Murahd Shawki
Contributing Writer
Wednesday, April 13th, 2016 was one of the single most captivating and profound night of sports entertainment I’ve experienced in years. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant–who spent his entire twenty-year career with the LA Lakers–played his last game in the NBA.
It started out plenty exciting. Golden State had barely squeaked by Memphis in their last game, so it felt like the record wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. Then I turned on the TV and saw the Warriors logo at center court, realized it was a home game, and lost any sense of suspense I felt before the end of the first quarter. So I decided to take out my phone and check on Kobe.
Wow five for thirteen on field goals already, should have seen that coming. Wait. In the first quarter??
Perhaps, were I a veteran Warriors fan, I might have had the discipline to keep watching my home team. Call me a bandwagoner, I guess. I pulled up the game on my phone, and quickly realized that the Warriors game was not the one that deserved the big screen. I switched, and my internet crapped out for almost the entire third quarter. In the middle of live history. It was like being at a book burning.
I started following the NBA just a year before that fateful night in the Staples Center, when Kobe Bryant tore his achilles tendon. I grew up in a household largely devoid of sports, so it took college to knock some cultural sense into me. To this day, my friends lament the fact that I never got to see prime Kobe. I never got to see why people (even I, unknowingly) felt the need to yell his name any time they shot a piece of crumpled paper into a wastebasket. To me, Kobe has always been a lame duck. A shell of his former self that I never got to witness. The Lakers were (and are) a dumpster fire of a team, so I never felt the need to really respect the man’s legacy. I could laugh at his horrible efficiency and crippling contract and move on to a more interesting team.
That was not this man. I never got a true season of Kobe. I never even got a full game. I was about to get 12 regulation minutes though.
No series finale, final album, or trilogy’s conclusion can compare to watching the final minute of a 20-year career end in front of tens of thousands of people. Even in the field of professional sports, Kobe’s night was an anomaly, overshadowing the single greatest team achievement in league history. Even while wearing my jersey, I couldn’t have cared less about the Warriors’ victory over the Memphis Grizzlies to seal the winningest regular season in NBA history. As far as I was concerned, they had sealed the deal against San Antonio just nights before. I already had that celebration, and it turns out there was a more pressing one happening on another channel.
Kobe was playing, and I thought I didn’t care. Until I suddenly realized that nothing was more important in the entire world to me than watching his final fourth quarter. Finally I’d witnessed the Kobe everyone cheered about. The Kobe that makes you stop caring about team sports as a concept. It’s amazing how much weight the gesture of fearlessly chucking a basketball carries when it’s going in. After all, the worst you can do is miss, and the fans at Staples Center knew that, cheering for brick after brick after brick until they finally started falling. The Kobe that makes you reevaluate how you approach life.
I never thought I could be driven to tears by a rubber ball bouncing on hardwood and then falling through a net, but Kobe had me damn near hyperventilating. Four quarters of basketball validated the most painful season in the franchise’s history, to a point where it made the Warriors 73 wins seem almost…superficial.
It’s nice that Kobe could end his career with a 40 point game. It’s especially nice that he was able to go out on a win.
