Kobe: Crying Over a Stranger
Photo by Andre Khawam
Written by Elliott Pak
The Same Air
“I can’t believe it. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. Dad. DAD DAD DAD we are literally breathing the same air as him.”
“DAd DaDD Dad DAd DaD dAd WE ARE BREATHING THE SAME AIR!”
I hyperventilate a bit.
“WE ARE BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS KOBE BRYANT.”
My dad gives me a look of half-amusement and half-calm-the-fuck-down.
Kobe’s warming up alongside his teammates. We’re at the Pond of Anaheim where the Ducks play for a preseason game. We’re pretty close to the court. Maybe 12 rows back behind the basket.
After all the years of watching the Lakers on TV, all the basketball cards traded, all the hours spent playing NBA Live 2003 on Playstation 2 – I was finally at my first basketball game.
It was my earliest memory of being in complete awe.
On the other side of the court, the Seattle Supersonics are warming up. Ray Allen just hit like 4 threes in a row. I get to see two of the baddest guards in the world go up against each other.
I want to eat the nachos in my lap but I feel it would interfere with the air I am sharing with these legends.
So the nachos get cold.
Picture it with me. The year is 2004.
Shrek 2 just came out. Usher just released “Yeah!” You still use Internet Explorer. Your Neopets are thriving. You just downloaded your favorite album on Limewire and do not yet know you just gave your computer AIDS.
And, of course, the Lakers are three-peat champions, led by the real-life superhero that is Kobe Bryant.
Life is good.
Where We Were
We’ll all remember where we were when we heard the news. I live in Korea, but I happen to be on vacation back home in California, and was on vacation-vacation (vacation inception) in New York.
It was 2:30pm, east coast time. We were all hungover and dying. Alicia is laying to my left, slowly deteriorating with her two pups laying on her. I’m three-quarters asleep on the right couch. Zach’s to my right with one airpod in, working on his computer at the dining table.
My eyes are closed and my phone vibrates. Two buzzes so I know it’s iMessage. But you know when you get two messages so quickly that the second buzzes interrupt the first buzzes? So it was more like a three mashed-up glitchy vibrations. Three quick buzzes. I somehow had a weird deep feeling it was urgent. I slowly open and readjust my crusty eyes. My phone blurrily reads:
Mitch : Holy fuck
Mitch : Elliott I’m so sorry
That’s not anything you want to hear from anyone without prior context.
Elliott : What?
The three dots appear. I wait.
Mitch: Kobe
Relief sweeps over me. I thought something happened to my family or to my friends.
But Kobe? Nothing can happen to him. He’s invincible. He’s superman. It’s literally Kobe. If something bad happened to him…he’ll just…he’ll get back up or something. He’ll make that scary mamba face and then fix it and then say something inspirational after. We’ll all talk about it and then we’ll go back to living our lives.
It’s Kobe.
Elliott : ?
Mitch : Helicopter crash supposedly
I snap up on the couch. We were literally talking about him this morning. About him and Lebron. This couldn’t be real.
I quickly google it on my phone. Nothing comes up. I do a more detailed seach, and only one TMZ article comes up.
Thank god, it’s fake. It has to be.
Minutes pass, and more alerts start coming up. More people start talking on Twitter.
The same words keep being said by every person.
Unreal. Speechless. Unbelievable.
Unreal. Speechless. Unbelievable.
Unreal. Speechless. Unbelievable.
This can’t be happening.
There’s a lot I could talk about.
I could talk about how much of an obsessive Laker fan I am. I could talk about how my mood literally rises and falls with how the Lakers play on any given night. I could talk to you about how my only stubborn, erratic irrationality in life is the Lakers. I could talk about going to college with all Warriors fans during their dynasty when the Lakers were the worst team in the league, so I’d have to lock myself in my room and watch every game by myself.
But I’m not special. There’s an uncountable number of Laker diehards and Kobe fanatics, not only in LA, but all across the world. There’s not much more to say about that that you probably haven’t already heard a million times on the internet or maybe other friends who feel just as deeply affected by this death.
There are so many damn things I could talk about here. But I’m not going to talk about them.
Not any of the five championships. None of the clutch game-winners. Not when he tore his achilles and still walked under his own power to drain two more free throws. Not when he diced the Raptors for 81 points. Not his last game, where he scored 60 points as a “washed up” player – a game where he convinced even the most cynical bastards that real-life superheroes exist.
I want to talk about why people who don’t even have a single clue about the sports facts I just stated are crying over a man that they’ve never even met before.
Crying Over a Stranger
How can someone cry over a stranger? Someone you’ve never even met before? How are there grown-ass men sobbing in public?
Right now, a lot of people are asking themselves this peculiar question for the first time.
This would be my third time asking the same question. And even for a third time, it doesn’t get less weird. I still find myself wondering, just like the first and second times.
First time I had to ask myself this question was when Chester Bennington (the singer of Linkin Park) killed himself in 2017. For all of the angsty, depressed kids of my generation that ever considered suicide – that one hurt.
Second time was when Anthony Bourdain killed himself in 2018. For all of the angsty, depressed adults who related to journeying into the unknown on a search for any sort of meaning or to simply run away from something – who also considered suicide – that one fucking hurt.
When those two happened, I felt like I had to explain myself to people. Maybe they were more niche, maybe their loyal groups of followers were not as widespread.
When both of those happened, I struggled to explain why it hurt so much. So I just didn’t explain. I tried to write an article about Chester but didn’t know what to say. I sat at an empty screen for hours with nothing. When Bourdain died a year later, I guess I was a little bit more expressive, so I was able to put a small tribute to him in this article.
Now it’s happening all over again. Thankfully, not as much explanation is needed for a man as well-known and universally respected as Kobe.
A God-level athlete. The most loving father and husband. An all-around role model. A successful businessman. The reason why people yell his name every time they throw away trash. The actual creator of an entire mentality. Mamba mentality. A creator of a mentality? That’s philospher-level shit. And I guarantee you Socrates couldn’t hit a clutch fadeaway jumper like Kobe.
Is that enough to make a stranger cry?
Maybe. Maybe not.
As I write it, I don’t think so actually. Successful, awesome people die all the time.
To be honest I couldn’t really explain it either. For a “writer,” I’m pretty inarticulate about my feelings and emotions and the words needed to explain them.
You know, I decided to write this before I had a clear idea of what my main point would be. And this is exactly where I got stuck.
Because I really didn’t know why I had been crying over this guy I’ve never met for almost a week straight now. I don’t know why I literally had to grab a small towel and lay it on my keyboard to keep it from shorting out. I don’t know why I can’t even look at a picture of Gigi without my day getting completely thrown off track.
But then, my dad unexpectedly said something this morning.
Dad’s Story
Little background, my dad lives here in Orange County in California with my mom, but commutes all the way to Dallas, Texas maybe once a month for work. Nowadays, he’s quite busy so he’s there half-time and here in California half-time.
He just got back from Texas and the following morning, we were standing around the kitchen table drinking coffee. I had just driven through piece-of-shit LA traffic the previous day for over 4 combined hours to go pay my respects to Kobe. I told him and my mom that I was wearing my favorite #8 Kobe jersey and that I also took my other #24 jersey, wrote a message on it, and left it at Staples at Kobe’s memorial in a pile of flowers. He kind of shifted when I said that.
I was expecting him to chastise me for wasting so much gas and an expensive jersey for a guy I had never even met before. I expected him to scoff at how much I paid for parking. I expected for him to at best, roll his eyes and stay silent.
Instead, he told me about a conversation he had at work the previous day in Dallas.
He was chatting with his coworkers, and one of them said to my dad, “Man, that really sucks about Kobe. But why is it such a big deal?”
It was a conference, a group of people, not only from Dallas but from the East coast as well. My dad, the Californian, was being questioned to speak for the emotional state Californians were in.
“What’s the big deal in California? Why’s everyone crying? A lot of celebrities die, who cares? These Californians are overreacting and acting like they knew him.”
I know you don’t know my dad but I’d like to think I know him pretty well. What he was going to say next was agree with them. He was going to make some really objective, wise, philosophical point as to why it’s dumb for us to be sad about him. He was going to say something a bit insensitive but in reality is kind of true so you can’t really argue with him about it.
Instead, this was his reply.
“Well, we grew up with him.”
Okay, right off the bat, wasn’t expecting him to say that. He continues.
“He was just a little kid when everyone started talking about him going to the NBA. That’s right when my son was born. Then my son grew up playing basketball. I watched my son watch him. I watched the two of them grow up together.”
My dad never talks like this.
“In Southern California, Kobe Bryant isn’t just an athlete to us. He’s just a normal man. He’s a man that we grew up with. He’s lived in Orange County down the street in Newport for as long as I can remember. His company is right there in Costa Mesa. His kids go to school around my area, just as my kids did before them. Maybe we don’t see him with our own eyes, but we know he’s always there. It’s more than him being a star. He’s our neighbor. He’s more than a local superhero, even though he is one.”
He pauses.
“Kobe Bryant…he’s my buddy. He doesn’t know me, but I know him, really, really well.”
Me and my mom look at my dad in silence.
“He connected a lot of people in this area. When he’s gone – the Socal residents here – they feel a loss of their own friend. A loss of their own relative. That’s how close we are to him. That’s why we are so emotional towards him. That’s why Californians are all crying over him, even if they don’t watch basketball. He is one of us.”
This is my dad. My dad, who never really cared much for sports. My dad, who didn’t even really learn all the rules of basketball (even though I played for twelve years). My dad, who never really leaves the house unless he absolutely has to. My dad, who couldn’t give one shit about the lives of celebrities. My dad, the emotionless immigrant, who I, his son, has seen cry maybe like half of one time in my life.
As much as that speaks to who my dad is, it speaks 1,000,000 times more to who Kobe Bryant was.
Unity
The biggest and most obvious positive impact of this whole tragedy is the unity and and cohesion that Los Angeles has had these past few days.
The scene at Kobe’s memorial at Staples and LA Live was really just one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. The most diverse set of people – people of every race, every age, every background – all wearing Kobe jerseys and Lakers gear. No one knew each other, but no one acted like strangers. People were hugging. Sharing stories. I don’t know any other situation where so many strangers could just come together like old friends.
I brought a sharpie to write a message on a jersey that I brought. One older woman with her three kids asked me if her son could use it to write a message on the ground. We ended up talking and telling Kobe stories for a solid 10 minutes. Just as the kid finished, an older man on the verge of tears came over and asked me if he could use it next. He said he was supposed to be in New Orleans that day and don’t know what he would have done if he had missed the chance to leave a message to one of his idols. I told him I felt the exact same way because I lived in Korea. We bonded. Just as he finished, another person asked if they could use it. This happened literally maybe 8 times in a row.
There was no awkwardness of meeting someone for the first time. No discomfort of talking to strangers. People who’ve never met talking about where they got different jerseys. Asking to take pictures. Laughing. Hugging. Crying.
Kobe chants broke out from time to time. MVP chants followed. My heart filled when this little group of children playing basketball on one of those little hoops chanted as loud as they possibly could.
It didn’t feel like a group of strangers at all. It felt like a family reunion.
It was full on love all around.
Me and my friends were talking about it later – there isn’t a single other person alive right now that could have brought on this kind of impact. Sure, I”m just talking about LA, but it’s not just LA. I had friends from all over sending condolences, from France to the Phillipines to Korea to Australia to Germany to Brazil. People posting on their social medias, people dropping stories from their childhood of how Kobe affected them.
All just about this dude who lived down the street from me.
Stupid, Floating Objects
When I was at that first game when I was 10, I didn’t know that he would change his number from 8 to 24 a few years later and how much of a blessing it would be to see him at that time. I didn’t know they were going to change the name of the iconic “Pond” to “Honda Center.” I didn’t know that the great Seattle Supersonics and their iconic green jerseys would never be seen again.
I didn’t know anything. I still don’t know anything. Actually, nobody knows anything. We all try so hard to be healthy and clean and careful and safe and plan everything – and then your fucking helicopter crashes into a mountain.
As I was a stupid, unaware kid – everyone, everywhere are stupid, unaware people. If we can’t see the future, we’re just helpless, moron objects, all randomly bumping into each other like pool balls, seeing some cool things along the way, experiencing some sad things and just trying to get by so we can catch a few more good views before the end.
If life really is this random, what can we possibly do? If we really are such helpless, floating objects, what is actually in our power?
We can appreciate. We can not take the small treasures in life for granted. We can hug our loved ones twice as hard as we normally do. We can send texts to people we fell out of contact with. We can catch that drink with the old friend we keep rainchecking. We can forgive the people who have done us wrong.
We can stop arguing about pointless shit that have no consequence upon the universe. We can stop complaining about things that can’t be changed. We can help strangers instead of being so passive. We can stop being cranky buttholes about the little things that annoy us. We can love our families as much as possible instead of quarrelling, because in the end, life is short and ephemeral.
People keep saying 2020 is already the worst year yada yada.
Hate to break it to you guys but this shit doesn’t stop. Bad things will keep happening, people will continue to die, forests will burn, toes will be stubbed.
Let’s not waste time complaining and shaking our fists at the universe. Collecting and categorizing the catastrophes in life is really easy to do. But in reality, we have far more blessings than we do curses.
It’s just harder to slow down and appreciate them unless we really have a reason to.
This is the most heartbreaking death the world has seen in a while, but it does have a silver lining.
Usually, only those close loved ones who lose someone important – those are usually the only people who are given the rare grace of the elusive “wake-up call.”
But Kobe just gave a really, really, really big group of people this rare gift – and we didn’t even have to personally know him. More people were affected by Kobe’s death than anyone else in recent memory. Half the world just received a wake-up call.
That’s a blessing, I think.
Kobe and the eight others on the helicopter didn’t see the sun come up this morning but you sure did, and probably so did all of your loved ones too.
So in his honor, you can do something really simple. Just count your blessings. I know I am. I mean right now, take out your little fingers and count every single thing you are thankful for. Your job, your mom, your car, your kid, your lunch, your health, your hair, your everything.
Be annoying-kid excited about the fact that you get to breathe the same air as your loved ones around you.
And be thankful for the fact that in the billions of years that have existed, you got to live in the same era as Kobe Bryant.
Kobe’s lessons are eternal, he is invincible, he is forever. His and Gigi’s smiles will be forever ingrained in our heads.
I usually avoid saying cliché things, but sometimes cliché is okay.
Legends never die.
Long live the Black Mamba and the Little Mambacita.
thank you for the memory, your family moments, and the history of your relationship with Kobe