Effigy wrote:Now I kind of wish I'd watched ESPN's replay of his last game yesterday. I originally didn't watch it, because I don't consider that a good example of a Kobe game. It's the kind haters latch onto citing his efficiency. But now I realize it would have been good to watch because it was really a tribute game.
I do hope they replay some of his stellar games though. The 81 point game, the game against the Kings when he had 46 in the playoffs in 2001, something like that.
I didn't like the game when I watched it live that day. I thought it totally misrepresented his career. He was never one to pad the scores, or go 100% on a meaningless game.
However, rewatching it yesterday did give me different perspective. We can say whatever we want about the game, about refs letting go fouls on lakers, about Kobe taking 50 shots, about Utah not doubling him. At the end, Kobe scored like 15 pts in the last 5 minutes, made every huge shots, and got the well deserved win. You could see that he was exhausted. He had no bounce in his steps and could barely move on defense, but he willed the balls into the basket somehow, and he didn't willing them in for himself, since he no longer needed to add anything to his basketball resume, but he did it for his family, for his daughters sitting court side, and for us, the fans.
When the game was getting closer to the end, they had a lot of shots with Vanessa and the daughters. I could not imagined how proud Vanessa was during that moment in time, and even though the daughters were probably too young to appreciate how truly special it was, perhaps they will one day look back that how much blood and sweat their father had put in for 30 years to get to that level. Not the level of skill of putting up 60 pts in 50 shots in the last game, but the level of being beloved by basically millions of people in the world, perhaps billions, because of millions of shots he had taken in the gym, alone. Now one of them don't have that chance anymore.
Ya, it was not the game I thought it were going to be, but now it looked like a perfect ending to that chapter.
It has been 2 days and I could barely think about anything else. I didn't know I could be affected so much by a celebrity death, but as many people, he was my idol, my hero, my escape, and my adolescenthood. Being a lakers fan, and more specifically, a Kobe fan, had impacted my life so much, and now, all the good memories will become bittersweet, knowing my hero cannot continue to inspire us, but it's our jobs now to spread his inspiration to others. Mortality and immorality, somehow, this tragic had turned Kobe's story into both.
