The Loathing and Loving of Kobe Bryant

The most complicated player in this lig.

Perception defines reality on hip-hop radio more so than anywhere else in the world. You say that 50 Cent is a manipulative Connecticut thug whose best days as a rapper are behind him? Not on hip-hop radio, a realm in which he remains the leading figure in the pathetic rap narrative of endless conflict and hyper-masculinity, appearing every six months or so to stoke the flames of phony beef. The bluster and bravado are currency with a hip-hop audience that willingly venerates the mindless. I mean, how else would an ignorant racist like Miss Jones still have a job? How else might we explain the excitement generated by the school-girl radio rivalries that do little more than sell mixtapes and heat up the Summer Jam screen? It's unfortunate, really, that the court of public opinion convened on the radio is governed by such a twisted notion of jurisprudence because it ultimately allows for a myopic sense of justice and rewards that which is so obviously deleterious. And no contemporary elite basketball player has suffered from being measured within this distorted value system more so than Kobe Bryant.

At some point, aided by the limited ways in which black people are portrayed in popular culture and the vestigial racial misapprehensions born of this nation's ugly racial climate, the Hot 97 hip-hop modality became a cultural synonym for blackness. Though surely a dangerous mischaracterization that neglects reality, the hip-hop culture of hip-hop radio is readily identified as a black culture. Similarly, the NBA is seen as a black league, thanks primarily to the racial composition of the NBA's rosters and also to the urban roots of basketball. (Black and urban, of course, became sad, frequent synonyms following World War II when government policies and latent racism built the suburbs and fostered pronounced residential segregation.) Through some kind of odd, lived transitive property, the NBA and hip-hop-radio hip-hop became forever intertwined, mapping the value system of hip-hop radio onto the NBA, though not to a full extent.

Kobe Bryant was not made for the radio. He grew up first in Italy and then in Affluent America; his origin story is not easily sited within the parameters we commonly envision for the black basketball star; and nothing about him is street. He went to a great high school and would have gone to a great (white) college had he not been a preternatural talent. If someone like Darius Miles was the Lox, Kobe was YBT, and as a result, he had no chance.


On Hot 97, he'd probably get dapped up for "keeping it real" and punching a trick in the stomach.

Predictably, Kobe didn't start out as a hip-hop favorite. Sure, people had his jerseys and were intrigued by the potential of tethering their fan identity to a straight-to-the-league player who might score like Mike, but Kobe never captured the hip-hop hearts and minds in the way that Allen Iverson did. Or Stephon, TMac, LeBron, and so many others. And as is often the case, what started in hip-hop became a mainstream phenomenon. So it was that while Kobe's talent made him nearly irresistible to some extent--he quickly emerged as the player about whom you said, "He's a great player, but..."--the mainstream learned that it was OK to hate Kobe, given his absent street bonafides, and, even better, the obvious flaws that stuck out to basketball fans. With each shot over a triple team; every forsaken pass; the cavalcade of camera shots showing an exasperated Shaquille O'Neal; and forced air balls that lost playoff games, the certainty of his ethereal inadequacy was further cemented.

Back in the radio realm, Kobe's misguided rap fantasies and orchestrated mean mugging made him that much more inauthentic, a charlatan who would never be of that place. His personal ascendancy and the triumph of the Lakers did little to dissipate the disdain, and no moment better captured the pervasive ambivalence towards Kobe than the MVP ceremony that followed the 2002 NBA all-star game. We celebrated him for the might of his skills and the sublime method through which he wielded them, and yet it was so maddening to recognize the positives of a person who was so widely disliked that he was mercilessly booed in living rooms around the country and, most notably, throughout the building in his supposed hometown.


Address me as Mister!

Even that moment was not Kobe's nadir, though. By the time the most recent iteration of a Lakers dynasty ended, Kobe was a non-entity on hip-hop radio. His credibility was undetectable. And in the mainstream, he was cast as a great player but impossible teammate who seemed to happily play the roles of aloof loner, locker room cancer, and brooding megalomaniac. There is perhaps no greater referendum on Bryant's excellence than the fact that when measured with traditional metrics such as jersey sales and all-star votes, he remained wildly popular while so many basketball fans, basketball writers, and culture critics detected, if not espoused, a palpable aversion toward the man.

The Kobe haters were sickly validated on July 18, 2003 when Bryant was charged with rape. I know because I was one of them. Rape was not a crime anyone condoned or from which anyone derived happiness, but to witness Kobe suffer was gratifying because it seemed to be karmic affirmation of the festering collective antipathy. He even came back with tattoos, which were taken as another pathetic attempt to adhere to the archetypes laid out for basketball players by the prevailing hip-hop culture. That Kobe became the punch line in several rap songs was both unsurprising and a strong reminder of how he was perceived on hip-hop radio.


Everyone's got jokes.

The episode of alleged criminality hung over Kobe, cost him endorsement deals, and resulted in the unfortunate circumstance of the lig's best player being ostracized at all times, subtly if not explicitly. Following the breakup of the Lakers and Phil's not-yet-retracted insistence that Bryant was uncoachable and far too difficult, Kobe was effectively left for dead. A good run had ended and it was Kobe's fault; Shaq was gone and anointed the winner of their feud; Bryant's reputation as a stoic gunner remained; and the prospects of team-based success were said to be bleak given the roster and the presumption that Kobe was a problem teammate.

Following his Tiger-Slam era of dominance, Tiger Woods embarked upon a lengthy swing revamp that didn't make sense to most people. He was already wildly successful, no one could stay with him...and he was gonna make changes? He dumped his old coach and started not winning. This led to howls that he had made some bad choices and needed to get back to what he had been doing. The public had no clue regarding what was going on, and Woods, a private guy, was happy to ignore the confusion and criticism. Now that he's riding a seven-tournament PGA winning streak and has captured the last two majors, people have shut up and are back to calling him the greatest ever and projecting that he'll win twenty majors. Sometimes, our sports heroes need to do what they think is best and heal themselves as they see fit. That's what Kobe did.


See the above caption.

He came back as Black Mamba, a player with a seeming scoring fury and a burning passion to win. He was darker and even more potent than before, his intentions almost ominous. Journalists seized upon the nickname and Kobe's style, creating a season-long orgy of conjecture that emerged as a cocktail of breathless appreciation of his talent, jokes that grew stale, and common wisdom that was often nothing more than laziness sometimes rewarded. Some were surprised that the Lakers made the playoffs while others viewed it as destiny realized for a team led by such a singular talent. No one seemed to have a definitive feel for the Black Mamba, whose motivations were always subject to speculation. Kobe was changing his swing and not letting anyone in on the process.



Given Bryant's serial evasion of total comprehension, it is only natural (and even fitting) that something unexpected has now grown out of the seed planted during last year's campaign of transformation. Kobe's preeminent ability taken in concert with the success of the Lakers, the direction in which they appear to be headed, and the improvement of his teammates has begun to recast KB824 as something different, something better. No longer unapproachable and selfish, he's become a gallant figure whose scoring is generally placed within the context of Bryant's desire to win through any possible means. Particularly notable outbursts of scoring are testaments to his talent, not manifestations of his narcissism. And people are even writing about the improved rapport he's fostered on a young team. His skills are no longer assailed as the traits of a stubborn individual, and his image has been slowly repaired, most symbolically by his placement adjacent to LeBron at the center of Nike's basketball future.

But to truly understand the altered perception of Kobe, one must turn on the radio in order to receive ultimate judgment: He's among the featured players promoted on Hot 97's all-star weekend giveaway. That's a credibility he was not supposed to enjoy.


See, he can play with others.