Lakers he had erred in giving them too much freedom. “I tried to let you guys figure it out,” he said. “Now I’m going to have to instill more discipline. You don’t get the respect of being champions.” But what did that mean? Would Jackson change anything? Would the approach shift? Answer: Not really.

O’Neal, meanwhile, was told of the article’s contents and decided he was done turning the other cheek. He would always take care of guys like Fox and Horry and Penberthy and Madsen. They were his people. But Kobe? Fuck Kobe. As the media gathered around after a practice, O’Neal spoke intentionally loudly with Jerome Crawford, his bodyguard. “Did you know they pay more taxes in Canada?” he said. “Like in Vancouver?” Crawford replied. “Hmm, Vancouver,” O’Neal said. “Isn’t that where Kobe’s gonna get traded to?

On the surface, nothing about Bryant’s move felt logical. He was a B student with a 1080 SAT score. He was being recruited by everyone, with Duke considered the most probable landing spot. He had yet to work out for a single NBA scout, many of whom had never actually heard of him. “He’s kidding himself,” Marty Blake, the NBA’s scouting director, told the Los Angeles Times. “Sure he’d like to come out. I’d like to be a movie star. He’s not ready.” “You watch Kobe Bryant and you don’t see special,” said Rob Babcock, Minnesota’s director of player personnel. “His game doesn’t say, ‘I’m a very special talent.’ ” “I think it’s a total mistake,” said Jon Jennings, the Boston Celtics’ director of basketball development. “Kevin Garnett was the best high school player I ever saw, and I wouldn’t have advised him to jump. And Kobe is no Kevin Garnett.

O’Neal, however, didn’t take care of himself—and everyone knew it. With each Laker season he seemed a bit slower, a bit less athletic, a bit more injury prone—still otherworldly 85 percent of the time, but not 100 percent of the time, as once had been the case.

Jackson hung the piece of paper in O’Neal’s locker without uttering a peep. When the Los Angeles big man saw it, he smiled widely. He had recently given himself a new nickname—“the Big Deporter”—for his treatment of foreign-born centers like Divac. Now he spun and told a reporter standing nearby, “I hear and see everything. I’m the police.” Translation: It’s on.

An explosive personality with a stubborn streak is bound to clash with other strong personalities when something big is at stake. Kobe had figured in several feuds mostly involving his Los Angeles Lakers teammates; the most infamous of which is the one he had with Shaquille O’Neal. Kobe and Shaq played together for eight years from 1996 to 2004. Not even three championship rings could extinguish the animosity between the two. They had since patch things up and openly talked about their beef in a TNT sit-down special. Still, it was a feud that added intrigue to the Los Angeles Lakers’ narrative as they

even much richer, than others. I object to gain of wealth through political connections rather than earning it by merit. If a basketball franchise pays my neighbor Kobe Bryant $20 million a year because it takes that much to get him, fine. But if hedge fund managers bribe politicians to put a clause in the laws cutting the tax rate on much of their income to a fraction of the percentage the average worker pays, I object.

I come from parents who are big on respect and also who are big on treating everyone with love. No race, no religion, no culture—none of that matters. You’re a person: you deserve respect. I was in a position to make people feel good and welcome and loved. Why wouldn’t I act on that?