Kobe Bryant was a former NBA superstar who played basketball for two decades. He spent his entire career with the L.A. Lakers. He was a highly decorated player. He, unfortunately, met his tragic end in 2020 in a plane crash. Just like every other athlete, he has a unique beginning. For him, it was in Italy, with a small court.
A 6-foot-9 forward, Joe "Jellybean" Bryant had played for the Philadelphia 76ers, the San Diego Clippers and the Houston Rockets and had now accepted an offer to play for Sebastani Rieti, based in the hilltop town of Rieti, around 50 miles from Rome. The club found him a cottage with a garden and gave him a new BMW, too. They even erected a basketball hoop on the outside wall for young Kobe to use.
The change still came as a shock to young Kobe, who left his home in Houston, Texas, along with his mother, Pam, and his older sisters, Sharia and Shaya.
"I knew it was going to be different, that the culture was different," he later recalled. "The first time we went in our house and turned on the TV, there was an Italian cartoon, and me and my sisters were rolling. We were dying. It was on in Italian but they had the same cartoon in America. It was the same exact cartoon, but it had just had Italian words."
On Sundays, Kobe would watch his dad play for his new Italian team, often helping out by mopping the sweat off the court during intervals. A clever kid, he cut his first sponsorship deal with the owner of Joe’s second club in Italy, Olimpia Pistoia, to wear a sweatshirt branded with their business when he cleaned; as long as they bought him a new red bicycle.
Once he wiped down the court, he often picked up a basketball and dazzled the crowd with his own "Kobe Show," only leaving the court when the game officials kicked him off.
In a peaceful corner of the quaint Italian city of Reggio Emilia, sits a tiny playground with basketball hoops glued on opposing walls. The playing surface is worn, bicycles are propped up around it's perimeter and the spire of a small local church pokes over the top of the surrounding buildings.
Although beautiful, it’s at first unassuming and certainly not somewhere you would link to the glamorous world of the NBA. Bryant spent many of his formative years in Italy, as his father Joe decided to take his playing career to Europe after leaving the Houston Rockets in 1983.
Just six at the time, a young Bryant was thrown into a new culture, a new language and a new way of life but it was a new world he quickly adapted to and eventually fell in love with. Constantly following his father to different teams across the country, the family’s last stop in Italy was in Reggio Emilia, where Bryant met friend and former team-mate, Marco Ferraroni.
When there was no organised team practice, Ferraroni remembers spending, "eternal afternoons" playing with Kobe on that small court nestled next to the church, with the local priest permitting them access during the day.
"We spent hours and hours there. One of my memories of Kobe is that he was always there," Ferraroni said. "I remember that Kobe was always available to play basketball, even for 1v1, just spending all afternoon playing 1v1 or a three-point competition. He was always there for basketball."
Ferraroni recalls a young Bryant playing a lot like his father, focusing on scoring three pointers which was, "peculiar" for Italian players at his age. While the future NBA legend was physically smaller than much of his competition, what stands out most for Ferraroni was the American's mentality, a trait which would later become world famous.
His close childhood friend, Giada Maslovaric, remembers his first day at his new school; she was tasked with keeping an eye on him and the pair soon started socializing in their spare time. Hours would be spent cycling through the city’s cobbled streets, getting its world-famous ice-cream and dreaming of the future.
"Kobe did not care for gossip, for shallow things, but when he laughed, he would do so genuinely, so he was good company," Maslovaric said.
Maslovaric never had an interest in sport, let alone basketball, opting instead to focus her attention on school work. While their focuses didn’t align, Maslovaric thinks the pair became such good friends because of their shared passion and determination to achieve.
"He would always say that he’d play for the NBA,” she said. “Whenever the topic was mentioned, he was not joking. We laughed a lot, but that joke was not funny to him, he would not play along with it. I was the only person laughing, he’d simply respond , 'I’ll get there'."
"I remember a very long Saturday afternoon playing with him," Ferraroni recalled. "We played all afternoon and it was very difficult to leave because Kobe didn’t want to leave having lost the last game – I was one year older, and it happened that sometimes he lost."
"And it was like: 'No, no, no, play one more, play one more. I want to win. Play one more.' So it was kind of a never-ending afternoon playing with him."
Obsessed with basketball at a young age, Bryant didn’t have much interest in school while living in Reggio Emilia. Maslovaric watched on from afar as her friend morphed into a global sensation, a world champion, a father and a husband. They would meet again, though, much later in life in 2003.
In 1992, Joe Bryant retired from playing basketball. The family moved back to the United States when Kobe was 13, settling in Lower Merion in Montgomery County, Philadelphia. One of the principal reasons for returning to Philly, Joe explained, was that he didn’t want his children to forget how to speak English. However, Kobe struggled to readjust. He didn’t know any of the new slang kids were using and he didn’t have the shared cultural references in TV or music to help him engage with other teens.
Even the clothes he brought back from Italy made him the subject of ridicule. On the school baseball team photo, for example, there are 18 students, all wearing baseball uniforms with mitts in hand — except one. Standing to the far right is Kobe, in a warm coat and a multicolored sweater over a white dress shirt buttoned to the top.
Bryant visited Reggio Emilia and had gone looking for Maslovaric at her mother’s clothing store. Maslovaric’s mother rang her and passed the phone over to Bryant. The pair agreed to meet up two days later.
Maslovaric recalls some of the deep conversations she shared with the five-time NBA champion when the pair met again. She was fascinated with what his life was now like and whether he enjoyed the fame.
There was an element of isolation in his life, she said, with Bryant not knowing who he could trust. It was a price that she thinks the boy who used to play on that small court on an Italian playground was willing to pay, all for his love of basketball.
"The description that I got was one of a beautiful, stunning cage, made not of gold, but rather of platinum, of diamond, which was his later life," she said, referring to a conversation she had with him.
"(That’s) the life he chose because that cage allowed him to feel those extremely powerful feelings that he felt as soon as he’d step onto the court. And all of the bars, in spite of being beautiful and golden, disappeared at that moment, it was worth it."
It would be the last time the pair met. Like millions around the world, Maslovaric watched with despair as the news spread of Bryant’s death in 2020.
Like her, the city of Reggio Emilia was rocked, it's inhabitants left mourning their adopted son. In the years that followed, a plaza in the city was named in honour of Bryant and his daughter, Gianna, as the community worked together to heal the, "collective wound."
For Maslovaric, the murals and tributes to Kobe are bittersweet. On the one hand, it serves as a constant reminder that she'll never see her childhood friend again. But, on the other, she understands the want and need to honor Bryant given his lasting legacy in the city.
"Kobe, I believe, has left to Reggio the opportunity for every single child, boy or girl, with a dream and a regular life, to be able to achieve that dream," Maslovaric added, speaking of Bryant’s legacy. "And I think that’s something extraordinary.”
A 20-year career with the Lakers netting him more than $320 million in salary alone followed. Bryant won five NBA championships and was an 18-time All-Star (second only to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 19). He was also the first player in NBA history to score at least 30 000 career points and make 6 000 career assists and won two Olympics gold medals with the US basketball team.
In 2001, aged 21, he married Vanessa Laine, 18, and the couple had four daughters together but his personal life wasn’t without it's problems. While Bryant had learned the importance of family from his father, he, too, would find himself engulfed in a scandal when, in 2003, he was arrested for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman. They case was settled out of court.
On 26 January 2020, tragedy struck. Kobe Bryant, alongside his daughter Gianna and seven others, were killed when their helicopter crashed in Calabasas, California. Kobe was 41 and Gianna only 13. Just as Joe had coached young Kobe, so too had Kobe been coaching the girl they called, "Gigi."
When he was playing in Italy in the 1980's, Joe once told a team-mate about a prophecy his grandmother had made. She said, "That someone would come along who would change the entire structure and direction of the family, who would accomplish great things and allow the family’s members to live new lives."
"I know it’s not me," said Bryant, before pointing to his son. "But it might be him."
Kobe lived quite an interesting life. To me, living in a diverse environment can be vital. Gaining knowledge on various cultures can lead to better understandings regarding such things as cultures. It was extremely beneficial that he got exposed to the game at an early age. The earlier the exposure, the greater the understanding as time goes on.
He passed away too early. He could've gone on to achieve great things off the court.