Kobe Bryant Billed As “The Last Alpha Dog” On The Cover Of Sports Illustrated

This week’s Sports Illustrated cover is devoted to 35-year-old Kobe Bryant. Writer Lee Jenkins interviewed Mamba while he’s in the midst of recovering from — what for many, would be a career-threatening — Achilles injury. But that’s not really Kobe Bryant, as Jenkins shows readers in chronological detail.

Jenkins painstakingly recounts little vignettes from various watershed moments in Bryant’s — not just professional — but personal life in basketball. There’s the winter of 1983, when a 4-year-old Bryant faced off against a larger opponent in Karate class; the summer of 1991 when he doesn’t score a single point in Philadelphia’s Sonny Hill Community Involvement League; the summer of 1994 at Fairleigh Dickinson campus in Hackensack, NJ where Kobe was invited to the prestigious Adidas-sponsored ABCD camp; the winter of 1996 when Kobe breaks his nose in practice the day before the state semifinals and decides not to wear the mask in the game before scoring 39 points and going on to capture his school’s first state title in 53 years. The list goes on through Bryant’s career in the NBA, and for any Kobe fan it’s a must read.

But Jenkins wrote a preface before these tiny anecdotes summarizing Kobe the competitor and it reminded us of LeBron Jamesinterview with ESPN:

“I have self-doubt,” Bryant says. “I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it. You respond to it. You rise above it. … I don’t know how I’m going to come back from this injury. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be horses—.” He pauses, as if envisioning himself as an eighth man. “Then again, maybe I won’t, because no matter what, my belief is that I’m going to figure it out. Maybe not this year or even next year but I’m going to stay with it until I figure it out.”

Perhaps the most eye-opening mini-stories come near the end of the profile. There is the memory of Kobe’s return to the bench on crutches in game 4 against San Antonio last season. It was the last game of a Spurs sweep, but the LA crowd serenaded Kobe with MVP chants anyway, which almost brought tears to his eyes after all the ups-and-downs in L.A.

L.A. is about to be swept and Howard is about to leave for Houston, where he will forfeit $30 million and avoid discomfort. But Bryant is the rare modern athlete whose presence can transcend playoff results and free-agent decisions. Sometimes, just seeing him is enough. “The long year, the injuries, the Shaq stuff, the Phil stuff, it all came to a head when I walked out to the bench,” says Bryant, who was serenaded with a standing ovation and MVP chants. “It was the first time I ever felt that kind of love from a crowd. Oh, my God, I was fighting back the tears.”

Finally, to end the piece, there is the story Jenkins tells about how Bryant helped his 7-year-old daughter, Gianna, overcome her grief after losing a soccer match:

“Hey,” he told her, after the tears dried. “You want to see Daddy cry?” He took her home and fished out the DVD from Game 6 of the 2008 Finals. They sat together and watched the Lakers get mortified in Boston. Then he popped in Game 7 of the 2010 Finals, and they marinated in the vindication. There, in one unforgettable double feature, was the evolution, the making of a man, the healing of a scar.

Bryant was just pegged as the NBA’s 25th best player in ESPN’s player rankings. Bryant told Jenkins that his recovery from an Achilles tendon tear is “The Last Chapter. The book is going to close. I just haven’t determined how many pages are left.”

Judging from Jenkins’ anecdotal evidence, ESPN’s ranking, and others who doubt Kobe’s full recovery, we’re guessing there are at least a few pages left, and we all might want to stick around to read them.

[Sports Illustrated]

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