The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality

PREFACE:

THE SIGNS OF THINGS TO COME

ON THE DAY AFTER KOBE Bryant died, a high school classmate and friend sent me an email that carried the force of a fist that I couldn’t see coming. Thought you’d find this interesting, Ben Relles wrote.

Embedded in the message was a link to a thirty-six-second video. On the right side of the video’s split-screen shot was Kobe, wearing a charcoal, scoop-neck sweater, sitting at an expansive cherry desk, riveted to flickering images on a laptop. He was in the executive offices of YouTube, where Ben was working to find new content for the channel. Kobe had come to the company’s Southern California headquarters in January 2018 to pitch a show based on Wizenard, a series of children’s books he had created that combined the themes of sports, fantasy, and magic. As it turned out, YouTube wasn’t funding children’s programming at the time and didn’t buy the show, but it was genuinely one of the most impressive pitches I’ve heard, Ben said later. He was incredibly passionate about the idea and clearly hands-on in every aspect of it.

On the video’s left side were the images that had grabbed Kobe’s attention: footage of a basketball game between two suburban Philadelphia high schools—his alma mater, Lower Merion, and mine, Upper Dublin. Ben and I were seniors then. He was a backup forward on the team. I was an editor of the student newspaper and lacked the skills and athleticism to play organized ball beyond intramurals. Kobe Bryant was a freshman. It was the second game of his high school career.

On December 7, 1992, as part of its high school boys’ basketball preview package, The Philadelphia Inquirer had published a pair of brief articles, one about each team. Both squads were green and were expected to struggle, but according to Jeremy Treatman, the correspondent who had written about the Lower Merion Aces, one player represented a glimmer of hope for them: Remember this name: Kobe Bryant.

The following week, the teams squared off in the consolation game of a four-team tournament at Lower Merion. In that thirty-six seconds of footage from that game, the Upper Dublin player closest to the camera—a senior guard named Bobby McIlvaine, the number 24, also Kobe’s number, huge on the back of his red jersey—whipped a cross-court pass to a teammate, Ari Greis. After Greis caught the ball on the right wing, he used a left-handed dribble to surge past Kobe and bank in a floater from the lane. A family friend of Ben’s had filmed the game, and Ben, having kept the tape all these years and knowing he would be sitting down with Kobe, had converted the recording to a digital file. Then, once the YouTube meeting had ended, Ben had played the footage on the laptop, and one of his coworkers had taken care to capture Kobe’s reaction to it. There it all was, in cosmic juxtaposition. You could watch Kobe as a thirty-nine-year-old watch himself as a fourteen-year-old in real time.

That is hilarious, he said. Great defense, Kobe.… That’s horrible defense.… You can replay that all fucking day.… Oh. My. God.… Nawwwww!… That’s funny.… We only won four games that year.

SO WHERE were you when that helicopter slammed into that Calabasas hillside in January 2020? Fixing yourself a midday snack in the kitchen? Relaxing in your recliner? Cleaning the garage? Me, I was in my car, my two sons in the backseat, hustling home so my eight-year-old could change and get to his 3:45 basketball game. And when we got there—I didn’t notice it, but my son did, and he didn’t tell me about it until after the game—there was a player on the opposing team, his arms peeking out like sapling branches from underneath a white T-shirt and a green tank top, the word KOBE written in black marker on his sleeve. You don’t forget a day like that. You don’t forget a death that causes the global compass to tremble.

That was Kobe Bryant’s reach and power. We attach so much to our athletes. We see what they have done and can do. That’s their gravitational pull, the attraction they have to us. They give us a standard to aspire to, a bar against which the rest of us can measure ourselves, and with Kobe, that pull was even stronger, because he was not limiting himself to basketball. He had been the executive producer of a short animated film, Dear Basketball, that had won an Academy Award and was based on a poem he wrote when he retired. In his post-Lakers life, he was, by all appearances, a loving husband to his wife, Vanessa, and a doting and demanding father to his four daughters. With time, with a media and fan base willing and eager to forgive, with the purchase of a gigantic diamond ring for Vanessa, he rendered the scandal that once stained his reputation—a rape accusation and his arrest in Colorado in 2003—an afterthought to most, though not all, of the public. He had put aside his petty wars with Phil Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal. There seemed great things ahead for him, things beyond the five championships and the fifteen All-Star Games and the 33,643 points and the 2008 NBA Most Valuable Player Award and the self-certainty—a belief in himself so absolute and obvious that it practically glowed and radiated from him—required to take the final shot when everyone in the arena knows you’re going to take it. And now all that excellence and redemption and promise had been extinguished, and there was no sense of it to be made. It was barely worth trying. You sat there and it sank in and you gaped and shook your head.

Those great things had begun in and around Philadelphia. It might not feel that way any longer, because Kobe was so much a part of Los Angeles for so long—had gone from boyhood to manhood there, always under the spotlight’s glare—that it seemed as if he had sprouted as a fully formed seventeen-year-old, complete with exquisite jump-shooting form, out of one of Hollywood’s hills. But no. The great things had begun at Lower Merion, located on the Main Line, the posh suburb that hugged Philadelphia’s western border. They had begun on the courts of those neighborhoods and playgrounds and parks, in the stuffy gymnasiums of local high schools, and in the tournaments of the country’s AAU circuit. Sure, many Philadelphia natives still note that Kobe technically wasn’t from the city, wasn’t one of them, but ask yourself: Was there ever a player who better embodied what being a Philadelphia basketball player meant, what it looked like—the edginess, the kill-or-die-yourself competitiveness? It taught me how to be tough, how to have thick skin, he said in late 2015, before his final game in Philadelphia against the 76ers. There’s not one playground around here where people just play basketball and don’t talk trash.

Those great things had begun with his high school coach, Gregg Downer, who formed and was formed by Kobe, who won a championship with him, too, and would love and be loyal to him forevermore, who collapsed to his kitchen floor, disbelief accelerating into despair, when the news of Kobe’s death broke. Those great things had begun with Treatman, who went from covering Kobe to befriending him, from a freelance sportswriter to one of Kobe’s most trusted confidants and to a mover-and-shaker in the world of Philly hoops. His 1992 Inquirer story would be the first mention of Kobe in any major mainstream news outlet. Remember this name? Treatman did his best to make sure that no one would forget it. He became an assistant boys’ basketball coach at Lower Merion at Downer’s request, charged with handling the never-ending interview requests, keeping the media close but not so close that they became a burden and distraction, tracking the tail of Kobe’s comet. He told anyone who happened to ask an offhand, casual question about Joe Bryant’s son that Kobe was the next big thing, that we were all going to end up saying we knew him when, which we did. He grew so close to Kobe that the two of them collaborated on a series of interviews for a book that Treatman never got the chance to write, though he made sure to preserve the microcassette tapes and transcripts of several of those interviews—the fresh thoughts and memories of a Kobe who was not yet twenty years old—and has given me access to them for this book. And then on January 26, Treatman answered his cellphone from Jefferson University, in the East Falls section of Philadelphia, where he was overseeing a girls’ basketball tournament, and he could barely get the words out. I can’t believe it, he said.

Those great things had begun at a school whose boys’ basketball program had faded into irrelevance years earlier but became a traveling circus—and the best team in the state—because of Kobe. They had begun within a community that touted its racial and economic diversity and harmony but whose members were in reality hungry for a common point of pride to unite them. They had begun in summer-league and pickup games that instantaneously became the stuff of apocrypha and myth and remained so for decades thereafter, stories that didn’t need to be embellished because the reality was flabbergasting enough: that a kid who was just turning seventeen already was the equal of or had surpassed the best players on those courts, which meant that he already was the equal of or had surpassed some of the better players in the NBA. They had begun at practices and workouts that the Sixers would hold at St. Joseph’s University in the mid-1990s, when a teenaged Kobe would walk into the gym and upstage many of those NBA veterans and coach John Lucas could only wish that the team would have the good sense to draft the kid. As an undergrad at La Salle then, as an editor and sports columnist for the student newspaper, I had read and heard rumors about those workouts. Like everyone else on campus who wanted to see La Salle men’s basketball return to the success—the twenty-win seasons, the conference championships, the NCAA tournament berths—that had been common, and perhaps taken for granted, just a few years earlier, I hoped Kobe would choose to go to college and to play in the same program where his father had such strong ties. Joe Bryant is a La Salle alum and a La Salle coach! He and Kobe are so close! It’s meant to be, right? But how realistic was that scenario once Kobe saw that he stacked up pretty well against pros, that they could try their sly tricks and throw their elbows and he could not only take it but give it right back to them? The great things had begun with that realization. They had to have begun then.

They had begun at a moment in our cultural history when a traditional path to athletic stardom was seen as the only appropriate path to athletic stardom—a presumption that Kobe managed to follow and eschew at the very same time. They had begun with a youth who was in some ways completely typical and in others unlike anything a teenager could possibly experience, a youth that seems so far away now. They had begun in December 1992, when Kobe was just fourteen. And look where it all had led.

THE BRIEF snippet of film that Ben Relles preserved for nearly thirty years didn’t tell the game’s full story. Lower Merion beat Upper Dublin, 74–57, and Kobe’s moment of embarrassment, captured forever, as if in amber, by that camcorder, was hardly representative of his overall performance. He scored nineteen points, and in a five-minute excerpt of the game that Ben later discovered, Kobe is the most arresting figure in the action. He drives into the lane and scores. He pulls up for two. He frees himself on an inbounds play and rattles in an open jumper from the left baseline. For a while, the longer video seems a highlight reel of Kobe and Kobe alone, and to watch him is to wonder how the Aces would ever lose as long as he remained in the lineup. But lose they did. Kobe was right: The team won just three more times while he was a freshman, finishing 4–20.

More illuminating than his perfect recall of that season, though, was the look on his face as he watched the game: smiling, snickering, and cursing at himself for his lazy defense, chomping on a piece of gum, his eyes on the computer screen but his mind searching, groping backward for that moment and that time in his life, for the prodigy he used to be. The footage clearly had surprised him, had sent him hurtling deep into his past, and if he went back far enough, he could make out the shape and contours of the mold for the man he became. The template was already in place. So many traits that shaped and characterized him were already present at that point in his life—the cockiness, the competitiveness, the warmth and the coldness that would emerge depending on the circumstances and his own desires and aims, the boyish insecurities, the comfort with fame, the beyond-his-years commitment to basketball brilliance and the preternatural understanding of what it took to achieve it, the traits he had retained over time, the traits he had shed. Memory is a gift often hidden away within a box locked tight, and that game film was the gliding, turning key, allowing Kobe access to sights, sounds, places, and people made tactile and intimate again. He was seeing himself anew. What follows is an attempt to see him that way once again.

PART I

I’m sure it seems to you like I have the perfect life right now.

—KOBE BRYANT

1

AFTER

THE FIRE

A TOP THE GRAY CONCRETE WALKWAY outside the entrance to Kobe Bryant Gymnasium, a makeshift memorial garden was blooming with colors and remembrances: candles and wreaths and sneakers and jerseys, maroon and white for the Lower Merion High School Aces, purple and gold for the Los Angeles Lakers, orange and brown from the basketballs, yellow and red from the roses. It had been forty-eight hours since a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, its body white and striped in royal blue and periwinkle, had lifted off from John Wayne–Orange County Airport in Southern California, hovered in circles above a golf course, tried to slice through a fog bank as thick and blinding as gauze, and crashed into a hilly ravine, killing the nine people aboard: Kobe; his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gianna; the pilot; and six people involved in Kobe’s AAU basketball program, including two of Gianna’s teammates—all of them bound for a tournament at his Mamba Sports Academy, forty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles. That was Sunday, January 26, 2020. Now it was Tuesday, a crystalline afternoon in the suburbs west of Philadelphia, the middle of the school day, breezy and chilly. Students, heading from one class to another, stopped to gaze at the items and whisper among themselves. Middle-aged men and women parked their cars blocks away, then walked to the site, as quietly as if they were entering a church. A sixty-four-year-old Lakers fan from central New Jersey, Mark Kerr, drove ninety minutes that day with his wife and nephew, just to visit the memorial, just to feel a connection to Kobe. Three members of the school’s 2006 boys’ basketball team, which had won a state championship ten years after Kobe had led the school to one, set a framed photo there; in the photo was Kobe, sitting on a bench with them. A WNBA player had written a letter to him in lavender ink, in curlicued Palmer method, on lined notepad paper: I feel selfish for just missing out on what else you would have done with your time with us…

For those two days, Gregg Downer had not watched TV, had avoided listening to any radio reports, and had not stopped once at the site. How many times had he kept his head down and kept striding past it and into the gym? How many times would he have to contemplate what he had lost, what the world had lost, in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains? He couldn’t say, but he knew he couldn’t bear to spend any time there yet. There was so much of him blanketing that ground, too. He was fifty-seven now, his face finely wrinkled and more weathered than it had been when he and Kobe were together, when he was in his early thirties and so boyish that the two of them could have been mistaken for college roommates. They were so close, knew each other so well, respected each other so much, that they might as well have been.

In his kitchen on the morning and early afternoon of that Sunday, Downer had been overseeing a playdate between his daughter Brynn, who was seven, and one of her friends. Whenever Kobe saw Brynn, towheaded and pigtailed, he scooped her up, nuzzled her face, and squeezed her tight as if she were his own, as if she were his fifth daughter. Downer had not become a father until he was fifty, until after Kobe and Vanessa had already had two girls, Natalia and Gianna. There was always a gleam in Brynn’s eyes, Downer noticed, whenever she saw Kobe and the gleam in his when he saw her. But now Brynn and her friend were padding past Downer and his wife, Colleen, and Downer’s phone was buzzing. A reporter. Downer guessed why he’d be getting such a call: The night before, in Philadelphia against the Sixers, LeBron James had moved into third place on the NBA’s career scoring list, leapfrogging Kobe. The sportswriter must be looking for a quote from Downer on the nugget of news. That’s what he told Colleen. He didn’t bother to pick up his phone. But then, for the next ninety seconds his phone didn’t stop, buzzing and jumping so much it seemed possessed by a poltergeist, and finally he went online and read a TMZ post on Twitter, the first report that Kobe was dead, and after Downer prayed for five minutes that the gossip site had gotten it wrong and that some sick internet troll was guilty of a cruel hoax, Brynn’s playdate was over and the Downers’ kitchen was a vale of tears.

He walked upstairs, walked back down again, walked through his front door, and walked around the suburban development where he and Colleen had moved fifteen years earlier, past lawns gone brown and swimming pools shuttered for the winter, past the houses of friends, past all the people who had known for a long time that Kobe’s coach lived in their neighborhood. He could gain no mental and emotional traction. Had this really happened? Who else had been aboard the helicopter? Who already had heard? Would he have to tell people? The other men who had coached Kobe at Lower Merion—the long-ago players and teammates who had been Kobe’s closest friends when they were teens and now didn’t often hear from him once he became a star and Los Angeles became his home and they remained Guys Who Had Been Teammates And Friends With Kobe Bryant—Jeanne Mastriano, who had taught English at the school for thirty years, who had no formal connection to the basketball program but remained a mentor to Kobe nonetheless, who had coaxed and fanned the intellectual curiosity within him into a fire—who would tell them? Tears leaked from him in small, sporadic bursts. On a table in his house, his cell phone continued to hum with calls and texts, each one a thread in a web of horror and grief. He walked home, not knowing who he should reach out to first, or if he could pick up the phone at all.

THEIR FOUR children, all under age eleven, were bored, with pent-up energy to burn off, with nothing to do at home on a winter Sunday afternoon. So Phil and Allison Mellet took advantage of who they were and where they lived. The couple were Lower Merion alumni, members of the class of 1998—they had started dating as seniors and been together ever since—and Allison, who taught Spanish at the school and directed its world-languages department, could get access to the building even on a weekend. A quick bit of packing, a short ride to Bryant Gymnasium, and there they were—Allison on a treadmill in a room down the hall from the gym, Phil shooting a basketball or throwing a football with the kids. Mellet propped his phone against a wall in a corner of the gym, next to the lumpy mound of jackets and long-sleeved shirts that the children had stripped off once they felt the gym’s sticky warmth, granola bars and applesauce pouches stuffed in the pockets and piled nearby.

The gym—named for Kobe in 2010, after he donated $411,000 to the school district—was far bigger than the old one that he and Mellet had played in back when they were teammates in 1995–96, when Kobe was a senior supernova and Mellet, now a corporate attorney who hadn’t spoken to him in years, was a scrawny sophomore guard happy just to ride the bench. With the bleachers pushed in against the wall, as they were now, the place seemed even bigger. The kids’ voices echoed as if they were at the bottom of a canyon. The only other person in the school was a janitor. Still, Mellet managed to notice that his phone was droning and lighting up with text messages. They were from old friends bearing horrible news.

As he read them, he was filled with an odd emptiness. Though he had not maintained a relationship with Kobe—how many of those guys, even with those old friendships and a state championship binding them to him, really had?—Mellet had always considered himself lucky to have played with him, to have gotten to know him a bit. Whenever he met someone through his work, investors or stockholders or other attorneys, he had always found a way to loop his connection to Kobe into the conversation. It was a marvelous icebreaker, better than asking about kids or golf or the same-old, same-old. You were on the same team as Kobe? Well, tell me about THAT! They lit up, and to Mellet, there was a thrill, a tiny electric charge, in retelling and reliving the stories. Now that wire had been severed. Now a piece of his life, one that had significance, was gone.

Within twenty minutes, the janitor came by to tell him that he and Allison and the children would have to leave. The building was going to be locked down.

IN THE frozen-food aisle of an Acme in Narberth, Pennsylvania, a mile and a half from the high school, Amy Buckman perused the options behind the glass, bags of vegetables crackling and crunching in her hands as she took care of the grocery shopping for her and her husband, Terry. Before the Lower Merion School District had hired her, a 1982 alumna of the high school herself, in March 2018 to be its spokesperson, Buckman had worked for a quarter century as a producer and on-air reporter for Channel 6 Action News, Philadelphia’s ABC affiliate. Terry, home watching TV, texted her. They had been married thirty-two years. He knew what she needed to know.

They’re reporting that Kobe’s helicopter crashed.

He continued to funnel her updates, confirmations, and details as she rushed through the checkout line. She drove home, unpacked the groceries, sent texts to the school district’s superintendent, Robert Copeland; to the high school’s principal, Sean Hughes; and to the district’s facilities director, Jim Lill. I’m going to my office. We’re going to be the news. She called Downer, then Doug Young, who was one of Downer’s assistant coaches, one of Kobe’s former teammates, and her predecessor as the district’s spokesperson. From the somber, halting whisper that was Downer’s voice over the phone, she could tell that he wasn’t up to speaking publicly yet. He gave her one six-word sentence, which Buckman included in the 189-word statement that she wrote there at her desk. It was not merely that her job required her to write the statement. It was that she, unlike Downer or Young or any number of people still tethered to Kobe, possessed the distance and perspective to do it. She had never met him. In her television career, she had covered the O. J. Simpson trial, had interviewed Oprah Winfrey, had produced a morning talk show and spoken with dozens of Philadelphia newsmakers—that was the evergreen term in the business for any chef or senior citizen or nonprofit director who might fill six and a half minutes on an hour-long local TV program, newsmaker—and Kobe had become Polaris in the region’s constellation of celebrities, the newsmaker of newsmakers. Yet they’d never crossed paths. This was not a hindrance to her at this moment. This was an asset. Someone had to be clear-minded enough to speak for the community. Someone had to be the face of Kobe Bryant’s alma mater on the day of Kobe Bryant’s death.

Already the impromptu shrine was spreading, like holy kudzu, from the sidewalk in front of the school’s gymnasium entrance to the doors themselves, and reporters and camera crews were lingering there, interviewing those who had come to the site, waiting to see if they would be allowed inside the school to shoot footage for that night’s newscasts—the trophy case, the memorabilia therein, Kobe’s name on the gym’s walls, the obvious images. At 4:30 P.M., Buckman rooted herself just outside the doors and read the statement.

The Lower Merion School District community is deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of one of our most illustrious alumni, Kobe Bryant. Mr. Bryant’s connection to Lower Merion High School, where he played basketball prior to joining the NBA, has raised the profile of the high school and our district throughout the world.…

Gregg Downer coached Mr. Bryant from 1992 to 1996. Mr. Bryant led the team to the 1996 state championship. Downer said that he is completely shocked and devastated by this news, adding, Aces Nation has lost its heartbeat. The entire Lower Merion School District community sends its deepest condolences to Mr. Bryant’s family.

She told the media that they could enter the building and get their footage. They could get it then and only then. No one would let them back in for more on Monday. Monday was a school day. The reporters filed in and gathered their B-roll, pointing their cameras to the sparkling hardwood court and the championship banners hanging inside the gymnasium, to the kaleidoscopic mosaics of Kobe on the walls outside the gym, to the glass trophy case where the school displayed five of Kobe’s sneakers and four framed photographs of him and the 1996 state-championship trophy, the lustrous golden basketball that he held above his head that night in Hershey.

The reporters filed out. The mourners continued to arrive. The carpet of letters and flowers and basketballs—officials eventually collected more than four hundred basketballs, donating many to local boys’ and girls’ clubs, keeping some in boxes and black trash bags that would remain stacked on storage shelves until they could be displayed at the school—snaked all the way to the lip of the entrance, blocking the doors, creating a fire-code violation. Buckman, Hughes, and Lill roped off a nearby section of lawn and began picking up the sheets of paper and the lilies and the roses, carrying them with caution and care, as if they were handling fresh-blown glass, and setting them next to the doors, near withered bushes and a plot of mulch and dirt. It took them until the darkness of early Monday morning to move all the items and clear a path to enter and exit the school, Amy Buckman still in the tan corduroy leggings and black down coat she had worn to the Acme.

AT AROUND the same time that his old friend’s helicopter had lifted off that morning, Doug Young had folded himself into a coach seat for a short flight from Alabama to North Carolina. A communication strategist, he had spent the week in Mobile for the Senior Bowl, which was both a chance for NFL executives and coaches to scout college players and a networking opportunity for several of Young’s clients: trainers and up-and-coming coaches and aspiring quarterback gurus looking to build their brands and businesses. Six foot four and lean, Young had a stylish appearance and refined deportment that belied his earnest loyalty to and affection for his high school. No one knew more about the history of Lower Merion, and of its boys’ basketball program in particular, than he did, and with the exception of Downer, no one had done more to maintain the connection between Kobe and the school. When the team traveled to Los Angeles in 2018 to visit Kobe, for instance, Young handled the itinerary and accommodations, arranged a ninety-minute roundtable chat between Kobe and the players at Kobe’s office, and made sure every player got a signed copy of his book The Mamba Mentality. Whenever Downer wanted to inspire his players, Young went to the trouble of fitting a conference call / pep talk snugly into Kobe’s schedule. His junior and senior years had coincided with Kobe’s freshman and sophomore years. He had been there for the dawn.

For the hour and forty-five minutes that the plane was airborne, Young had kept his cell phone and laptop off. But once the plane landed, he looked around and noticed some of the passengers crying, all of them looking at their phones and freezing in place, person by person, row by row, a domino array of shock and sadness. He turned on his phone, then went numb.

Until he wandered toward the terminal for his flight to Philadelphia, the coincidence of his location didn’t occur to him: Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Charlotte, home of the Hornets. The team that had drafted Kobe.

OVER THE two days after the crash, Downer responded to just a few of the calls that he had received Sunday. He remained in the same half daze that he had lapsed into that afternoon, and Hughes had told him not to come in to try to teach. Stay home. Take what time you need. Downer had exchanged text messages with John Cox, Kobe’s cousin, but he had not heard from Kobe’s parents, Joe and Pam. No one had. They had said nothing publicly. Downer hoped he might reconnect with them soon, but until then, there were more immediate matters to which he had to attend. Hughes and Jason Stroup, the school’s athletic director, would be gathering Downer’s players before the team’s regularly scheduled practice to speak to them, and Lower Merion still had a game on Tuesday night. Several of the players had met Kobe during the team’s recent visit to Los Angeles, and Downer didn’t want to leave the task of calming and reassuring them, of speaking with authority about who Kobe was and what he might want them to do now, to Hughes and Stroup. He drove to school for the meeting.

He talked to his players about Kobe’s death in a manner that, he hoped, would resonate with teenage boys. There are a lot of circulating emotions here, guys, Downer told them. We have to get those ten or fifteen emotions down to three or four. When I try to think what Kobe would want to have happen in a situation like this, I think he would want to get back to the bouncing ball as soon as possible. We have an important game Tuesday. We should want to bounce the ball. We should want to squeak our sneakers. We should want to compete like crazy, and we will. Let’s respect that we have our health. Let’s respect that we have the ability to do this, to play basketball, and let’s try to have a heck of a lot of fun while we’re doing it.

He had said nothing publicly since Buckman had released the statement, but now he would have to. A wave of interview requests for Downer had flooded the school district’s offices. In response, Buckman arranged a midafternoon press conference at the administration building with Downer and Young. It was a strategy straight from the textbook of modern media relations, and given the power of Kobe’s fame, it was understandable. Buckman would give the local TV stations and newspapers and websites, and maybe a national outlet or two that might travel a couple of hours to suburban Philadelphia—The New York Times, The Washington Post—one fair and open opportunity to talk to Kobe’s coach in person. Then—and Buckman gathered the thirty reporters on hand and insisted upon this condition—the district wouldn’t allow reporters to ask Downer or anyone else at Lower Merion about Kobe for a good long while. Downer still had a basketball team to coach. He needed time to mourn. Everyone did. So here was your chance, journalists. Take it.

ONE BY one, twenty to twenty-five in all, the media members marched into a conference room to stake out their positions for Downer’s appearance. The room held a large, horseshoe-shaped table with thick wooden chairs, and the phalanx of tripods closed off the open end of the shoe. A maroon banner hung behind the table’s head. Set on an easel was a poster-size photo of Kobe that had been snapped during one of his high school games. He was clad in a white jersey and cradled a basketball in his right hand, his mouth open and his eyes turned upward toward a net as he prepared to flip the ball over his head for a reverse layup—a flawless, frozen coup d’oeil of his athleticism and grace on the court.

With Young behind him, Downer stepped into the conference room from a door behind the banner, his thinning, straw-gray buzz cut perfect for the archetype of his profession: He had been a physical-education teacher at the school for more than twenty years. Minutes before, he had dug through a closet in a storage room next to the gym and removed from it a precious artifact: Kobe’s white warm-up jacket from his junior and senior seasons, the number 33 on the sleeves. It had stayed in that closet for twenty-four years since Kobe last wore it—24, Kobe’s first jersey number at Lower Merion, his second jersey number with the Lakers. Was the coincidence odd? Fitting? Maybe both. Downer, as he prepared to meet with the press, had donned the warm-up himself, as if it were a protective cloak. He felt that he had to wear it, that he would be somehow safer and stronger if he did.

He’s giving me strength in a moment like this, he said later that afternoon. Wasn’t sure I could get through yesterday. Wasn’t sure I could keep my emotions together. And I found … the ability to do that. It’s coming from him. It means the world to be in a jacket like this. If there’s some sort of small connection between him and me with his warm-up he wore…

He sat at the table’s head; Young sat in the chair to the left, his body bowed toward Downer’s in deference to him. I appreciate your patience, Downer said to the assembled media. The past few days have been poor sleep, poor nutrition, and lots of tears, and the evidence was obvious—his face puffy, his eyes rimmed red. To his right, in a corner of the room, mingled a loose group of men with connections to the program: former players and coaches, alumni, friends of Downer’s. Jeremy Treatman stood there among them, his arms crossed against his chest, his head dangling below his shoulders as if he were hanging by his nape from a hook.

The gathering was a testament to Kobe, of course, but to Downer, as well. Kobe’s freshman season with the Aces had been Downer’s third as the school’s varsity head coach. The first time he had seen Kobe play, when Kobe was an eighth grader, Downer had joked, Well, I’m definitely going to be here for four years. Four years had stretched to thirty years. Lower Merion had won fifteen league championships over that time. It won the state title in 1996 with Kobe, then won two more thereafter. Downer had never experienced again a year like Kobe’s senior season—the autograph and ticket demands, the crowds, the media attention, games becoming rock concerts—but without that year, he believed, none of the success that followed would have been possible. The pathway of our program would be very different had we not met him, he was saying at the table. He taught us how to win. He taught us how to work hard. He taught us how to not take shortcuts. The bar got very high.… I don’t think the momentum for any of this would have been there if we hadn’t been blessed enough to meet this amazing player and this amazing person.

He was searching for his words, and the hunt became harder when someone asked him, Have you talked to anyone from Kobe’s family? The question cut him. Joe and Pam Bryant had practically been members of Downer’s family, too. Joe, in fact, even served as Downer’s junior-varsity coach during Kobe’s career there. But Kobe’s relationship with his parents had fractured during his years with the Lakers, both because of his decision to marry Vanessa when they were so young—he was twenty-one, and she was eighteen—and because of a dispute with Pam over the handling and sale of some of his personal items and memorabilia. You’re not ready to be married.… Yes, I am.… I’m going to sell some of your things.… No, you can’t. There had been fights and cold wars and temporary reconciliations and the tearing apart again and maybe, still, the faint but lingering possibility that there might yet be full healing … all of that conflict, in the end, over stuff—high school jerseys and Lakers jerseys and rings, just stuff, and what did that stuff matter now? The wounds had been deep, so deep, Downer knew, that they had to be the reason Joe and Pam had yet to issue any public comment about their son’s death. Downer had never met Vanessa, but he had maintained his relationship with Kobe. He had seen him three times in the previous eighteen months, had flown his team to L.A., had met up with him in Philadelphia at a book signing. Kobe had published a series of novels for elementary school students in March 2019, and he was giving the books away—not selling them at the signing, giving them away. That was the last time Downer had talked to him in person. He couldn’t remember the last time he had talked to Joe and Pam in person, or at all, and now here was this question, here were these cameras …

I had a wonderful relationship with Pam and Joe.… I learned about coaching from Joe, and I think of him in the highest of regards.… If they’re out there, I badly want to be supportive of Vanessa and the other three girls. I badly want to be there for them in any small way that I can be. And I definitely … uh … want to get in touch with Joe and Pam.

Now he was crying. Now the words stopped.

Joe and Pam, we lost a great one. I love Kobe, and I love Joe and Pam also.

He reached for a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade that he had set on the table in front of him. He held it to his lips for a few heartbeats. He wiped his eyes with his right hand, then with his left. There was no sound in the room.

ONE MONTH later, at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday, February 25, the day after the memorial ceremony for Kobe and Gianna Bryant at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, Downer sat aboard a cross-country flight back to Philadelphia, racing home to coach in a district-playoff game at 7:30 P.M. that night. He had missed his team’s last four practices and not watched one second of film on the Aces’ opponent, Pennridge High School. His assistant coaches had been in contact with him, and he had no doubts that his players would be ready for the game. But in truth, his mind was elsewhere, dwelling on the day before.

Downer, Treatman, and Young had followed through on a tentative plan they had laid out not long after Kobe’s death. No matter when the Lakers might host a memorial for Kobe, the three of them would travel to the West Coast for it. Now Downer’s mind reached back. Obtaining tickets for the ceremony had been a chore, because so few were available and because the ceremony would be so NBA- and Los Angeles–centric, to align with Vanessa’s wishes. But Tim Harris, the Lakers’ senior vice president for business operations, had interceded on their behalf. Harris had done more than intercede, in fact; he had procured a couple of extra tickets, allowing Jeanne Mastriano and Downer’s younger brother, Brad, to attend, as well.

The group left their hotel early on the morning of the ceremony, Brad driving them to the Staples Center. To Gregg, ten minutes early was always ten minutes late anyway, and they had anticipated, correctly, delays beyond the normal Los Angeles rush-hour mess. Some streets were blocked off. Traffic choked the rest. Outside the arena, giant murals of Kobe painted on brick building walls in the days since his death, phantasmagorical in their colors, towered over the passersby, most of whom wore Lakers jerseys, some of whom wore Lower Merion jerseys. Lower Merion jerseys in California, in China … the reach … Kobe’s reach … even in this setting … Young marveled to himself at the community created by this one human being. Vendors sold Kobe T-shirts. People are buying them? Downer thought. He had trouble stomaching it … the inappropriateness. Kobe’s ghost was everywhere, and it could be yours, screen-printed on rayon, for fifteen