Here was Bryant on his 30th birthday, on the eve of playing Spain for his gold-medal moment for United States basketball, and he had such regret that it took so long in his life to let Shaq shadow box.
All of a sudden, there’s no winning. There’s no way out. Perhaps this is why Bryant seems so liberated, freed from a legacy and life forever framed through the prism of Shaq and their three Los Angeles Lakers’ titles together. As Kobe reshapes his image here with American flags, Jordanesque ferocity and the warm, welcoming touch of a grateful guest, O’Neal is back in the United States facing a restraining order for allegations of stalking an Atlanta woman after several disturbing e-mails and phone threats surfaced.
The old images of the brooding, immature Kobe and the gregarious, life-of-the-championship-party Shaq have turned inside out. Somehow, Kobe’s become the grownup and Shaq the screw-up.
In the wake of the Lakers’ NBA Finals loss to the Boston Celtics, Shaq climbed on that stage and started with the lyrics that, “Kobe couldn’t do without me,” and maybe for the first time cast Bryant as a sympathetic figure. To dismiss the firestorm as deftly as Bryant did – whatever, I’ve got a gold medal to win this summer – cornered Shaq as a fading superstar filled with too much jealousy, too little motivation.
These Olympics have been the most remarkable three weeks of Kobe Bryant’s basketball life. He disdains the marketing “Redeem Team” title, calling it “kind of cheesy” because let’s face it: Those weren’t his international failures over the past eight years. Nike tried so hard to make LeBron James a co-star of these Games but failed miserably. He’s riding shotgun and doesn’t seem terribly thrilled about it. There’s no usurping Bryant in China.
Bryant has won the respect of his teammates, but he doesn’t run in the big cliques on the team. LeBron is the ringleader of the young players, and Kobe goes his own way. He’s won his teammates over with his ferocity, his insatiable need to win, but no one ever gets close to Bryant. He’s a loner, but he learned to lead. When all hell was breaking loose in the semifinal victory over Argentina, it was Bryant working with Jason Kidd to bring his teammates back from the brink of losing composure.
When his teammates went in groups to volleyball and women’s basketball games this week, Bryant was over at the U.S.-Brazil gold medal women’s soccer match with his wife and daughters. He waves his American flag, his eyes mesmerized by the dichotomy between the winners and losers, gold and silver.
As much as any NBA player, these Olympics have been a source of pure fascination for Bryant. For this most obsessive perfectionist, a basketball player with a full-time staff “whose whole job, whole purpose, is to just stay on top of my health,” Bryant couldn’t stop putting his own greatness into context with that of the world’s best athletes. He spent several years of his childhood living in Italy and always did have a global perspective on himself. The Olympics have been such a renaissance to his career, Bryant insists that he wants to play as a 34-year-old in 2012 in London.
Bryant’s popularity is staggering in Asia and Europe, and he insists that, “People here have seen my personality more than in the States. I’ve done tours here. In the season, I’m in that Mamba mode. That switch is on. But during the summer, I’m kicking back and they get to see what a smart-ass I am. They get a chance to relate to you a lot more.
Well, there’s this idea, too. Bryant will forever have the rape charges in Eagle, Colo., on his permanent stateside record, but they don’t judge him overseas. They don’t care about that dropped case and taking sides in the Lakers’ soap operas and vitriol toward his Lakers bosses and teammates.
They just judge Kobe in the pure way that he judges himself: On the basketball court, peerless.
On his way back home, Bryant will be remembered as the anchor responsible for restoring American basketball glory. His MVP season, his return to the Finals, taught Bryant that he had to give more of himself to get the things that he ultimately wanted.
For the longest time, though, he played the part of the spoiled brat, the baby brother that Shaq had to balance between shaping and scolding, and maybe ultimately defining. Now, Shaq’s career is in sharp decline with a summer of high-comedy, low-rent rap and a stalker complaint in hot pursuit.
Across the world, Bryant goes for his gold medal on Saturday, something it turns out he could do without Shaq. Still, that’s a war Bryant never won and never will. Mostly, he understands that it isn’t even worth waging. Let it go, he tells himself. Let it go.
The world has watched him grow from teenage prodigy to tortured twentysomething to the weekend a world away in China when Kobe Bryant could feel the burdens peeling away like a second skin.
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