I will always remember where I was on January 26, 2020. Sometime before noon, I was surfing around Twitter when I found a series of phrases popping up: Kobe, Bryant, Kobe Bryant, RIP Black Mamba, etc. It’s the type of context clues where you can predict what is really going on, but you’re scared to enter that level of research. It will confirm something that could be some perverse joke, like TikTok kids selling out the Bank of Oklahoma Arena. It’s your last moment of doubt before it all became real.
On that day, Kobe Bryant died from a helicopter collision in bad weather. I do not wish to exhaust the technicalities, but it was one of those awful feelings that you’d think would define the rest of The NBA season. How could anything get worse than losing a legend at the mere age of 41, in the prime of his retirement taking his daughter to basketball training? As many will be quick to tell you, we get to watch NBA stars grow old. They become respected elders in the industry, informing the decisions of the next. Bryant definitely was doing that with his Mamba Academy, and it was tragic to not only know he was gone but that the next generation lost a potential great in his daughter Gianna, herself training for The WNBA.
If anyone had to question Bryant’s love of raising the potential of female athletes, just look at the recent success of Sabrina Ionescu with The New York Liberty. Dubbed “The White Mamba,” she was chosen to speak at his funeral at The Staples Center and highlighted how much he had given in the mere four years since he had called it quits.
Closing out this funeral was a message not by any of his many colleagues. Sure we got some memorable moments from people like Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal, but when it came to saying goodbye, it made sense to end with, of all things, a little short called Dear Basketball, narrated and written by Bryant himself and animated by the great Glen Keane.
In just three years, the short has evolved in my mind. When it came out in 2017 and received a Best Animated Short Oscar, I thought of it as pandering. Of course, I was looking at it more as awards politics than anything else. By the time that Bryant had initially published it, I had stopped following basketball. The Los Angeles Lakers meant little to me in the present tense. Recently watching Bryant’s final game, I was reminded again how much lesser they were in 2016. Bryant only had a high score because nobody wanted to be the team that beat Bryant on his home court on his final night. This was a celebration of a living legend, nothing else.
Which I understand. In my personal experience with Bryant, I had those three glorious years when he made being a Southern California kid something to take pride in. We had Kobe and Shaq, arguably the most popular players at the time. There was something substantial about him in his prime before he became a career veteran who played 20 years and felt like he would play another 20 if his soul would let him.
Without context, Dear Basketball is a straightforward poem about why basketball was great. This was hyperbolized because of who Bryant was.
Then, when I watched that funeral I began to understand for the first time why Dear Basketball could be considered a revolutionary piece of writing, especially for any NBA player. This wasn’t because it now read as an ominous love letter to a sport that he made better with his presence. In that respect, it is almost haunting how much you can read lines about running towards the tunnel as symbolically representing an end of life.
But in 2015, it was just a poem.
For context clues, I think of a recent retirement. Back in June, Vince Carter made a public statement that he had personally achieved everything that he could in basketball. It’s a summation that any athlete would say, especially if you played 22 years like Carter. He’s had a storied career and has one of the best performances in the dunk contest’s history. You can’t deny his legacy.
And yet while athletes have gone on to pay tribute, it feels like celebrating Carter’s achievements have fizzled. Maybe it’s a result of COVID-19, but I don’t know what the party would’ve looked like. Would he have finished the season with The Atlanta Hawks and had a humble farewell, or would there be more vibrancy to his goodbye? As it stands, he just left and it was a small news story. I personally don’t think he’s going to win an Oscar for his parting thoughts.
Which is what’s incredible about Dear Basketball.
Many athletes have announced their retirement over the years and they all deserve some reverent place in history. However, there was something until the final moment of Bryant's playing career that made you pay attention to him. Everything was scrutinized to such a degree that he practically forced himself to stay great out of a social contract. Everyone shooting paper balls into trashcans shouting “Kobe!” were owed success. He was on a level of perceived talent that absolutely nobody else of his generation was.
And he chose to go out with a poem.
This could be cornball in anyone else’s hands, but reading over the lines again you begin to understand his ability to be universal. What he captures at the core is a personal love of the sport. Even if there are signifiers that tie it to his time with The Lakers, one can easily see it as a story about being a fan as a six-year-old boy, playing make-believe, growing up to follow his dreams and become a defining voice of a generation. We all dream to be our best, and by writing this poem that simultaneously relied on personal experiences and captured the enthusiasm he felt in his heart, he captured why we were all thrilled to watch basketball. Whether or not he was involved, I finish the piece a bit tearful, knowing that he captured the feeling perfectly.
What’s also incredible is that for a poem that could be a neon sign “I love basketball!” he managed to create one of the most mature and captivating subtexts in how he wrote it. The reason that it worked so well being played at his funeral was because what he did was write the aging of man in relation to the sport. We start as a child before building to adult and later old age where we retire. There’s a reference to his body starting to give out. He loves the sport, but he can’t play anymore. He’s given it all he can. His life (as a basketball player) is over.
And, in one of the most beautiful parts of the poem, he ends by saying that he will shoot until he can’t shoot no more. The buzzer is running out. Before ending the letter, he counts down from five. For fans, it takes on a deeper meaning since Bryant had a knack for scoring the buzzer-beating winning shot. For one last time, he would surprise us. Even then, the awareness of time was running thin. It wouldn’t last forever. Time felt more flexible at the start of the poem.
That is what’s so great. It was a story that captured so much in a very short space. Like the best of poetry, it had multiple ways to interpret things. It uses space so perfectly that you feel rewarded the longer you spend with it. Every line hides deeper clues that will make you recognize how sensitive this whole matter is. At the time we wouldn’t know that we had less than five years left with Bryant. It was just preparing us for the end of his playing career, before he transitioned into a mentor figure. Who knows what the road ahead was, and I think we were all looking forward to his autumn years.
I personally like to think that Bryant spent years drafting this. I don’t know what kind of writer he is outside of this piece, but he strikes me as one who is meticulous. Given that most athletes are forthright with their personality, they often put energy over depth in matters like these. Bryant clearly knew that this would be just as scrutinized as every play he made. I don’t know if he workshopped it for years with more literary-minded individuals, but it feels like it. This isn’t something written on the fly. It’s something so provocative that I imagine it took him years to pick every last word. He cared to give us his best work, itself some form of gratitude to us supporting him over the years.
As far as retirements go, I don’t think any comes close to being as memorable. He was preparing us for the end of his time in the sun, and it feels tragic because of how much potential he still had. Many could try to leave as resonant as a note like this, but I’m pretty sure none of them would win an Oscar for their thoughts. They wouldn’t have a short animated by a great cartoonist and have music by John Williams.
As much as I saw the short as over-compensating, a form of showboating that still occasionally makes me roll my eyes, I notice what it ultimately achieves is a form of art that only Bryant could. You can only get away with saying “you can achieve anything” if you’ve actually done that. Given that it’s Bryant, it feels more special because it paints the giant as somebody mortal, who is just like us. It’s his inspirational letter that he probably wishes he got as a six-year-old. In that respect, the production quality is much appreciated, leaving us with parting thoughts in his own words.
I imagine how many other great athletes we wish left us with similar treatment. It was clear that most of these people owe some gratitude to their fans. Carter deserves to be held with as triumphant of a victory lap as Bryant was, though it sadly doesn’t seem likely. Still, to know that even at his own funeral that Bryant had the last word, you understood how much effort he put into making his whole life meaningful. Even when he said goodbye, he made it clear that nobody could do it better.
Even five years later, I’m thinking about this poem and recognizing that it’s more than pandering. It’s art that speaks to the soul of its creator better than most examples of its kind. It seems unfair how good it was. We were lucky to have him, and I think what makes this special is not that it was saying goodbye, but that it was telling us to continue on and follow our own dreams. The world isn’t over. It just needs new authors to write history.
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