Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bean Bryant was named for a cut of beef his father, NBA forward Joe "Jellybean" Bryant, had seen on a restaurant menu. When Kobe was six, Joe's playing career took the family to Italy, where they lived in four towns over six years while his father finished his career in the Italian leagues. Kobe grew up speaking Italian, played soccer, rooted for A.C. Milan, and did not take basketball seriously until the family settled in Reggio Emilia. He returned to Philadelphia at 13, fluent in a language none of his American teammates spoke, and enrolled at Lower Merion High School, where a freshman team that went 4 and 20 became, by his senior year, state champions for the first time in 53 years.

Bryant skipped college entirely, entering the 1996 draft straight from Lower Merion and landing with the Lakers after Charlotte traded his rights. He won three championships alongside Shaquille O'Neal from 2000 to 2002, scored 81 points against Toronto in January 2006, the second-highest total in NBA history, and won two more titles and two Finals MVP awards in 2009 and 2010 after O'Neal left. He retired in 2016 after scoring 60 points in his final game, having made 18 All-Star teams and won two Olympic golds without a single loss on the U.S. team. In 2018 he won an Academy Award for the animated short "Dear Basketball," becoming the only person with both an Oscar and an Olympic gold medal.

In June 2003, a 19-year-old hotel employee in Edwards, Colorado, accused Bryant of rape after a sexual encounter he acknowledged but said was consensual. Prosecutors charged him with felony sexual assault, and the case was dismissed in September 2004 after the accuser told them she would not testify, by which point the state had already spent more than 200,000 dollars preparing for trial. Bryant settled a separate civil suit for an undisclosed sum, reportedly above 2.5 million dollars, and issued a public statement acknowledging that "she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did" while maintaining his own account of what happened. He lost endorsement deals with Nutella and McDonald's — Nike, Coca-Cola and Spalding stayed, and he signed a 136-million-dollar contract with the Lakers that same year.

Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven others died when their helicopter flew into fog and hillside terrain near Calabasas on January 26, 2020 — investigators found the pilot had continued into weather the LAPD had already grounded its own helicopters for that morning. The mourning was immediate and enormous, and so was the argument over how to hold both halves of the record at once — a Washington Post reporter was briefly suspended, then reinstated, for posting about the 2003 case within hours of the crash. The Lakers retired both his jersey numbers in 2017, the Hall of Fame inducted him in 2020, and the NBA renamed its All-Star MVP trophy for him. None of it settled the argument.

Kobe Bryant's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Granity Studios company
  His multimedia company, later run by Vanessa Bryant 2013
• Dear Basketball film
  Animated short from his retirement essay, won the Academy Award 2017
• The Mamba Mentality: How I Play book
  His account of his approach to the game 2018
• Detail television
  ESPN analysis series he created and hosted 2018

• August 23, 1978 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• c. 1984 aged ~6 Moves to Italy when his father joins the Italian leagues
• c. 1991 aged ~13 Returns to Philadelphia and enrolls at Lower Merion High School
• June 26, 1996 aged 17 Drafted 13th overall by Charlotte and traded to the Lakers
• 2000 aged ~22 Wins the first of three consecutive championships with Shaquille O'Neal
• January 22, 2006 aged 27 Scores 81 points against Toronto
• April 13, 2016 aged 37 Scores 60 points in his final game and retires
• January 26, 2020 aged 41 Dies in a helicopter crash near Calabasas with his daughter Gianna and seven others

• Shaquille O'Neal b. 1972
  Dominant NBA center and entertainer whose larger-than-life personality transcended sports. won three titles alongside, then feuded with
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar b. 1947
  NBA's all-time leading scorer and six-time champion known for his skyhook and social activism. passed his Lakers scoring record
• Michael Jordan b. 1963
  Widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time, who became a global marketing phenomenon. measured against for two decades
• Tiger Woods b. 1975
  Golf icon who revolutionized the sport and became one of the most famous athletes in the world. contemporary global sports icon