Kobe Bryant And The End

In the beginning, he came across as a fun-loving kid. He wasn't, of course. Kobe Bean Bryant had to work hard to make it look like nothing bothered him, especially during his troubled rookie season.

I was there the night Bryant scored his first NBA field goal, a three-pointer, in Charlotte Coliseum, in December of 1996. He bounced into the locker room after the game and hit me with a soul shake, a little skin, the hooked fingertips, and a tug. He had no earthly idea who I was. Just some guy with a notepad and a recorder. But he was eager to greet the world.

Later that year, I sat alone with Bryant in a locker room in Cleveland; he was waiting to compete in the Slam Dunk Championship at the NBA's 50th Anniversary Party and eager to pass the empty time he spent waiting to go on stage. We discussed his situation as the poster child for a generation of new talent coming into the league, much of it very young. He talked of the difficulties, the expectations, the hazards of the many temptations in Los Angeles for a player who was just 18 years old.

Bryant talked about how deeply Magic Johnson's HIV announcement had affected him at age 13, about how he would avoid the corruption that Johnson would later admit had him sleeping with 300 to 500 people every year.

"With me, it's simple," Bryant told me, "because there's a lot I want to accomplish in my life."

Minutes later, he would leave our relaxed, thoughtful locker room conversation behind and put on an energetic performance to win the Slam Dunk Contest, a performance that both hinted at and further stoked his burning ambition.

The next year, Bryant would be voted a starter in the All-Star Game, despite the fact that he didn't even start for the Lakers. That would be followed by a disastrous 1999 season, which saw Lakers owner Jerry Buss blow up an extremely talented team that seemed to be headed nowhere. In the middle of the chaos, Bryant was a very lost, lonely, frustrated 20 year old.

"I just want to be the man," he told me, reaffirming his goal of making himself into the NBA's top player. "I don't know how I'm going to get there. I just have to find a way."

And he would. Bryant now looks back at the numbers he racked up in 20 seasons and declares he has "a seat at the table" with the game's greatest. He has passed his idol, Michael Jordan, to sit at No. 3 on the league's list all-time scoring list, behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. He has helped lead the Lakers to five NBA titles, made 17 appearances on the All-Star team, and become a player who other players idolize.

The answer Bryant found to that question long ago—how was he going to get to the top—was the answer he had known all along. He would grind his way there, implacably. This was the job and life he chose: to relentlessly grind away at the challenges of the sport, night after night, game after game, until finally, all these years and shots later, he came up against the limits of time and age.

His ultimate defeat, the decline of Bryant's game in the wake of Achilles surgery and an array of other injuries, has been absolutely shocking this season to just about everyone—except the coterie of his former Lakers coach, New York Knicks president Phil Jackson, who knew the insane wear and tear through which Bryant repeatedly, near-compulsively put himself through over his career, would be his undoing.

For the first time in his life, Kobe Bryant is absolutely and completely exposed on the court, and lost in a place that had always been his ultimate refuge.

The sudden announcement of his retirement at season's end was an odd, awkward acknowledgement of the obvious. He no longer has the physical ability to play the game at anything remotely near his previous level, and is hanging on by the slimmest of grips. He announced his retirement in a love letter he wrote to the game, published Sunday, acknowledging his obsessive passion for the sport.

The Lakers are terrible and off to a 2-14 start, which means their season will almost certainly come to a merciful end in April. In the meantime, there's a problem: Bryant sounds like an addict, still very much intoxicated, who is promising to quit his debauchery in another four months.

The circumstances pit his one-time greatness against his current pathos, and they threaten to drive Bryant crazy—after all, this is a man who promised several years ago to play "til the wheels fall off" and to never engage in the sad act of traveling from one NBA city to another, seeking and receiving kudos and retirement gifts. Bryant is down to that now; there is nothing else left. His ability is badly eroded, his game no longer relevant in the way he had made it supremely relevant for so many years, with a ferocious talent honed by work and will.

Aloof and uncompromising, brilliant and self-confident, Bryant stands alone as the grand enigma of American professional basketball, and in my estimation the most driven competitor in the history of the game. The other names on that short list—Jerry West? Bill Russell? Jordan?—suggest just how great Bryant's will helped him become. A basketball fanatic who over the seasons would gain a reputation among the sport's insiders as an absolute master of study and intense preparation, Bryant was always possessed of a singular focus and attention to detail that astonished those around him.

It winnowed and narrowed his life. Bryant churned out immense conflict, just about all of it the by-product of his push to dominate the sport. Night after game night, day after day, for two decades, through injury and turmoil, through the rupture of one key relationship after another, he proved over and over that he would pay any price to have his greatness.

It was an effort that no other player, not even the great Jordan, could claim to match. Nor would likely have wanted to.

From the earliest age, Bryant's father, former NBA player Joe "Jellybean" Bryant had sought to establish in his son a supreme confidence. It remains his trademark. Impenetrable and unshakeable, Bryant's self-belief is the one trait that clearly outranks his contemporaries. Psychologist George Mumford, who has worked extensively with Jordan and Bryant, says "it puts him in his own category."

Confidence has guided Bryant through his early struggles as a teenager in the NBA; through his battles with teammate Shaquille O'Neal and coach Phil Jackson; through rape charges in 2003; through his conflicts with and estrangement from his parents and even a lawsuit against his mother to stop the auction of jerseys and other memorabilia from his playing career; and later through his battle back from serious injuries. It has been the backbone of his 81-point game, of his many game-winning shots, of his MVP performances, of his total lack of conscience on any given night.

Self-belief is largely the reason that Bryant made a regular practice over his career of playing through the sort of pain that put others on the injured list, Mumford says, and it remained in place because Bryant virtually excluded any challenge to it. "He won't allow himself to deal with any contrary view," Mumford says. Circumstances he cannot bend or change have now forced that view upon him.

It's time to go, and Bryant knows it. For the player who never, never, never slacked, now is not the time to begin, to cling to the league out of the fear of age and infirmity and loss.

The awkwardness of Bryant's press conference in the wake of yet another Lakers loss Sunday night spoke loudly. He says that in his post-basketball career he wants to tell stories, to turn back to the writing talents he discovered as a youth.

A good start to that would be learning how to author the right ending to his playing days.

Now is the time, I think, for Bryant to step away. Not April. Now. After his upcoming game in his hometown of Philadelphia. One last hurrah. Bryant wanted to accomplish a lot, and he did. He wanted to be the man. He was. The wheels finally have come off—as they do for us all—and there's nothing left to prove, nothing remaining but a gauzy farewell tour he'd clearly detest. Maybe that's what fans want. One last goodbye. Appreciative, sympathetic applause. Personally, and from what I know of Kobe Bean Bryant, I can only hope that a player who had the courage to face so many big moments fearlessly can find the stones to step away sooner rather than later, the better to get on with the next phase of his life.

Whenever that happens, I also hope Bryant can begin it like that first night of his first big bucket in Charlotte—with big bright eyes for the future.

Roland Lazenby is the author of "Mad Game: The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant" and "Michael Jordan: The Life," among other books.