RealGM

Spring of 1997 and Bryant sits alone in the visitors' locker room at Utah's Delta Center. "Why?" he asks himself. "Why did I miss those shots? Was I nervous? No, I don't get nervous in games. I don't get afraid in games. So what happened? The shots were right on line, right on target. Why did they come up short?" He is a rookie who just unleashed three air balls down the stretch of an overtime playoff loss to the Jazz that ends the Lakers' season. He is packing for his first offseason when the answer dawns on him. "I was going from 30-something games in high school to 100-something in the NBA on an 18-year-old body," Bryant says. "I went right back to L.A. and changed my whole weight training program. I had to start lifting during the season so what happened in Utah would never happen again." That summer Spike Lee begins filming He Got Game, a movie with Denzel Washington about a basketball prodigy named Jesus Shuttlesworth. "I want you to be part of it," Lee tells Bryant. "Thank you but no thank you," Bryant says. "This summer is too big for me." Ray Allen lands the role as Shuttlesworth.

Kilroy wrote:Nothing with Ray Allen associated with it should be top 5 anything...
By far my least favorite sports figure.

Summer of 1991 and Bryant enrolls in the Sonny Hill Community Involvement League in Philadelphia. He has spent the past seven years in Italy, where Jellybean was a pro, and nobody on the club circuit overseas could stop the kid. "Then I came back here, and in that first summer I didn't score a point," Bryant says. "I'm serious. Not one point. My dad was a Philly legend. My uncle [Chubby Cox] was a Philly legend. And I'm out there with these big ol' volleyball kneepads looking like the Cable Guy. I had really bad Osgood-Schlatter disease, so even tapping my knees gave me serious pain. The league was probably 25 games, and I didn't score a basket, a free throw, nothing. At the end I sobbed my eyes out." That fall Jellybean joins a team in Mulhouse, France. The Bryant family moves into a villa with a tennis court and a basketball hoop that's 11 feet high. "Whatever, it was a hoop," Bryant says. "I played there all day long, and the only thing I thought about was, One basket, one basket, one basket. Just score one basket. When I went back to Sonny Hill the next summer, I wasn't dominating anybody, but I scored. I figured out, If you keep pushing, you'll keep getting better."

Gianna's team lost a game recently, and she cried afterward..."Hey," he told her, after the tears dried. "You want to see Daddy cry?" He took her home and fished out the DVD from Game 6 of the 2008 Finals. They sat together and watched the Lakers get mortified in Boston. Then he popped in Game 7 of the 2010 Finals, and they marinated in the vindication. There, in one unforgettable double feature, was the evolution, the making of a man, the healing of a scar.