Front Burner - Contending with all of Kobe Bryant's legacy

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

NBA legend Kobe Bryant died on Sunday in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, California, along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people. The 41-year-old 18-time NBA all-star won five championships with the L.A. Lakers. His legacy is also complicated by the fact that in 2003 he was accused of sexual assault. The criminal charges were dropped after his accuser refused to testify in court. Today on Front Burner, we talk about Bryant's career and complicated legacy with Slate writer and podcast host Joel Anderson.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. You know, I said a long time ago, when I was 15 years old, I made a promise to myself and said, at the end of my career, I want people to think of me as a talented overachiever.

That I was blessed with talent, but that I worked as if I had none. And if I could be remembered that way, that would be pretty good. That was NBA legend Kobe Bryant. He died on Sunday in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, California, along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people. He was 41 years old. Kobe was an 18-time NBA All-Star, winner of five championships with the LA Lakers. He was known on the court for his incredible scoring ability, relentless work ethic, and not being shy about his talent. Canadian fans might remember that time he scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors.

18 for 20 from the line and an 81 point game 55 in the second half his legacy is also complicated in 2003 he was accused of sexual assault the criminal charges were dropped after his accuser refused to testify in court today kobe bryant's legacy i'm jam Jamie Poisson. This is FrontBurner. I'm joined today by Joel Anderson, and we're going to talk about Kobe Bryant's legacy. He's a writer for Slate, host of season three of the podcast Slow Burn, and was a sports and culture writer for ESPN before that. Hi, Joel. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Jamie. So looking back on Kobe Bryant's life and career, it's clear to me, at least, that it was a real evolution. And today I want to spend some time unpacking that with you. And can we start with 17-year-old Kobe Bryant, who got drafted into the NBA straight from high school?

The Charlotte Hornets select Kobe Bryant from Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania. The youngest player in history. Do you remember the first time that he came up on your radar? Yeah, absolutely. Because I, too, am 41 years old and a member of, in the US, the class of 1996. We both graduated from high school in the same year. So actually at my high school, we had a high school basketball All-American who played against Kobe in a lot of those big national summer tournaments. Tonight the championship in boys, Quad Aim, featuring the best player many believe in high school basketball.

Intercepted by Brown, he's got a leg. Going, going. See ya. It was Quad Aim featuring the best player many believe in high school basketball. Intercepted by Brad. He's got a leg. Going, going. See ya. And, like, obviously the media environment then wasn't like it was today. So you would never see Kobe play. You would only hear about him if you, like, kept up with that world of, you know, youth basketball.

You know, he was kind of like, you know, of like a word of mouth celebrity in that way. And then I remember the first time that I ever really heard of him was when he took Brandy to his prom, the R&B star Brandy. I wanna be down. I wanna be down with you. Down with you. It was like, oh, this guy is kind, you know, kind of a big deal.

He was like one of the first one of those, a youth teenage basketball superstar in the United States. And so like that was how he kind of first came to mind. But I mean, you know, for all of the accolades, for everything that everybody said about him, how great he was in high school, it was still sort of absurd to think about a guy at that size and that age going to the NBA directly out of high school, because normally that's something that people that are seven feet tall do. And what was it about him that made him so special back then? He was the youngest player to ever be drafted to the NBA. It's crazy. Well, I think there's a couple of things.

One, you know, he came from a fairly privileged background. And part of that is because his father was a former NBA player and a guy who had starred in professional basketball in Italy. Left hand, hooking no. Follow jam by Joe Brown over Caldwell Jones. There is a man who is one of the most offensive-minded men you're ever going to see. So he grew up around the game. He also played soccer, which he credits as being really pivotal to his competitiveness and also his footwork, which was, you know, very advanced for somebody at that age.

So by the time he got to the United States, you know, right before high school, you have a kid who already has, you know, the genes for it. And he's got this skill level that is sort of unprecedented plus when you add the drive on top of that um that is what really helped him to excel uh at that early age and made him stand out you know even as he got into the nba at a fairly early age as well brian has been the top reserve scorer in the nba at only age 19 toby brian shooting and hitting with michael jordan in his face. I know much has been made of his drive, of his work ethic. Can you tell me a bit about that? He's a famously hard worker. And in a lot of ways, he sort of branded the idea himself.

You know, he created his own myth about, you know, being the sort of guy that worked harder than anybody else all summer long we worked on our condition with the track we did olympic lifts it went out there on the basketball court and we did that those three things in one day because at the end of the game even though the shots felt good the truth of the matter is my legs were tired and so what am i going to have to do now to get ready and it was easy to think that that's just sort of, oh, that's just myth-making. Kobe is just, you know, really, you know, trying to build his own legacy. But, you know, one thing that sort of comes to mind to me when I talk about that is the 2008 Olympics when the United States men's national team had all these great players all at once.

You know, Kobe, LeBron, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Chris Paul you know some of the best players in the history of the NBA and they got there and they played with Kobe and what you hear from people that spent time around Kobe at that time is like they learned what it was like to truly work hard by observing him that he was the first person at the gym and that that first Dwayne Wade would start joining him there early, and then LeBron started joining, and then it became a team thing. And then that year in the Olympics, they had pretty much blown through everybody, but they found themselves in a tight game against Spain that year.

U.S., no worries. Two-point game. We know it's tight. We're battle-tested. And when the things got really tight, they all deferred to Kobe. Kobe is the guy that, you know, helped them pull it away, pull away and win that game. That's three and a foul.

Kobe wants to silence those who aren't cheering for the U.S. So you get the sense that, like, oh, even amongst his peers, even people that theoretically were his contemporaries, they looked up to him as well, and a lot of it was because of his work ethic. So it wasn't just talk. He actually put the work in. He also had this great confidence, right? Like, he seemed aware of his talents. And how much do you think that was a part of it, too?

Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, you know, he kind of came in naturally, you know, confident. How big was the gym you played in at Marion? How many people? About 500 people. 500? About 500 people. This seat's 26,000. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It's obvious that his confidence came from someplace, from his work ethic, seeing his father.

Like he had a chance to like get a sense for what the nba was like and yeah then he had early success i mean you know he was drafted by the charlotte hornets and the lakers traded for him and the guy that traded for him was jerry west who was literally the logo of the nba and early on he said oh this guy is going to be a superstar in the league then i told sha Shaquille O'Neal after this draft, I said, look, I said, we got one of the greatest, going to be one of the greatest players ever played this game. If the logo of the NBA is the guy saying, hey, you've got the potential to be great and I want you on my franchise, it's hard to be anything other than as confident as he was.

Did you admire him? Oh, so that's complicated. I am, I'm from Houston, Texas. I was a huge Houston Rockets fan and I'm very provincial in my loyalties. I could look at Kobe and admire him. Like I thought that it was amazing that somebody that young at that size

could pull off what he pulled off. And like, you can't, there's no denying that he was a one-of-a-kind talent. Did I love his game? I mean, was I, like, you know, did I admire him? You know, I mean, not necessarily. I mean, because, you know, one of the things that comes around on it, right, is that, you know, there's been a revolution of analytics in basketball

which sort of measures the efficiency of players. And so we found out that, you know, measures the efficiency of players. And so we found out that, you know, in a lot of ways, Kobe was like, you know, a dude who just shot a lot, a lot of volume. And that helped him to be great. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to be great to get these shots, but he still shot a lot. Yeah. So that's one thing. And then, of course, like, as everybody knows, I mean, you know, it's hard when you're assessing his legacy to look past what happened in colorado um fairly early in his career when he was accused of rape it's something that like when you're talking about him and talking about his legacy you can't

overlook that that is a piece of it i want to talk about colorado a little bit more with you in a moment but but first i wonder if you might be able to help me understand why he meant so much to so many people. It seems like different generations have different basketball heroes from Bill Russell to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Michael Jordan. But for a certain generation, Kobe was their guy. Why? Well, I think right now what you're seeing, especially in the NBA, you're seeing players who grew up with Kobe as their Michael Jordan. So like for somebody my age and Kobe's age, Michael Jordan was that guy. For this generation of kids that have come after, Kobe is that guy,

the one that won the five championships. And the winner of the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP is none other than Kobe Bryant. That, you know, had this like, you know, undeniable, beautiful athletic talent to go with this killer competitive drive. In a way that like for them, LeBron isn't that right now. Because they're playing against him. He's their contemporary. I'm happy just to be in any conversation with Kobe Bean Bryant, one of the all-time greatest basketball players to ever play,

one of the all-time greatest Lakers. He had zero flaws offensively, zero. You backed off of him, he could shoot the three. You body him up a little bit, he can go around you. Maybe in a generation when LeBron is retired and 50 years old and people will look back and they'll talk about him in the same sort of reverent tones. But that's what Kobe is right now. He's the link in the chain between Michael Jordan and LeBron James. And so, like, right now, like, he is that guy.

And I think that's what you're saying. Thousands made the pilgrimage to this new shrine outside the Staples Center. Everyone with their own connection to Kobe. I met Kobe when he signed with the Lakers years ago. What can I say? He was an incredible man. I mean, our wedding was Laker-themed. We're Kobe die-hard fans. Kobe, Kobe's been there for us for 20 years and plus.

It's like we have lost a family member. I want to come back to the 2003 sexual assault charges. He was accused by a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado of rape. He was arrested on felony sexual assault charges as he mentioned. Detective testified that the woman told them, told investigators, that the NBA superstar attacked her from behind, grabbed her by the neck, and forced himself on her despite her repeated protests. The bellhop is supposedly somebody who sees her come out of the room

and says she's in a stupor, she has torn clothing. This is really going to be an ugly trial because the only defense here is that this woman is lying. He claimed that the sex was consensual. I sit here before you guys embarrassed

and ashamed for committing adultery. And the case was dropped after the employee didn't want to testify in court. What was your reaction to that back then? Oh, man. It was as shocking as his death was yesterday. I remember waking up the morning that the allegations came out, and there was a little crawl at the bottom of ESPN News, because I would fall asleep with ESPN

News on TV, and I'd wake up, and it's still be on. And I remember looking at that, and I was like, oh, that must be a mistake. I was like, am I reading something wrong here? What is happening? And so it was essentially the same reaction that I had yesterday. It just seemed unfathomable, because Kobe had fashioned himself as like this Renaissance man, you know, he spoke Italian No, my visto was too much. We started to change. He was into celebrity culture, you know, he wanted to be a rapper And he had done some acting on the side I'm out doing the court I'm at home. You put a test in front of me, and I choke like the New York Knicks.

He just really sort of carried himself in a way that you, at least back then, and I was a much younger man, that you'd be like, oh, that, that, how could that be? How could this person who has carried himself and conducted himself in this, like, really dignified manner also be an accused rapist? And so it was just sort of jarring to me at that age, to be honest. What impact do you think the allegation had on his public image in the intervening years? Well, I mean, it definitely hurt. Right.

You know, he never he was never able to sort of claim that mantle in that at least for the years after. And as you know, he even has admitted that, you know, the nickname he has Black Mamba. Right. You know, which is, you know, some sort of a snake, you know, known for its quickness and agility or whatever. And, you know, striking power that he did that is a way to sort of indulge the darkness. And so he sort of indulged that by changing his name and becoming the Black Mamba and sort of rebranded himself as this killer, this competitive killer or whatever. And it's hard to separate that rebranding from what happened in Colorado or what he was accused of because he knew that he could never reclaim the mantle of being this innocent, wide ey innocent, wide-eyed, you know, dignified dude. It just wasn't possible anymore. The challenge is who you are as a person, you know, to have to go through something like that, you know, with not only individually, but, you know, as a family.

And the only thing that you can do is just put one foot in front of the other. It's interesting. I've read him commenting on on this he sort of compares himself to the character the hulk you know bruce banner and then the creation of this the hulk this alter ego i mean he was always a guy who you know anybody would have said was like a sort of a killer competitor but like it became that much more burnished into his into his uh ethos and uh the way that he carried himself afterward. Like, you know, even something like as small as interviews and years later, especially as he got older, he would, like, curse more often in his interviews. And that was something he wouldn't have dared have done when he was 23 or 24 years old.

But he just was much more comfortable, you know, with people thinking that he was a little bit rougher around the edges. He was just totally willing to, you know, be a little bit of a different sort of a person, a different sort of a basketball hero than he had been before. I wonder, do you think it would have been different if similar accusations like this came to light, say, in the last few years? I'm not sure. I don't know that I can answer that question fairly. I mean, one thing that I've noticed in the response to his death is that when people bring up the rape allegations from then, people get really mad. And you can see this is like an undercurrent of like pretty much any any high profile male celebrity that gets accused of rape. The same thing happens over and over again. So I don't even know that there would be that much of a change um and i mean that like it's hard to divorce that from whatever from what people call rape culture which is essentially the idea that what happens to women matters less than

you know the prerogative of men and that you know people are just people want to see kobe as one way and they don't want to have to grapple with the idea that me may have really hurt somebody and didn't pay a real cost for that. So I don't know. You know, it's really tough to say what would happen if that happened today. It probably might unfold exactly the same. This isn't the first time, you know, I know that you've navigated complicated legacies. I know that you did this on season three of your podcast, Slow Burn, with the rapper Tupac Shakur's legacy. Another man who meant so much to so many people and was convicted of sexual assault. What are we learning, you think, about how we navigate the grieving process for complicated cultural figures? I think we're still bad at it.

I don't think we've learned necessarily anything. But I think that one thing that people just kind of have to hold is that no matter how great of a basketball player you think Kobe is, no matter how great of a rapper you thought Tupac was, everybody's not going to be sad in the same way when they die. And they're going to be inclined to bring up the idea that, yo, they hurt some people along the way and we need to talk about it.

And that's fair. And people need to be able to allow them to hold those feelings. I kind of come back to this idea that if you admire Kobe a lot and that you think that he's a great basketball player and even a great person, your love and admiration for Kobe should be able to withstand a real serious critique of it at the end of his life. You know, and like, if you still want to come out on the side of, you know, all things at the end of his life, Kobe was still a good person who made a huge mistake, who never paid a price for it, then that's fine. But I don't think it's really difficult for people to sit here and say, hey, we can't, you know,

we're grieving Kobe right now. This is not a time to talk about it because that's what we've done the entire time. The rest of Kobe's life since Colorado, there was never a good time to talk about it. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. I also want to talk about his life a little bit after basketball. After he retired, he threw himself into storytelling.

As a six-year-old boy, deeply in love with you, I never saw the end of the tunnel. I only saw myself running out of one. He wrote, produced, and narrated an Oscar-winning short film called Dear Basketball. It was sort of a love letter to the sport. And what did you think of that film? I have to be honest.

I did not watch that film, which doesn't mean that it wasn't great and it didn't deserve an Oscar, obviously. But I do think that there is something to take from this. I go back to a few years ago. ESPN, the magazine, ran this great profile of Michael Jordan at the age of 50. And they kind of went into the idea that he was really restless and he had just he was not a very happy human being. And because Kobe had modeled himself so much after Michael Jordan, a lot of people, including myself, thought, oh, man, Kobe is going to find a real difficulty and find a meaning and purpose after basketball is over. But as you see from that Oscar, that's not it at all. Like Kobe seemed to flourish, actually, once he was outside of the NBA and outside of basketball.

He had done something else. And in that way that Kobe had actually modeled what a fulfilling post-NBA life might look like. Now, obviously, he had the advantages of many millions of dollars, and he still found a way to move on and keep himself motivated every day. And, you know, even just from the stories that we're getting from people that are mourning him today, it seemed like he actually made an effort to become a better person in terms of, like, becoming more accessible. So it certainly seemed that, like, when he was away from basketball, accessible. So it certainly seemed that like when he was away from basketball, that he was as interested in like becoming a full and fulfilled person in a way that I didn't think was going to

come. It was interesting to see, you know, how much he had also been working on being a coach, right? When he died on Sunday, he was on his way to a basketball game with his daughter, Gianna, to a basketball game with his daughter Gianna, who is 13. And she was going to play and Kobe was going to coach her. And he talked really glowingly about her talent and about being a dad in these years as well. The best thing that happens is when we go out and fans will come up to me and she'll be standing next to me and they'll be like, hey, you got to have a boy. UNV got to have a boy gotta have a boy man you have somebody carry on the tradition the legacy she's like oh yeah i got this yeah no what's interesting is that um you know from

earlier stories about kobe you know when gianna came up um he mentioned that she was really competitive and she was playing soccer. And that all of a sudden, you know, she turned towards basketball. And I don't necessarily believe Kobe when he says this. He said that he did not watch basketball. That he had, you know, decided that, you know, he had moved on and he was doing other things. He didn't watch basketball. But then Gianna got into basketball and it got him back into watching basketball.

And when I took it to the Laker game as the first Laker game I've been to I think since my jersey retirement And we just had so much fun because of the first time I was seeing The game through her eyes and he you know sort of became a fan of both men and women's game as a result of Gianna's Dedication to the game and I like what a beautiful gift that his 13-year-old daughter gave him. You know, we often think a lot of times about like what parents do for their children, but she certainly seemed to give him like a renewed appreciation for the game in his final years here. Joel Anderson, thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

More information started to surface Monday about the crash, including that the pilot was given approval to fly in the foggy conditions around Burbank, California. Whether or not he made the right decision to carry on to the hilly area around Calabasas will apparently be among the central questions in the probe into the crash that's currently being conducted by authorities. And all the passengers on the flight have now been identified. The pilot, Ara Zobayan, college basketball coach John Altebelli and his wife, Carrie, and daughter, Alyssa, were also on board.

Christina Mauser, a basketball coach, and Sarah Chester and her daughter, Peyton. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.