Mentality as Legacy. RIP, Kobe.
“The day Kobe Bryant died.”
That phrase still doesn’t make sense. Not to me or to you. He’s Kobe. He’s the poster(s) on the wall. The sticker on the Gameboy cartridge. A staple of this generation’s reality — whether or not you were a kid watching basketball growing up.
If you’re like me, your Kobe relationship had its ups, downs, and surprises over 23 years. I’m too young to even remember when I first learned of Kobe, but somewhere around the age of 9-10 I became his fan. Then, when I was 12, the Lakers three-peated, and I grew worrisome that if he reached 6 rings they’d say he surpassed MJ. So I feared Kobe, on Chicago’s behalf, as if he was competing against some part of me. Eventually though, as I grew older and began to understand the process of pursuing a goal, I started watching Kobe in a different light. I couldn’t help but admire the “Mamba Mentality” he lived by. By the time I was 20, I cold-emailed Kobe’s personal trainer, Tim, asking to be a non-paid summer intern at Tim’s Chicago gym. I figured, if I could keep up with his trainer’s day-to-day, maybe I could better understand what the mentality looks like in practice.
So by the end of his 20 year basketball career, Kobe had out-worked and worn down my opposition to him. Typical story. Within the first three years of his nascent post-basketball career, however, he’d surprised me on a whole different level. I started paying attention to Kobe Bryant again in 2019.
Strangely enough, when the tragic news struck, five themes resonated with me in reflection about Kobe. None of which were NBA Championships.
Character lives in the moments when nobody is watching.
We see the cultural icons like Kobe plastered across highlight reals at the top of their game. With this victorious collage painted in our minds, it’s less intuitive to consider that the icons also experience bad days, even within their own field of mastery.
I have just one first-hand Kobe story. And it came at a time when he was having a bad day.
January 21st, 2013: Lakers vs. Bulls, on an icy cold Monday evening in Chicago.
I was a “ball boy” working inside the Lakers locker room. It was that hyped-up Championship-caliber Lakers team boasting Kobe, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash, Pau Gasol & Metta World Peace. You know, the one that disappointed on all expectations.
Long story short, the Lakers lost to the Bulls. While the Lakers team left a bad stat sheet, Kobe’s personal stat line was worse. His box score was a mess. You won’t read about this game in Sports Illustrated.
After the game, I was assigned to visiting team bus duty, which means hauling continuous rounds of luggage-stocked golf carts outside to the loading dock and onto the team bus. It was 8 degrees out in Chicago that night, before factoring windchill. I had a light zipper-jacket tucked away in the back broom closet of the Lakers’ locker room, so I went back to grab it before going outside.
Oops. There was Kobe Bryant, hunched over on a folding chair, sitting head-down inside the broom closet. Not wanting, or daring, to disturb, I took one luggage load out to the bus and then came back for the jacket, figuring he’d be gone by then. Nope. There sat Kobe Bryant, Gatorade towel now draped over his head, still sitting in the broom closet. This went on for at least 90+ minutes (I gave up on the jacket).
That was new to me. I’d seen the coolers get punched or kicked amidst a player’s frustration after a loss. You’d hear the yelling and screaming occasionally (and I’m sure Kobe had his share of all of that). What I hadn’t seen before this was a single player, in full uniform, towel on head, sit silently in the isolation of a broom closet, processing the game for that long. He may have been meditating, thinking, fuming, I don’t know. The point here is that Kobe was having a rough night. The story is what happened after.
All of the other Lakers players & coaches had left by the time Kobe even started showering. Meanwhile, the herd of media, undeterred by the extended delay, anxiously awaited him at his locker.
By the time his round of interviews finished — an onslaught of “Why do you think your team keeps losing? …Oh and why do you think you personally played so badly tonight?” sports media type questions — Kobe was left with a basically empty locker room (in the context of NBA arenas, us ball boys blend in with the furniture). We’re past midnight by now. Nobody of note is watching or filming him. Kobe is exhausted, both physically & mentally.
That’s when a guy, some member of the media, enters with his son, maybe 10 years old as I recall. The kid had been awaiting the chance to meet Kobe.
In this moment, Kobe could have easily dismissed the request. Nobody would have written an article about it, and none of us would have blamed him. But he didn’t. He invited the boy over, brightened up his own demeanor, and hung out with the kid. He signed the autograph, yea, but Kobe also gave the moment a little extra too, engaging in conversation with the kid.
If it happened after midnight with nobody watching in Chicago, my guess is it happened elsewhere. That’s the glimpse of character I saw in Kobe.
That kid will never forget his 1:1 with the Black Mamba. All I can really remember of the dialogue is the kid asking:
“Do you think we’re going to win the championship?”
“Well. We’re going to try. It’s not going to be easy though…”
Three months later, Kobe tore his Achilles heel.
Rather than retire, as would be understandable at age 35, he decided to re-start his process from the zero-dark-thirty ground up. That wasn’t going to be easy either.
Two years later, in his final game, Kobe scored 60.
Small Detail + Boring Process
“A lot of the focus is still the same; industry just changes. Same focus, same attention to detail” — Kobe, on his post-basketball business & arts career.
In his basketball retirement, Kobe had recently launched something really interesting for students of mastery to follow: “Detail: From the Mind of Kobe Bryant”.
It’s a low-key, low production-effects segment on ESPN+, wherein Kobe demonstrates the most mundane thing in sports: he annotates game footage. Game film annotation isn’t glamorous stuff. We’re not talking about the Sportscenter highlight reels that every TV personality with a microphone breaks down. Kobe narrows in on the mundane plays in-between.
I don’t watch “Detail” for the games that Kobe dissects; I watch it as a window to observe Kobe, practicing his craft of examining the small details. He was the ultimate student. He watched hours of this mundane film every day. He studied himself, opponents, even historical players. His “Detail” segments gave us a glimpse at the process of lifelong study a master-as-student pursues.
Any trace of sentiment along the lines of “I’m already good, I don’t need to study myself or others” just doesn’t gel with the Mamba Mentality. The Mentality isn’t about basketball. It’s about, among other things, the process, patience, and attention to studying the details of our craft, whatever your craft may be.
Last summer, we took a stab at applying Kobe’s approach here at Packback, in a “Detail” series studying our own craft. You can do this too.
We see the 1% highlight reels. Kobe consumed the 99% small details of the plays in between.
We see the 1% game winning shots. Kobe obsessed over the 99% boring process that prepared him for it.
This is my favorite Kobe Bryant highlight reel.
Vulnerable Creator
And this is where Kobe really took me by surprise.
While other players were watching movies, Kobe dedicated some portion of the countless plane & bus rides with his head in a notebook, refining his creative writing craft. It’s here that Kobe braves over a noteworthy social line.
Think about it. Kobe was king of the old-school masculine jungle. Alpha Dog #1. I’ve been a fly on the wall of his “arena”. While it may be evolving nowadays, from 1996–2016 the NBA was in large part your historical masculine setting. Writing vulnerable poetry and children’s books doesn’t fit that mold, and physical strength doesn’t provide courage in this creative category.
Take a look at the way he labels himself on Twitter. No mention of basketball championships: “CEO, Writer, Producer”. Kobe was willing and able to evolve his own identity. He had an all-access pass to a stadium down the street where 20,000+ people would jump at the chance to give him a lauding ovation, and yet he wasn’t even attending Lakers games (until, very sadly, his daughter Gianna took an interest). Kobe simply didn’t harbor much desire for basking in the praise of his comfort zone. He preferred venturing into new, uncomfortable terrain.
As much as his hoops career displayed his willingness to be different on the hard-skill stuff, these past three years demonstrate how willing Kobe was to risk his Alpha Dog reputation to be different on the soft & creative stuff too.
I only wish we could see how far the Mamba’s process would have led him in this category.
Coach & Parent
Two things I observe here.
- ) Kobe didn’t tell his daughter to play basketball.
Your whole life is dedicated to mastering something, and you don’t tell your kid to do it? That takes a wise perspective on intrinsic motivation and child identity.
“My daughter just decided to play about 2 and a half years ago”
2.) His non-directive philosophy in coaching his daughter’s team:
“It’s fun. I get a chance to sit, and watch, and ask questions. That’s really my job … is to ask questions. Let them figure things out throughout the course of the game. And you’ll win some, you’ll lose some that way. We’d probably win a lot more if we micromanaged how they play the game. ..but we really just kind of sit back and let them process things and figure things out. Because we are playing for the long game…”
After 20 year competing at the highest level, Kobe had developed something rarer than tenacity: a calm command over his own relentless competitive drive. He could tame the short term urge in order to nurture the long term chess move. That’s impressive.
And then of course, insert Kobe’s execution prestige in the form of a family-focused application for that Mamba process:
“I’m really psychotic about having that family time. …I’m doing school drop-offs and pickups…”
He sets a goal, then executes the process to support it. Even with family goals.
“Mentality” as Legacy
Given enough time, all statues fall and even championship banners lose their luster. Trajectory is much more interesting to me. How might the impact of one lifetime serve to positively tilt the human trajectory forward in some small way? Kobe’s legacy being characterized by a “mentality” that we can all deploy — in terrains far outreaching the basketball court — now that’s something capable of tilting our trajectory.
It’s terribly sad that he didn’t get to finish writing the full book. We’ll just have to pick up the pen where he left off.
RIP, Kobe.
*Pictures below were taken at the United Center in Chicago on Monday 1/27/20. Almost exactly 7 years from the night when Kobe sat conversing with a 10 year old kid and his dad, after midnight, in an empty locker room.
