This past January, I was browsing through the grocery list on my phone while shopping on an otherwise ordinary day when I received a number of strange messages from friends, some from whom I had not heard from in years. “I can’t imagine what you might be going through right now” They had reached out as they knew I had been a die-hard Kobe Bryant fan, and were asking if I had heard “the news”.
My mind raced during those seconds that separated receiving those messages and trying to anxiously Google what “news” they were talking about. I had tried to think through some possible scenarios to brace myself, but when I read the headline, it came out to be perhaps the worst case scenario. “Kobe Bryant, 41, dies in helicopter crash.”
Even though it still doesn’t seem real 7 months after it happened, the news hit me in a way that felt as real as it could have been. I knew he was aged 41, and I knew he started riding helicopters to be able to balance his basketball career and spending time with his family several years back. I felt the world had been turned upside down and could not remember feeling such a tremendous feeling of loss before. I started thinking about all of the people close to him that would be affected, and how much he had meant to me throughout the years as I watched from afar.
I tried to take my mind off it for a second, but immediately my eyes came across a row of Body Armour drinks that I knew Kobe had invested in and I thought of him. It felt that I knew too much about him to take my mind off the headline I had just read. In retrospect, that feeling makes sense given now that it has been 7 months, I don’t go a day without thinking of him.
At times these past few months, I’ve tried to sweep it under the rug and say to myself that I never met him anyways, so it shouldn’t affect me that much. But it wasn’t so easy to process even months later, and wondering why this was the case made me realize that perhaps I had never fully appreciated how much of an impact Kobe has had on me through the years.
When I was a kid, watching Kobe was an outlet for me to find joy. As I grew older, he enabled me to find something far greater: fulfillment.
Joy
While I was in elementary school, I started with only a surface-level understanding of who Kobe was as an avid young fan. I had read a short book on him, and I started following him in the 2008 NBA Playoffs after accidentally turning on the TV to find him playing on NBA Sunday Showcase on ABC. It didn’t take too long for his wins and losses to feel like my wins and losses, as I remember how bitter I felt after their 2008 Finals defeat against the Celtics.
Back then, my elementary school bedtime didn’t allow me to watch the West Coast Laker games that would start at 10:30pm EST. I remember how the following day I would walk home from school wondering if they had won the previous night. I would walk home fast in anticipation and wait for our family’s 2008 desktop computer to boot up. When the Lakers won, I’d be overjoyed and watch a recap video while eating an afternoon snack before going outside to shoot hoops on my driveway, inspired by Kobe and the Lakers’ performance the previous night.
My favorite teams to root for ended up being the Lakers and whichever team was facing off against LeBron’s Cavs. I have to admit, I felt Kobe would have a better chance to win in the Finals if he didn’t have to face off against LeBron. Even then I knew LeBron was good… good thing he plays for the Lakers now.
Sometimes during the playoffs, I would sneak out of bed to try to watch some of the games. I still remember the night I got special permission from parents to stay up to watch the end of Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals of the Lakers vs. Celtics — a night I’ll never forget.
I also ended up doing countless school projects on Kobe. In 5th grade, I wrote that I wanted to play in the NBA when I grew up, and that was because of Kobe.
At this point in my life, I had only watched Kobe play, but hadn’t yet started learning more about aspects such as his work ethic and mentality.
Fulfillment
As I grew older, I started learning life lessons from Kobe and started unlocking myself through his approach and mentality, which allowed me to live a more fulfilled life that was truer to myself.
In my academically-focused high school days, I would watch a 5 minute Kobe motivational video about his work ethic after dinner before getting back to studying. Before big exams, I would hear the words he would use to prepare himself for big games, and afterwards I tried to bring his mentality after big games of locking in on the next challenge and avoiding complacency.
I learned it was okay to be obsessively passionate about something, even while feeling like few around me understood that passion. This helped me find the passion that fueled the founding of my startup PeerKonnect. As Kobe would say, when you find a true passion, you make sacrifices but you don’t feel like they are sacrifices because you are so obsessed with what you do.
Pretending like I was him during the tough stretches of a 10-day silent meditation retreat I went on last December helped me persevere through it, and his book “The Mamba Mentality” helped me learn about the importance of mental awareness, the help he got from mentors in other basketball legends, and authenticity.
I sometimes felt like I knew his future better than my own. I knew LeBron would pass Kobe on the all-time scoring list in a Lakers uniform, but it would have been unthinkable for me to imagine that he would leave us just one day after it happened. I believed he would make a big impact in the fields of storytelling and venture capital, perhaps watch his daughter Gianna become the greatest women’s basketball player of all time, and maybe own the Lakers one day. I also truly believed I would one day meet him in the business field.
As we celebrate what would have been Kobe’s 42nd birthday today, I strive to remember that this is just the impact Kobe had on me. When I got a chance to meet Jayson Tatum during my time at Duke a few years back (and by meet, I mean take a quick photo with), I immediately thought about how he was the same age as me watching Kobe in the 2008 Finals aspiring to be an NBA player one day (I guess Jayson’s dream became true and mine didn’t 😂).
As Kobe entered the later stages of his career, he realized that wanting to become the greatest player of all time was a very fickle goal, and that it was more important to focus on how many lives he could inspire and impact. So many current NBA players started playing basketball because of Kobe, and countless others from other fields have been inspired by him. Thus, his legacy will continue to live on.
