![]() “Let’s just go to another fucking NBA game. “All right, fuck it,” Kobe told the trainer. And tonight, the Nets were playing Atlanta, in Brooklyn. She and Trae even shared their trainer with Kyrie. So they went to a game at Staples Center before Thanksgiving - Kobe’s first time back since they retired both of his jerseys, 8 and 24, a couple seasons earlier - because the Lakers were playing the Hawks, and Gigi loved Atlanta’s deep-range shooter Trae Young, the way he could chuck threes with the flair of Steph Curry, at 21 years old. But this, with Gigi, this was love and basketball. He did that because the legends who’d come before him had passed down heirlooms for safekeeping: the blue-chip investments, the public deference of the talented, the all-timer’s tricks of dirty play. ![]() Those Batphone text messages to rookies, the pro camp back at The Sports Academy in August, all that elder shit - Kobe didn’t necessarily do all that, except when he was doing it for his guys Kyrie Irving and Kawhi Leonard and maybe Russ Westbrook, because he wanted to. ![]() Now they were watching NBA League Pass together every night. “To make the trip,” he said, “that means I’m missing an opportunity to spend another night with my kids, when I know how fast it goes.” He was 41, and he’d hardly watched pro basketball in the two and a half seasons since he’d retired - until Gigi, the second oldest of his four daughters, became a legitimate pro prospect herself, at 13 years old. The final public appearance described below, before the crash, is how we’ll remember The Mamba and the girl-dad all the same: underground with no-name Nets and teenagers from Kyrie’s high school, courtside with Brooklyn’s almost-all-star Spencer Dinwiddie, and in a loving moment shared across our feeds. It ends at Kobe’s gym in California, where I’d gotten a look inside the room for an all-star seminar and where, on Election Day, a secret pickup game between Kyrie, Kevin Durant, and James Harden helped a dynasty grow in Brooklyn. It opens with Kyrie aboard Kobe’s helicopter, seeking career advice - on the condition that the student guest-coach for the professor’s team, which starred 13-year-old Gigi Bryant. And he swooshes all throughout my book, Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow. But Kobe’s legacy will be in the joy of its everywhere effect. What happened that morning, and that year, was sudden, and scary, and sad. I left an email to the Black Mamba in my Drafts folder on Sunday, Januthe kind you wait until Monday to send in hopes of a quicker response. “I saw what he was creating,” Kyrie explained to me, “and I knew that I wanted the same structure: He had his own company, he had his own belief system, he had his own principles that he lived by. (Except for his politics.) He was a mentor to the Brooklyn Nets’ snake charmer Kyrie Irving, who would call the so-called Black Mamba on the verge of championships, fatherhood, movie deals, anything, anytime. (Except maybe the sneakers.) More than LeBron. In my two-year journey off the court with NBA players, no presence proved more influential than Kobe. But in this particular case, my iPhone actually malfunctioned, the result of a real-estate broker in San Antonio responding to my tweet about a story we ran at Bleacher Report’s magazine in 2018, which prompted Kobe to go at the guy. He’d text basketball players, too, with the same one-liners for superstars and teens alike. He didn’t have my number, although he was known to cold-call writers like that. ![]() ![]() The department did not pursue any charges against Mr Escalante as they feared the case would draw attention and bring negative publicity, sheriff’s commander Allen Castellano is reported to have said in the internal report.Kobe Bryant blew up my phone once. Mr Johnson and other deputies pinned him on the ground and the inmate was handcuffed as the sheriff knelt on the head of Mr Escalante. One of them, Enzo Escalante, 24, was pushed towards a wall by Mr Johnson, at which point the inmate turned around and punched the sheriff in the face multiple times, according to reports. They told the inmates not to make noise as the pair continued laughing and talking. The sheriff’s office is accused of covering up Mr Johnson’s alleged abuse of the inmate, “given its nature and its similarities to widely publicised George Floyd use of force ,” the LA Times reported citing a commander who wrote in an internal force review.ĭuring the incident, deputies were conducting routine searches of inmates before their court appearances. Luis Li, an attorney representing Ms Bryant, said on Friday: “We look forward to responding in court.” ![]()
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