Kobe Bryant was never going to be happy with a slow fade into the record books. The player who stretched the athletic sneer to new, prodigious widths needed a triumph. So he's decided to throw himself one.
Bryant announced his retirement via a poem published on Sunday night in The Players' Tribune (the written-by-the-stars-themselves publishing platform of which he is a major investor): At the age of 37 and playing in his 20th NBA season, this will be his final year in the NBA.
In The Players' Tribune model, athletes are interviewed by an uncredited journalist, who turns their ideas into first-person narratives for the Web. In this particular case, you feel almost certain Bryant wrote it himself.
He once broadcast a picture of his (wonderfully garish) custom-designed piano with this caption: "My collection of masterpieces just hit a crescendo of domination." The poem reads similarly.
There is a special level reserved at the tippy-top for performers who talk an impossible amount of smack, and can find a way to back it up. Since Muhammad Ali perfected the form, few have managed it with quite as much snarl as Bryant.
"As far as one-on-one, I'm the best to ever do it," he once said. It's played five-on-five, but with Bryant it always looked like it was him versus the world.
He was not the best player of his generation. His Los Angeles Lakers teammate, nemesis and through-a-glass-brightly opposite Shaquille O'Neal was probably that. But he was the player who most defined the new NBA. He was flawed and brilliant, the sort of compromised genius you more often think fits the writerly or painterly mould. He was just as much an artist.
Bryant was a prodigy who skipped the NCAA and went straight to the pros, back when that was still allowed. One of his favourite conversational gambits was making an observation, then following it with some variation of "But how would I know? I didn't go to college."
It sounded self-deprecating. It wasn't. Bryant knew he was the sharpest guy in any locker room, and spent a lot of his time looking for someone dumber to skewer.
We'll say of someone like that they do not suffer fools. Bryant turned it around: Anyone he thought a fool suffered him. He was ruthless to his colleagues, regardless of what colours they were wearing. His self-confidence was a primal force.
About a year ago, he marched into a Lakers timeout huddle, shrugged off the coach who was trying to set up a play and announced to his teammates: "Get the f--- out of the way." He said it twice in case someone had misinterpreted the comment as a request. Everyone looked stricken. They also got out of his way. He missed his shot. L.A. lost. It was one of many signs that it was over.
Bryant could not reconcile his internal imaging with the body of an increasingly broken middle-aged man. He lived inside his own version of The Matrix – where he is always his kung-fu fighting, ideal self.
Even now that he's admitted his moment has passed (" … My heart can take the pounding/My mind can handle the grind/But my body knows it's time to say goodbye …"), you don't believe him. This is Bryant's way of setting up an "I'll show you" five-month run through the league.
Stories are told about his Herculean work ethic, but it was that mile-wide streak of contrariness that drove him. Bryant didn't seek success so much as he tempted failure. He wanted to be the guy the game rode on, every single time. It wasn't a generous impulse. It was a compulsive one. Bryant was more likely to pass you a compliment than the ball.
Gary Payton once described in general terms this epic me-first-ism: "Man, you ain't even letting the ground touch the ball." It ought to be carved on Bryant's professional tombstone.
But it worked. For an awfully long time, Bryant didn't miss often, and almost never when it really counted. He won games by himself. He was paired dynastically with O'Neal. Once he had a few rings, Bryant began to complain about the arrangement. Lakers management chose the younger of the two. Bryant won two more championships by himself … along with 11 other guys.
He wasn't always this prickly. At the outset, Bryant was a needy, uncertain kid from an unlikely NBA background (driven by overachieving, helicopter parents). He wanted to be liked. He smiled a lot.
At the height of his success, Bryant was accused of a sex assault and arrested. He was never tried, but apologized vaguely and settled a civil case out of court. For a time, this brought him low in public estimation. But that same public has proved again and again that it will forgive its heroes anything if they win.
Bryant won. His public persona changed. The smile disappeared. He was angrier now, and unconcerned with what people thought of him. The more he pushed people away, the more they were pulled toward him. Eventually, he morphed into the game's crankiest old man. Though now drawn in shades of grey and nowhere close to the player he'd once been, he was loved by the average fan most at the end. The world is a strange place.
He will leave as the third-highest scorer in NBA history, winner of five NBA championships and one league MVP, but his legacy is not statistical.
When we think of Bryant in years to come, it will be as a man who always seemed to working to a pattern only he could see. He was perhaps the most solitary team athlete of all time. Few will choose to follow him down that path – it looks too lonely.
All you can really say of Kobe Bryant is that he took control over every aspect of his basketball battle, including the terms of surrender.
Cathal Kelly