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27th January 2020
08:38am GMT

He carried an exaggerated sense of invincibility due to his self-perpetuated alter ego as the 'Black Mamba', which nobody cared about more than him. It was cultivated off the court through his frightening work ethic and Nike's marketing team, but mostly it was cultivated on the hardwood itself.
In 2010 Matt Barnes, a notorious basketball provocateur, stood a foot away from Bryant and faked throwing the ball straight into his face. Bryant didn't flinch. He didn't allow himself to succumb to ancient biologically reflex. He just smirked. In 2013 he tore his Achilles tendon whilst being fouled in a game against the Golden State Warriors. Although it came three years before his retirement, it was the injury that essentially ended his basketball career. Most would have been carried off the court in tears. Kobe Bryant pinched his calf to stop the Achilles from separating completely, walked to the line and sank two free throws to tie the game.
Even in high school, the story goes that Bryant would play his teammates in one-on-one games to 100 points. The closest anyone came to beating him was a score of 100-12. Most people have a worst defeat. He had a worst victory.
Post-retirement, the aura softened and Bryant eased into life not without basketball but much less of it. He became a venture capitalist. He released a series of children's books. He started coaching his daughter's team. He seemed more at ease with himself, unerringly comfortable in his own skin now that the fight was over. He spent his playing career gritting his teeth and making more enemies than friends but it was worth it. He spent his retirement grinning.
The news of his death in a helicopter crash, which also took the lives of eight others, including his teenage daughter Gianna, a basketball prodigy in her own right, confounded. Of course it did. People like Kobe Bryant don't die. They aren't meant to. People like Kobe Bryant shape the universe to their will. They are unstoppable forces. They exist to show us what can be done. That we are capable of great things. They believe it and they strive for it and so it happens. That's it. Kobe Bryant showed us the life we want is possible through the relentless determinism of his own. He gave an otherwise seemingly meaningless existence a thin veneer of meaning. That is why the news was so shocking. Kobe Bryant had everything worked out, he had already won. He had pulled up at the elbow and watched the net swish. If this can happen to him, what chance do the rest of us have? Are all our dreams a lie?
They are and they aren't. His passing reaffirms two opposing truths we always knew but rarely if ever consider side by side. The first is the transience of life. It is too fleeting. Too precious and too fragile. It is not enough. That much is evident every time a loved one passes, or a person people loved. The second is its permanence. Its lastingness. Think of all he did, the scale of it. Joy in waves the size of mountains. An abyss now he is gone. And all he needed was a ball. The life we have is enough.
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