1.
The mamba strikes quickly at great range and in rapid succession. Black Mamba, a new self, his “alter ego.” A Marvel hero. Doctor Strange. Iron-Man. The Black Mamba, “a serpent who channelled his rage and darkness into devastating power.” The hero is imperfect, maybe worse. Flies too close to the sun. Icarus fell. Superman, Sentry, Apollo grow stronger. Kobe Bryant escaped and rose. She called it rape. He claimed it consensual. She was 19, he 25. The lawyers made it go away. You know the script.
2.
On the basketball court, Bryant was a rare talent, the bridge between Michael Jordan and LeBron James, one of the greatest to lace up sneakers. Physically, he had few weaknesses, even as his body began to betray him late in his career. I can still see him rise, ball in hand and strike at the rim. The talent was pure. Jumper made of silk.
Mentally, few were on his level — both smart and determined, but also unforgiving of his teammates. He could score in bunches, almost without effort, pass with the best, rebound.
I remember watching a sequence in the 2001 NBA finals when the Lakers dismantled the Sixers. Allen Iverson was a scoring machine, pouring in 35 points a game on daring drives and long-distances shots. Iverson, “The Answer,” wicked cross-over, unreal speed, a dervish of a player — no one could control him. Kobe slides over to cover, locks him up with long arms, quick feet, fierce intelligence.
3.
Two years later, Kobe in Denver for surgery. Rape charge. Apology. This is the black mark on the biographical record, one of the many complications in a complicated legacy, part of the story that needs to be told even as the world mourns Bryant, his daughter, and the seven others who died in a California helicopter crash on Jan. 26, 2020. Public figures live public lives and these lives must be presented, in full, at the time of their death. This is true of Kobe, as it was of Don Imus and Michael Jackson and all of the political figures we’ve come to lionize after the fact, after their death, somehow allowing the ugliness to be pushed from the narrative of their lives.
We call it respect. We claim it is to protect the surviving family. But this is bullshit. We do this for ourselves, do this because complicated legacies interrupt our need to turn public figures into symbols of virtue, so that we can justify our own adoration.
When George H.W. Bush died, he was feted in most media, raised up as an antidote to Trump’s crassness. He was an exemplar of a different, simpler, better time. This also was bullshit. Bush was a rank opportunist who would do whatever was needed to get himself where he felt he should be — including trafficking in some of the ugliest racial tropes available. He was not an example of how things were better in the past, but a link in the chain that ultimately led us to the racist Trump presidency.
4.
This kind of respect calcifies into accepted narrative, cleanses the stories we tell about famous men of their real legacies. The irony in James Agee and Walker Evans’ book title — Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — is instructive here. It is a book about sharecroppers, about the most un-famous men in America, about being honest in what we say about them and how we talk about them — and that the action of telling their stories should make them as famous as those with means, privilege, power.
5.
Stories. This is the key word, I think. There are stories. There are always stories — “a thousand stories in the naked city.” “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” “The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms.” I tell stories. We all tell stories, and we all have stories to tell.
The stories we choose matter. When Agee and Percy opt to tell the stories of sharecroppers, they contradict the stories of wealth and power, of capitalism’s provenance, laying out the grand failures of a system that created great wealth for a few by selling a narrative of great opportunity. Agee and Percy offer the flip side to Horacio Alger. They build on Theodore Dreiser’s dark explorations of the underbelly of success.
Dreiser’s novels — particularly Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy — are about the stories well tell, the lies we believe, and the damage the lies do to us as individuals and as a larger culture.
6.
Kobe was a great player, among the absolute greatest. He has done a lot of good in recent years, especially regarding his support for the WNBA and women’s professional basketball. He became an author and filmmaker. But he also was accused, credibly, of rape, had the charges dropped, made a sort-of apology. That’s part of the story. It has to be treated as part of the narrative of his life, which is complicated and difficult to reconcile as are all personal narratives.
Credible means allegations that warranted investigation and trial. The Bryant team went after the accuser, attacking her as promiscuous and mentally ill. It was a classic flip-the-script defense that many believe caused her to recede into hiding and to refuse to testify. Basically, he was not found guilty or not guilty. He was neither convicted nor exonerated, which fits the pattern of that very different time.
I have no idea what happened, and I’m not saying we should be calling Bryant a rapist. That’s unfair. But I also think that, as a public figure who owes so much of his public regard and his wealth to his fame, we as journalists have a responsibility to tell the entire narrative of his life — which includes the rape accusation and the Oscar, the titles and his tendency to be surly with the media early on and to treat his teammates as inferiors.
7.
Kazeem Famuyide, host of the Big Apple Buckets podcast, offered his own ode to Kobe on the Jan. 28 episode, praising Kobe not just for his attitude, but for his grit — which includes accepting all of the bad, not shying away from it. Famuyide:
There’s a lot of people out there that don’t think that it’s the right time to bring up those allegations that happened in the early 2000s, but I think it perfectly encapsulates the humanness of the spirit, where somebody who can be accused of something so heinous can turn around and not just become — and you’ve got to think of so many layers, not just the accusations but what it did to his wife, what it did to his family, what it did to his kids — somebody turned that all around and not just became a great family man and a great husband and father but an ambassador for women’s sports.
Kobe, like all public figures, was a complicated person. A human being. His legacy encompasses all of this. But we insist on hagiography in these moments, and this is dangerous, leads to deification, which in this case may not have long term consequences —but it does.
8.
Jan. 28 in Wildwood, N.J. President Donald Trump, admitted sexual harasser, overt racist, stands before a crowd of thousands, basks in the applause, the adulation. This is hero worship divorced from lived reality. This is deification in action — men and women in flags and MAGA hats, props in a larger performance. And they say they don’t care. They want a glimpse, a touch. To be made whole. Whole and hopeful.
Think of Obama. Think of The Beatles. Think of Kobe. We want gods, not men. We want our heroes without their flaws, without their warts.
9.
We want our history clean and neat, want it to support the pre-constructed narratives of American exceptionalism. “The moral arc of the universe is long,” said Martin Luther King, “but it bends toward justice.” This is King at his most eloquent and most ironic, King speaking to Americans in the language of their myths, their sense of themselves as always on the right side of history, attempting to drag the majority over to the side of justice by appealing to their better selves.
But moral arcs do not bend without action, as King knew, and the American narrative is evidence of this, with its fits and starts, its baby steps toward the good followed by the seemingly inevitable backslides. Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow. Civil Rights gains followed by retrenchment under Reagan and Bush. Obama’s hope and change followed by Trump’s anger and retreat to myth.
And with someone like Trump, this leads us into the dark underbelly of the American psyche, where grievances transmogrify into action. Trump’s sins are erased. Our sins are erased, even as our grievances are justified legitimized. Legitimacy becomes approval.
10.
This may seem a tangent, but I think it is of a piece. American history, world history — they are complicated, are composed of many strands, many stories, many disagreements. Our tendency is collapse these often contradictory strands, to tease a unified theory, a uniform narrative from their messiness.
We want our history simplified. We want our heroes free of flaws. We want to watch the relief pitcher throw a 100-mph fastball without having to acknowledge the domestic violence accusation. We cheer on the linebacker without acknowledging his role in a murder investigation. We listen to musicians whose histories include accusations of spousal abuse, statutory rape, pedophilia, read poets who collaborated with fascists, honor painters who violated and degraded women, watch films made by pedophiles, rapists, racists. We often do so while pushing any questions about their character, about their crimes, to the side.