I (heart) Kobe

I can’t think of a better person to take the last shot on my team than that Kobe Bryant guy. It just might be that I am one of the few Kobe lovers on the planet. Because, unlike my friend Jack, I can forgive Kobe his indiscretions. I am able to forgive the fact that he was the biggest punk, bitch, asshole this side of Danny Ainge.
That’s not really fair to Danny Ainge. Kobe is the biggest bitch since Sammy “The Bull” spilled it on Gotti. “The Ocho” told the investigators in Colorado that Shaq just paid off the women that he raped. There, I said it. He told police men that his teammate rapes women and pays them off. Maybe I’m paraphrasing, but man if that were my homie he would be capped or some kind of street justice.
See, Kobe, isn’t from the street and that has always been his fatal flaw. Kobe learned to be black in Italy. I’m sorry but they still call blacks Carthaginians in Italy. There is no angry black street population in Italy. Everyone is happy and living La Dolce Vita. On top of that his dad was basketball royalty. So there is no “mean streets of Florence” in Kobe. There isn’t any of the “my daddy left when I was six” anger. There’s none of the indigenous distrust of the white man.
Even when he came to the states he was living in Upper Merion which is like living in, well, Upper Merion. For God’s sake, his idol as a boy was Mike D’Antoni. That in itself is just sad.
So how do you expect this kid from Italy to come here and be able to relate to the American black experience? He can’t and he never will. This is a kid who didn’t get the same cultural indoctrination like an Allen Iverson or Tracy McGrady or Shaq. The only person who can come close is Grant Hill and look what happened to him.
There are a lot of people (Jack included) who will traipse out all these stats about Kobe and how his shooting percentage is not so good, how he shot us out of games early in his career and how he ran Shaq out of town. Listen, it takes two to tango and Shaq was as big a baby, if not worse since he was older, than Kobe. For me the bottom line was, Shaq ate his way out of L.A. He couldn’t stay in shape. If you look at Kobe’s stats versus MJ’s at this point in their careers and Kobe’s stacks up just fine.
So as a white guy I think it’s my duty to like Kobe. I mean, the white guys are the only ones he has left. Lord knows there isn’t a black man in the Western Hemisphere that will admit to liking Kobe.
I like his tenacity. I like his fearlessness. I like that he tried to buy his wife’s trust back with a diamond ring. He’s my kind of cheater. And he’s going to bring my Lakers back. Right? I’ll give him two more years and then I’m going to have to pull the plug. I mean, did I tell you what he said about Shaq?