An acoustic guitar comes in, bright and quick, as Kobe dribbles from right to left, the basket out of focus in the distance. He rises and Dwyane Wade rises with him. His right elbow bends and extends just before the buzzer sounds and the backboard's outline emerges in red. Bryant drifts out of the shot as Wade turns to follow the ball's path. Our perspective changes, and now we see all ten players and a crowd of thousands staring at the rim.
Bryant makes it. The crowd erupts, and Kobe, skipping with his arms held high, is wrapped up by Derek Fisher.
"One, two, three, four," sings a voice made of giggles and wire. Kobe gestures along with the song, raising one finger for each of the championships he had won up until that point.
The whole gang is here. Scottie Pippen and Magic Johnson. Charles Barkley and David Robinson. Lil' Penny and Spike Lee. They've all come to celebrate Kobe and his achievements in one of Nike's latest ad campaigns.
It's an esteemed group, although any time Nike gets the band back together, it's conspicuous when the front man doesn't show. But that doesn't matter. The generation that preceded him - Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Patrick Ewing, Gary Payton, Alonzo Mourning, John Stockton, Reggie Miller - and the generation that will follow - Kevin Durant, LeBron James - have all gathered round to flap their arms, wave their towels, laugh and smile.
"All Together Now," sings the voice, or voices rather, as the wiry giggles have steadily expanded into a raucous chorus. It's a happy scene.
It wasn't always like this. In fact, I'd argue that the path to this moment, with its easy-to-come-by joy, was rather unclear only a few years ago. The fact that the commercial I just described could pass us by without much discussion is emblematic of just how far Kobe Bryant's image has come.
The unique thing about the celebrity of professional athletes is that it is fundamentally meritocratic. This isn't true of other "famous" professions. Actors need not be accomplished thespians in order to acquire the adoration of fans or the endless pursuit of paparazzi. Politicians can be unthoughtful, inarticulate, and ineffective while receiving the votes of millions. Contemporary pop music often sounds like the moans of a dying sow and that has hardly stemmed the tides of fame. Athletes, on the other hand, are unquestionably very good at what they do. Even garbage time players are amongst the top 500 or so basketball players in the world. A variety of factors go into producing the celebrity-athlete, but our understanding of them is never wholly divorced from how they carry themselves while at work.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Kobe Bryant. As we all know, anyone looking to attack the character of Kobe need do nothing more than focus their attention on the events that transpired in Eagle, Colorado during the summer of 2003. But Kobe's critics, a once prolific but now dwindling species, don't focus on accusations of rape, do they?
No, it's always been about the game. Kobe was flawed, but his shortcomings lied at the crossroads of morality and basketball. He was arrogant and selfish and although he may have scored, doing so with little concern for his teammates made his team worse. I'm not sure any player in the history of the NBA, or any league for that matter, has been as dominant as Kobe Bryant yet struggled so mightily to transcend partisan passions.
But after he won his fourth ring, and certainly now that he has his fifth, Kobe has finally reached a point where he is not only feared but respected. Maybe even admired. The game for him is no longer a struggle, it is a celebration. At least that's what "All Together Now" is suggesting.
The odd thing about his on-court achievements, and his struggles to gain acceptance: They are both highly affected by the league's front man. You know, the one who didn't show.
In order to understand Kobe Bryant, we must understand how he is similar to and different from Michael Jordan. Certainly he in possession of the most Jordan-esque game since Jordan. His floor style is as evocative of MJ as anyone's has ever been. His combination of elasticity and control around the basket. The seemingly endless variety of ways he can create space to get an open mid-range look. His ability to muster unwavering focus and still actual casual. Come on, the man changed his number from 8 to 24, a gesture that has more than a little symbolic significance.
Meanwhile, the gaps between Jordan and Kobe can be found in two distinct areas: the postseason and the commercial break. The former is rather concrete, the latter more nebulous. Both gaps are narrowing.
The postseason gap is simply a question of arithmetic. Michael Jordan has six NBA championships. Kobe Bryant was stuck at three, but now he has five. The absence of Shaquille O'Neal for the most recent two is a factor, but more than anything, as Kobe demonstrates so clearly in the commercial described above, it's really about how many fingers it takes you to count.
Measuring Kobe's impact on the advertising world is more difficult.
For years he had no impact on the advertising world. The events of Eagle, Colorado made certain of that. But long after we had stopped thinking of Kobe as a rapist and focused in on his alpha-male style of play the major companies associated with the sporting world were still hesitant to adopt him.
The hesitancy on the part of companies like Nike and Gatorade to come to Kobe's aid is a critical moment in his story. Jordan has his fair share of shortcomings as well. The difference is we’ve been able to overlook the gambling, adultery, and vindictive Hall of Fame induction diatribes because the reservoir of positive PR his deep commercialization provides will never run dry. There is a lifetime supply of smiling images of Michael Jordan in our heads, reassuring us of the tastiness of our Big Macs, the comfort of our Hanes and, most importantly, the superiority of our sneakers.
For years Kobe lacked this protection. He earned it in the early 00s but lost it in Eagle, Colorado. He struggled to regain it because he struggled on the court (or, more accurately, the Lakers struggled). Two relatively tidy NBA titles later and suddenly he's earned it back. We're at a place where basketball is fun for Kobe Bryant again. Well, at least our friendly neighborhood multinationals want us to think it is.
There was a time and a place where it seemed that Kobe Bryant might never escape Jordan's shadow, that by anointing him "the next Jordan," we had doomed Bryant to a career in which every wrinkle of his would be excavated in an attempt to disprove such a weight prediction. But now Kobe's got his rings and he's got his commercials. Times are good.
[Graydon Gordian is a recent graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He is the founder and editor of 48 Minutes of Hell, a San Antonio Spurs blog. His work has been published by Hardwood Paroxysm, TrueHoop, the Rumble, the Huffington Post, Politics Daily, the Military Times, and UPI.]
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