Kobe's Ball Was Round, Too

On the Lakers superstar's relationship with the Beautiful Game

What would happen if our best athletes played soccer? Kobe Bryant taught me:

He’s probably too tall, right? Granted, he looks like Ronaldinho against that little kid. Just by not smashing it with his toe, he’s miles ahead of 99.99 percent of the American-professional-sports-playing population in terms of ball-striking technique. Here’s another one:

But his legs are just too long. It sure seems like Cristiano Ronaldo was created in a lab to play soccer, but really, it’s Messi who was (almost literally) genetically engineered to dominate the Beautiful Game. In basketball, it’s all about the giants who can harness their gangly limbs into some semblance of balance; those are the players who make it to the NBA. Those who can’t are destined to become civilians who can’t escape strangers asking, “So, why don’t you play basketball?”  In soccer, you’re competing against perhaps the world’s foremost practitioners of stability: sub-six-footers with short legs who can maneuver through crowded space, at speed, with a ball at their feet and not in their hands. Height, long arms, long legs -- they’re obstacles to overcome.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is 6-foot-5, only an inch shorter than Kobe. And the fact that there’s only one of him is the exception that proves the rule: giants just don’t become superstars in soccer. The only one who did is a flexible, wiry, jujitsu master whose size oftentimes served as more of a decoy rather than a competitive advantage. He’s that big so he’s, wait, he’s not, no, he can’t, oh my god:

Kobe, a Barcelona and AC Milan fan who’s also been an outspoken supporter of the USWNT, grew up in Europe while his dad played professional basketball in Italy. He played both basketball and soccer, and perhaps there is an alternate timeline where he sticks with the latter and becomes a center back or a keeper of a solid off-the-bench striker for Torino or something. In none of those scenarios does he get to become what he did on the basketball court: a mythic, ascetic figure who pursued, achieved, and controlled winning in an almost-religious fashion. However, he did use soccer to get there.

You might’ve seen it by now, with all the various memorials about Kobe’s death airing across the multitude of cable stations, but toward the end of his career, he was asked by ABC’s Robin Roberts to name his all-time starting five. Rather than doing that, Kobe offered up the five players who had the biggest influence on him as a player: Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Jerry West, and Hakeem Olajuwon. In the book Basketball: A Love Story, written by my buddy Rafe Bartholomew, Jackie McMullan, and Dan Klores, there’s a brief section about the NBA’s international growth. Here’s Olajuwon, who grew up in Nigeria, talking about his famous, elegant post-up game and its signature move:

The Dream Shake was a soccer move. Soccer requires body movement when you’re facing the goal and chasing the ball, and your opponent is chasing you from behind, and you wanna turn around and go in the other direction. He’s chasing you from behind, so you have to misdirect your opponent, and after he turns, you make a U-turn. This is the foundation of the Dream Shake.

Now watch Hakeem teach Kobe how to do it:

“He worked with Hakeem” became something of a cliche over the past decade or so. It was a checkpoint for any basketball player who wanted to be taken seriously. If you wanted to improve, you worked on your post game, and if you wanted to work on your post game, you went to Hakeem. However, Olajuwon pointed to Kobe as the one guy who took the training seriously and truly implemented the new maneuvers into his game: “I’ve worked with a lot of players, but the one who really capitalized on it the most is Kobe Bryant. When I watch him play, he'll go down in the post comfortably, naturally, and he'll execute it perfectly." As Kobe described their time training together: "I was ecstatic. I was like a kid learning something new. It's like opening up that Christmas gift. You know what's in it, and it's the excitement of opening it. That's the feeling I had.”

The post-game has become something of a dying art in the NBA. Threes and layups and free-throws are simply just easier to execute efficiently. The Dream Shake wouldn’t warrant capitalization if it were easy to master. But the ability to operate from that inefficient area of the court -- not behind the bonus arc and also not right up at the hoop -- was a requirement of the offense Bryant won all five of his NBA championships within: Phil Jackson’s Triangle. The Triangle was, as Dan Barry wrote for The New York Times when Jackson was fired by the New York Knicks in 2017 after an ill-fated stint as the team’s president, “an existential basketball strategy so complex that it was quite simple, and so simple that it was maddeningly complex”. As the name suggests, though, the offense was built around a triangle created by a trio of players on one side of the court. The other two would then drift to the other flank to create optimal spacing.

Johan Cruyff, the legendary Barcelona player/manager and the patron saint of this newsletter, was obsessed with triangles: “You should always have triangles, only then you have passing options." And sure enough, so was Kobe. As he said four years ago:

Most of the time, American basketball is only taught in twos: 1-2, pick and roll, or give and go, or something like that. In playing soccer growing up, you really see the game in a combination of threes, sometimes fours—and how you play within triangles. You see things in multiple combinations. And growing up playing, my eye and my brain became accustomed to seeing those combinations in threes and fours versus one and two.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for half-a-decade, and I still can’t quite comprehend the way people here hold him in reverence. It’s another thing that echoes the soccer world. It’s Diego Maradona-esque, really -- just projected onto one of the biggest cities in the world, rather than a marginalized metropolis in southern Italy. Rarely do American athletes ascend beyond secular devotion, but Kobe and Tiger Woods have done it. Maybe it’s because some of their flaws were out there for everyone to see. As my friend Louisa Thomas wrote for The New Yorker:

He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 profile, by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.”

There was another kind of ugliness to him, one that had nothing to do with greatness: in 2003, a nineteen-year-old hotel employee in Colorado accused him of rape, and Bryant was arrested on felony sexual-assault charges. He claimed that the sex was consensual. The case was dropped after the employee refused to testify, and after Bryant’s legal team publicly smeared her. “I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter,” Bryant said later, in a public apology. He settled with the woman in a separate civil case.

Just think of what that woman must be going through right now. Given the standing I’m afforded in society, I’m literally incapable of imagining it. There’s no need to explain it away, though; it happened, and it’s part of Kobe’s legacy, too. 

That legacy, as it ends, includes a bunch of titles, so, so many All-Star games, a generation across the world that he inspired in some way, and tragically, three surviving daughters who he really seemed to love. It’s also a legacy of curiosity. He wanted to know more; watch any sit-down interview with him and he’s always present, just as interested in saying what he wants to say as he is in hearing what you have to say. He’s never anywhere else, never offering up generic soundbites to pass the time. During his playing days he seemed to exist not in a bubble, but rather a Kobe-sized tunnel that only fit him and only pointed toward winning; except, he really didn’t. Or at least, the walls themselves were permeable. He was always letting other things in, so long as he felt that they would help get him to wherever it was he needed to go.