Kobe Bryant’s fade-away
Kobe Bryant’s stellar career will officially end after the 2015-2016 NBA season and all I can think of is how inauspiciously it all began. He entered the NBA as a brash and entitled phenom but he wasn’t as good as he imagined himself to be. In one playoff game during his rookie season, he shot four air balls in crunch time, each one made more amazing by the humbling potential of the last. He felt he had earned the right to take crucial shots for a team that had Shaquille O’Neal, a hulking giant widely considered to be the most dominant offensive force of his era. Yet, there he was, chucking up shots as if he was the best player on the floor. In many ways, Kobe Bryant is the first great millennial.
His rookie season with the Los Angeles Lakers was somewhat personally embarrassing for me. I’m aware that this is weird: we’re obviously not related nor was I even a fan but the fact that we were born three days apart was enough for me to feel a kinship with him. He belonged to my generation and I felt (as stupid as it was) “represented” by him. I wanted to see, in 1996, what a fellow 18-year-old could do in the big bad world of grown-ups. And if his performance was any indication, we just weren’t ready to take over yet.
Like me, Bryant barely made the arbitrary Gen-X deadline by a couple of years. But in a sport defined by youth entitlement in the ‘90s, he was every bit the millennial people frown upon these days — inappropriately confident, unintimidated and irreverent. Like millennials, he was also misunderstood. Maybe because his confidence came from a singular obsession with basketball; as he himself confirmed in this year’s interview for GQ magazine, he has no close friends and very little social life. He is a pure basketball savant, someone who would spend countless hours of every day working on his game, so that when he stepped onto the court, there would be very little left for which he was not prepared.
Obsessed with greatness
Bryant was so obsessed with being great that he eventually became as good as his confidence suggested. He would go on to become a five-time NBA Champion, a league MVP, the third highest scorer in NBA history, and the deadliest basketball assassin of his generation. But even as he won titles, piled up stats and dazzled the league with his excellence, he was still widely reviled. The common complaint was that he always seemed too contrived. As a second-generation basketball star who grew up in Italy, his street cred was always questioned. His response was to act “gangsta” on the court, puffing out his chest and trying to look as hip-hop as possible. Unlike a superstar like Michael Jordan, who was homegrown and original (he made baggy shorts a thing), Bryant was largely perceived as an act, his inauthentic swagger rendering his game, however exceptional, as unpleasing. No matter how great he became, he was always ersatz Michael Jordan.
Announcing his retirement in the form of a poem entitled “Dear Basketball” (a phrase also used by Jordan in his retirement announcement in 2003) is the perfect end to a career characterized by pretentiousness. Bryant’s greatest weakness is also where his greatness lies: he always tries so hard. His signature move is one that his most loyal fans and his most rabid detractors would equally invoke to illustrate their point: a difficult and near-impossible fade-away jumpshot against two or three defenders. In today’s more efficient, advanced-stats-informed NBA, this shot, now dismissively called “hero ball,” is simply anathema. In this era where Stephen Curry’s Golden State Warriors rule the NBA, where ball movement and high percentage shooting is the new measure of greatness, Bryant is basically a dinosaur fossil.
Millennial Ball
Curry is an updated reflection of the millennial generation. He is brash but accomplished, a prodigy who does things effortlessly simply because he has all the tools at his disposal. Watching the way he scores with ridiculous ease, one can say that Curry is truly entitled as a basketball player. He seems to have been born with a preternatural skill, as if he simply wills the ball into the basket at all times, the way he shoots it with no wasted motion whatsoever. Bryant’s shot, in contrast, is all movement. He flings the ball up as his body almost falls away at a 135-degree angle, with every limb seemingly pushing against the air, until he leaves his exaggerated shooting stroke frozen long after the ball has met its destiny. He always gave you the impression that he worked so hard for everything. It is in this regard that Bryant was neither millennial nor Gen-X. His approach to basketball echoes an earlier era, one that considered workmanship as the supreme virtue, way ahead of any imagined existential fulfillment.
But this is not how he will be remembered. When the dust settles and he finally hangs it up after this NBA season, we will always see him as young and immature, mainly because he never seemed to outgrow his petulance and sense of entitlement. Even now, as his skills have diminished, he still demands the ball, still takes the big shots over his younger, more skilled teammates. His career, initially marked by outsized self-regard, has come full circle. The generation he leaves behind is one that is more self-aware, more effortless, and less selfish. The kids are all right after all. Still, I cannot help but think that maybe we’ll look fondly at those days when they were wilder, crazier, more “heroic,” undaunted by airballs.
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