Weekly Mail Special Report

Kobe Bryant 1978-2020

It was strange.

I would be less than honest if I said that I was Kobe Bryant's biggest fan.

I don't know if it was because he so modeled himself after another NBA legend I spent most of the 90's rooting against, Michael Jordan. I don't know if it was because of some of the less flattering things I heard about him, especially from teammates and coaches. More likely, it was because he was so good while the guys on my NBA team weren't.

But when I looked at my social media feed and saw the first bits of news, and then as the news was breaking on TV, I felt myself getting that same sick pit of your stomach feeling that you get when someone you know dies suddenly. I just kept hoping it was a mistake, even though it almost never is a mistake.

I watched some of the coverage and as former colleagues and media types who had covered him and had a relationship came on to talk about him, it just kept getting sadder and sadder till I had to turn it off. I only found out just before I started to write this, that his 13 year old daughter was also killed, making this a even deeper tragedy.

Roy Halladay died a couple years ago, also in an aerial accident, also in his early 40's, and I felt bad about that. I'm also a bigger baseball fan than I am a basketball fan these days. And yet, this news seemed to hit me much harder.  And I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why.

I can't say I grew up watching him, his rookie year was 1996-97, around the same time I got my first full time job. When you are a kid, these athletes are your heroes, when you are older, they tend to be a bunch of millionaires playing a game. I realize it's not that simple, but my point is that hero worship luster is greatly diminished, if not gone.

And yet, we still go to the games, we still root these guys on, we still go nuts when they win, and in my case even more nuts when they lose. Maybe it's that pull that watching sports makes you feel like you did when you were younger and the world was still full of possibilities.

Kobe to me was the bridge between the two of the titans of basketball in my lifetime, Michael Jordan and LeBron James. I used to try to argue that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were as good as Jordan, but I usually felt like I came up and the short end of that one. The Magic/Kareem/Worthy Lakers and the Bird/McHale/Parrish Celtics played some of the greatest NBA Final games I have ever seen. Jordan's Bulls dominated the 1990's.

And then Kobe and Shaquille O'Neal kicked off the new millennium by winning three straight titles. Kobe would win two more later on without Shaq. LeBron has dominated the sport almost from the first day he joined the NBA, and he took the torch from Kobe. And for many of those years, Kobe was a close 2nd to King James.

And maybe that's it. The fact that Kobe Bryant was one of the two most dominant forces in is sport in his career is probably why this tragedy is hitting so hard for so many. I was alive when Thurman Munson was killed in a plane crash and I remember being haunted by the next day's Daily News front page for a while after that. But I was just a few days shy of my 6th birthday when that happened and I didn't know many of the facts until years later. I know many people who were older than me at the time who still feel the sadness 40 years later.

I suspect NBA fans especially, but anybody who was alive today will carry that same kind of sadness when they think back to the life and death of Kobe Bryant. A rare talent, a superstar of his sport, gone way too young.