Kobe Bryant: The Jaundiced View of a Superstar
Right here before these playoffs end, before we get to the Finals, it is important to put Kobe Bean Bryant in some sort of perspective. His Los Angeles Lakers - and make no mistake, on the court they are his Lakers - are winning and winning big. They finished first in the highly-competitive Western Conference with a 57-win season. They wiped out the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the conference playoffs and then handled Utah in the next round. Now Bryant and the Lakers are engaged in the conference finals against the San Antonio Spurs and with their playing style, athleticism, and togetherness, are leading the series 2-1 and are giving the defending NBA champions fits.
And they are being led by Bryant, the NBA’s Most Valuable Player.
This Los Angeles team is a far cry from the group that Bryant wanted to abandon 14 months ago. As recently as opening night late in October rumors persisted that Bryant was to be traded to the Chicago Bulls or even the New York Knicks. But early in the season it was apparent that Bryant and his head coach Phil Jackson had a decidedly different outlook on the team. Gone was the Bryant who disparaged teammates during games and in public settings. Gone was the Jackson who repeatedly disparaged the team in the press.
As the season wore on it was obvious that the young, relatively inexperienced Lakers were beginning to coalesce. Everyone finally understood the vagaries of the complex Tex Winter triangle offense, a scheme unlike any other played in the NBA and copied - in a simplified form - by only one other team in the league. It was also apparent that the young players finally understood the commitment to the game necessary to improve, produce victories on the road as well as at home. Most importantly they exhibited the ability to trust in themselves and each other and a maturity that can only come with experience and through the pain of losing.
Yet despite the winning, despite the obvious changes in team and personal maturity, Bryant finds himself the object of derision from certain segments of the media.
Just this week Chris Mannix has twice on ESPN nationally-televised programs, expressed more than skepticism about Bryant and the notion that is he is more mature and a better team leader than that he has been in the past. On Jim Rome’s Rome is Burning show, Mannix frowned visibly at the thought that Bryant was a changed person. Wearing a look of distaste Mannix embarked on a mini- “I know better than you do” diatribe about how Bryant was different only because his team was winning. Then Sunday on ESPN’s Outside the Lines Mannix repeated his assertion about Bryant but put a whole new negative spin on the Bryant persona:
I’m not sure I buy into all this Kobe is a better teammate, Kobe is this great guy thing. It’s easy to be a great guy when your team is winning….
When the team wasn’t winning he was a bad guy. He was throwin’ Andrew Bynum under the bus. He was throwin’ his GM under the bus. He was all over the place. So I don’t think [we’ll see] the true testament of Kobe’s personality is when the team starts to struggle again….
Kobe’s shown he can run anybody out of town if he really wants to. It is Jordan-esque and that’s right up Kobe’s alley…. It’s nice to see your teammates show up and be that supportive group (as they did when Bryant won the MVP award) but I can’t buy into it until they struggle. You know I can’t believe that, they haven’t struggled all season long.
This whole, ‘we don’t know if Bryant hasn’t changed because his team is winning’ is a new excuse thrown out by members of the press to ensure that there can always be a complaint about a player for whom that press does not, as a whole, favor.
We saw Shaquille O’Neal this season claim that he was too hurt to play for a Miami Heat team that was going nowhere fast. O’Neal was then traded to the Phoenix Suns, where he was miraculously healed, began to practice immediately after being traded, and then played games as soon as he was ready.
No member of the press ever whispered the harsh truth about O’Neal: he faked an injury and through sitting on a huge contract and a bad attitude finagled a trade through his petulance. He arrived in Phoenix to much fanfare and nothing in the way of admonitions from the press.
When the Suns with Shaq got out of the box with a 3-6 record, O’Neal was curt and surly with the press, constantly reminding them that those who would critique him and even hint that he was faking an injury would be treated with complete disdain when things got turned around. Dutifully, the press treated O’Neal with kid gloves.
And when the Suns finally began to win O’Neal quickly became his usual publicly gregarious self; public persona intact, the ever-comedic, always amenable, mostly affable giant. Even when Phoenix was dismissed from the playoffs the press excused O’Neal’s part in their losing. He didn’t “get enough touches” and the trade happened too late in the season for the rest of the team to become fully acclimated to O’Neal’s presence on the court. ‘Wait ’till next year” was the press’ battle cry - all meant to go to any length to ensure that none of the criticism for Phoenix’s losing was place on the center.
Instead Mike D’Antoni was forced out as the Suns coach.
And despite having ample evidence for O’Neal sabotaging the Heat then doing an attitude about face with the Suns, writers like Chris Mannix didn’t utter or write an untoward word in O’Neal’s direction.
But according to Mannix, Kobe Bryant is changed only because his team is winning. And the true test of his personality will come when his team loses.
Further, Mannix - and others - still wrongly claim that Bryant ran O’Neal out of Los Angeles, which is what is behind Mannix’s saying:
Kobe’s shown he can run anybody out of town if he really wants to.
This is the stuff of lies and legend, but writers like Mannix repeat the phrase as if it’s out of some, “The How to Dis Kobe Bryant Bible.” Here is an excerpt from a Roland Lazenby post that speaks to both Bryant’s - and Michael Jordan’s - competitive nature and its effect on his teammates, and a word on the Shaquille O’Neal trade:
Bryant and the Lakers seem to be stuck with each other.
For better or for worse.
Which means coach Phil Jackson is right back at the same old task — trying to get Bryant to play the right way, the team-oriented way.
To “involve his teammates.”
How many times have you heard that phrase?
There are critics who want to take this situation and make something bigger out of it. They project that Kobe Bryant is this metastasizing ego that will suck the life out of any team he plays for.
Tex Winter, Jackson’s longtime assistant, will tell you that the same issues emerged when they coached Michael Jordan in Chicago.
As Jackson told me once, Jordan’s hypercompetitive behavior could be “destructive” to his own teammates.
Jordan himself admitted to me that he could be ruthless and unkind, but that he had to find teammates who were mentally strong enough to play with him.
Winter said there is one major difference between Jordan and Bryant in these circumstances: Jordan played system basketball in college for Dean Smith at North Carolina.
Bryant came to the Lakers right out of high school and never had benefit of that college experience.
Winter said, it’s a battle each night with those rare superior players to get them to quiet those raging competitive urges, to get them to “include their teammates.”
Bryant, of course, has expressed tremendous frustration with the Lakers and their talent level in recent months.
Some observers find delight in these circumstances because they believe Bryant’s ego set them up in the first place, when he seemed so eager to leave the Lakers in 2004 or force the trading of center Shaquille O’Neal.
The debate and the urban legends spawned by the Lakers in 2004 have been the subject of entire books, so we don’t want to get into that one here….
It is far too easy - not to say lazy and reductionist in thought - to assign Bryant the kiss of death through wrongly blaming him for the O’Neal trade and musing that winning is why Bryant is a “nice guy” rather than explore how Bryant’s personal changes have helped the Lakers win. And writers like Mannix use the crutch that is the “negative first” approach to Kobe as if it was a surrogate leg to rely on as much as the two they already possess.
Was Michael Jordan a nice guy when Chicago was losing? And I know Mannix said Bryant’s ability to run people out of town is Jordan-esque but that does not excuse Mannix and his peers who have hated Kobe Bryant since he came into the league (and for some of them like Mannix, long before they were handed a national platform to spew their particular brand of venom Bryant’s way).
If you take a trip down the memory hole you’ll find the spot where Jordan was despised for coming into the league wearing gold chains on the court, his non-conformist Nike shoes, his long shorts, and his aloof demeanor. He was castigated for his alleged role in the firing of former Bulls head coach Doug Collins
However, Jordan’s passion to become a global icon was equal to his passion for winning basketball. Jordan worked to become a better speaker and the charge of “aloof” went away. The chains quietly came off. He won the battle to wear his Nikes because Commissioner David Stern knew that a positive relationship with the burgeoning juggernaut and it flagship athlete, Jordan, was to his owner’s benefit. The shorts were explained away as being worn to hide Jordan’s “lucky” North Carolina shorts, which, after all, if seen would have been a uniform violation.
Bryant, with his Italian Euro-cosmopolitan background and pro basketball playing father, was a different breed of human. He didn’t need money. Power was not in becoming a global icon it was in winning championships. And Kobe Bryant wanted to take the on court lessons learned from MJ, expound on them, and be hailed as a better player than Jordan ever was.
The maturity part, as Lazenby wrote in the above passage, Kobe would have to learn on the fly while already in the NBA:
Winter said there is one major difference between Jordan and Bryant in these circumstances: Jordan played system basketball in college for Dean Smith at North Carolina.
Bryant came to the Lakers right out of high school and never had benefit of that college experience.
Also, Jordan was the Bulls centerpiece from day one. Meantime from day one Bryant was forced to deal with the outsized presence of Shaquille O’Neal. Having to play second fiddle to a man who did his best to ensure that the world revolved around him and no one else was difficult to swallow for an 18-year old with more talent and more discipline than the established “star” who was six years his elder.
But behind the scenes of the championships Bryant suffered through O’Neal’s brutish dominance of the locker room and their relationship. Then when the center attempted to hold owner Jerry Buss hostage to his contract demands (actually it was the emergence of Bryant as the true future of the Lakers franchise that O’Neal objected to) and Buss jettisoned the center someone in the Lakers organization blamed Bryant for the trade. The press jumped on the opportunity to blast the “uppity” Bryant while O’Neal left for Miami a hero in LA and a conquering hero in South Beach and they haven’t quit since.
From the moment of the O’Neal trade, the rest of Bryant’s story from then to now is well known and not worth repeating here. What is instructive is that Bryant, unlike other great players has been treated differently than Jordan and O’Neal; more like a pariah than hailed as the next logical evolutionary step in basketball between Jordan and what has become LeBron James.
The why of this treatment is in part Bryant’s doing. Nothing ever happens in a one-sided vacuum. He is a man who, as a teenager, eschewed college for the NBA and therefore grew up in public. And unlike Kevin Garnett drafted by the Minnesota Timberwolves out of high school a year before him, Bryant was forced to grow up in the most public of arenas - star-studded Los Angeles.
However, the press has more than played a role in the making, breaking, and cynical rebirth of Bryant’s persona. The press has unduly scrutinized Kobe when he played with Shaquille O’Neal, tried to maim him after Eagle, Colorado, and is now alternately treating him as a savior and a fraud. When the 2007-08 season began Bryant was vacillating between the two descriptions. By the time the regular season was done he has apparently found his way. His teammates truly enjoy his presence and he theirs. He has spoken out against the events currently taking place in Darfur. His private life is his own and for now well out of the public eye. He is the NBA’s Most Valuable Player and his team is on the verge of the NBA Finals.
Kobe Bryant is doing everything right.
But not to Chris Mannix and his ilk. Mannix and crew take every opportunity they can to plant seeds of doubt in public about Bryant. It is as if they have a vested interest in his downfall; as if it would somehow make them feel better about themselves.
Or perhaps they have found that it makes for giving better TV face and makes the fans sitting in their angry chairs more comfortable when they stay negative, stay snarky, stay one-dimensional, and knee-jerk reductionist in their thinking.
Perhaps attempting to grasp a human with all their frailties and strengths is just too much work.
Perhaps.
Tags: Chris Mannix, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers, Michael Jordan, NBA, Phil Jackson, Shaquille O'Neal
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It makes sense that the author of this article is a freelancer. The piece is all over the place & continually strays from any real point. At the end we know he idolizes Kobe in a blind child-like way and he really dislikes Shaq. Kobe is a changed man however. I knew this to be true last week when it was reported that he had an affair with a Laker girl. His wife can look forward to another make-up diamond ring. I’m sorry but if you think Kobe has changed, you’re not thinking objectively.
Comment by Steve on May 27, 2008
Great article.
Comment by Andygirl on May 27, 2008
Gotta love the personal attacks in comments. That always leads to worthwhile discussion, so thanks Steve.
Some people will never get over the Eagle, Colorado thing, whether that’s fair or not. It’ll always be there when you discuss Kobe’s on or off-court legacy. That’s unfortunate, but as Brian McNamee would say, “It is what it is.”
Comment by David on May 27, 2008
Steve-
Thank you for your personal attack….
Also, there are many editor opportunities at newspapers across the country. Perhaps you should seek out one.
One suggestion, though: should you gain employment at any level of editorship, if a reporter files an article and uses Internet gossip rags and unsubstantiated rumor as proof of an event (as you did with Kobe and his alleged “affair”) please don’t print the article. You’ll lose your job and any hint of a career and cost the reporter the same.
Comment by D.K. Wilson on May 27, 2008
I heard the Laker girl gave Kobe her own little “MVP award” this year… I mean, how else would he possibly get one with that Nash guy around, who can’t seem to win a title even with Shaq? Well, I guess there is that little known fact that Kobe is the best player in the game. That part always gets in the way of the MVP trophy — except this year.
Steve should read my stuff. It is actually all over the place, chock full of absurdities, contains very few facts, and actually has no point whatsoever. You’ll love it. And I can set ya up with about 30 really hot hockey chicks that I met on the Internet, who can also gossip like nobody’s business about things that — in all likelihood — will be proven false.
Go Redskins!
Comment by Den Cotton on May 27, 2008
it is really a good article.Kobe has been changing !
Comment by Shenzhen,China Hot sauce on May 31, 2008