Professional basketball fell off my radar screen two decades ago. I was once a serious fan back in the Magic/Bird/Jordan days, but as I got older I lost interest. Today, I still know who most of the stars are but if you asked me to name the starting five of any team in the NBA I would be lost. But, I knew who Kobe Bryant was, and his tragic death yesterday felt like a blow to me. It’s funny how it is when famous people die unexpectedly. You feel an intimacy with the loss that you haven’t earned.
Over the next few days tributes will pour in from all sources of the media in praise of Kobe Bryant. This is good and proper. He was an iconic athlete and personality with millions of devoted fans all over the world. As a player he was one of the top five to ever play the game, I would think, although true basketball fans may argue the point. He played with a flair and flamboyance that few others had, and a fierce competitiveness that perhaps only Michael Jordan could top. But beyond his skill as a basketball player, I have no idea what kind of man he was. Yes, I do remember the 2003 sexual assault charge against him. I remember being disappointed in him at the time. But through all of that ugliness he and his wife managed to save their marriage and have four beautiful daughters, one of whom perished with her father on that ill-fated helicopter ride.
To learn of the death of anyone at age 41 feels like a blow. Then to learn that a 13 year old child was lost makes it even more jarring. One minute the man was on top of the world, fabulously rich, adored by millions, his future as limitless as the imagination. Then he gets on his private helicopter with eight others, a few minutes later the engine sputters and everything that was Kobe Bryant ends in a fireball on a hillside outside of Los Angeles. In the twinkling of an eye...
My life doesn’t resemble Kobe Bryant’s. I am not fabulously rich, or adored by millions. I’m more like comfortably well off and well- liked by tens. But, just like Kobe Bryant, I am flesh and blood. I am perishable. I am infinitely destructible. Kobe and I share one thing...our mortality. One day, for all of us, this life will end. And when it does, we all become equal.
So, I pray for his family, although I don’t know anything about them. I mourn his untimely death although I never knew him, we never spoke a word. And I will think more about what sort of legacy I will leave behind when it’s my turn to become equal with all who have gone before me.
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