A year after Kobe Bryant’s death, remember that the Lower Merion kid was ours to cherish | Mike Sielski
His experiences at Lower Merion High School were an essential part of his story and legacy.
It is easy, if you’re not from the Philadelphia area, to have a narrow view of Kobe Bryant relative to the totality of his life, to regard him as if he sprouted, fully formed, from the hills of Hollywood in the summer of 1996.
From the moment that the Los Angeles Lakers acquired him until his death a year ago today, it seemed that he was growing up before America’s eyes, from a 17-year-old kid who dared to take his talent to the NBA to a husband and father who had shaken free of the arrogance and atrocious choices that once threatened his legacy and, at worst, his very freedom. He had played those 20 years with the Lakers, had won those five championships and those two Olympic gold medals, had forged an identity as an emotional and psychological touchstone, the possessor of a mentality that all should adopt and emulate. And when that helicopter crashed into that Calabasas hillside, he still had more to accomplish: the Mamba Academy, his forays into publishing and storytelling, the raising of his four daughters, including Gianna, 13, aboard the copter with him. He had done great things, and there were great things yet ahead for him.
Those great things had begun in and around Philadelphia. It might not feel that way any longer, because Kobe was so much a part of Los Angeles for so long — had gone from boyhood to manhood there, always under the spotlight’s glare. But there was a preface to that remarkable rise, a story here before The Story.
Those great things had begun at Lower Merion High School, whose boys basketball program had faded into irrelevance years earlier but became a traveling circus — and the best team in the state — because of Kobe. Before he and head coach Gregg Downer arrived, no one thought of Lower Merion as a basketball power, because no one thought of Lower Merion basketball. The team’s uniforms were often mismatched: a No. 41 on a player’s tank top, a No. 21 on his shorts. Once, the Aces lost a game, 54-13, finishing it with just four players on the court. Then Downer showed up, and Kobe soon after, and this year the program’s alumni will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its ’96 district and state championships with the heaviest of hearts.
Those great things had begun within a community that touted its racial and economic diversity and harmony but whose members were in reality hungry for a common point of pride to unite them.
“I don’t think Kobe was responsible for some mass awakening,” said Doug Young, who was Kobe’s teammate for two years and later became the Lower Merion School District’s communication director. “That would be overstating it. But he was a person everyone in the community could be proud of. We could all identify something of ourselves in him. In some ways, he was the savior who swooped in from out of nowhere, but the truth was, he was a Lower Merion kid. He went to middle school here, high school. His family moved into the community. By the time it was said and done, he was as Lower Merion as anybody.
“You had Black kids cheering for Kobe and you had white kids from the soccer team in another part of the stands,” Young continued. “But you also had kids from the theater who never came to watch basketball who were there. You had community members bringing their kids to games. That hadn’t happened in generations. It became, ‘Here’s a Lower Merion kid who happens to be Black who’s doing things for this community that no one else has done.’ ”
They had begun in summer-league and pickup games that instantaneously became the stuff of apocrypha and myth and remained so for decades thereafter, stories that didn’t need to be embellished because the reality was flabbergasting enough: that a kid who was just turning 17 already was the equal of or had surpassed the best players on those courts, which meant he already was the equal of or had surpassed some of the better players in the NBA. They had begun at practices and workouts that the 76ers would hold at St. Joseph’s University in the mid-1990s, when Kobe would walk into the gym and school all those NBA veterans and coach John Lucas could only wish that the Sixers would have the good sense to draft the kid.
They had begun at a moment in our cultural history when a traditional path to athletic stardom was seen as the only appropriate path to athletic stardom — a presumption that Kobe managed to follow and eschew at the very same time. He played for his neighborhood high school, and sure, he could have gone to college. He would have had his pick of any school in the country. But how realistic was that scenario once he saw that he stacked up well against pros, that they could try their sly tricks and throw their elbows and he could not only take it but give it right back to them? The great things had begun with that realization, that he alone could control his future. They had to have begun then.
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They had begun with a youth that was in some ways completely typical and in others unlike anything a teenager could possibly experience: a news conference to announce his post-high school intentions, a celebrity prom date, a youth that seems so far away now. This has been the darkest and strangest of years — a pandemic, months of social upheaval, his death the first of global note in a year of global death — but those great things remain and should be remembered. They began here, before Kobe Bryant had turned 14. The world had him until he was 41, a too-short time for what he had done and what he might yet do, an end that, even a year later, remains too sad and stunning to comprehend.