A familiar Soul

Yesterday would have been Kobe Bryant's birthday. Today is 8/24. Every year, these two days bring his name back into the world a little louder. The photographs return. The highlights play again. People share his words, his performances, his mentality, and the memories they have attached to him. I understand why. He gave the world plenty to remember.

But when I think about Kobe, basketball has never really been the first thing I feel. Even when I was young, before I had enough life experience to understand exactly what I was sensing, I felt strangely connected to him. I don't know how else to describe it other than to say that something about his energy felt familiar to me. I didn't know him, of course, and I would never pretend that I did. But there was something in me that felt as though I recognized something in him. His soul, perhaps. That might sound strange. Maybe it is. But it is the most truthful way I know how to explain it.

Of course I loved watching him play basketball. How could you not? The movement, imagination, intensity, and willingness to take responsibility for a moment when everyone else wanted to escape it were incredible to witness. But even then, I was interested in the person underneath all of that. I wanted to hear him speak. I wanted to understand how he thought. I noticed the seriousness with which he approached things, but also the curiosity underneath it. There was an intensity that seemed to extend far beyond competition. I was a fan of the basketball player, but I think I was always more of a fan of the soul.

As I have gotten older, that feeling has become more interesting to me because parts of his life that I couldn't possibly have understood as a child have slowly begun appearing, in very different ways and on a very different scale, inside my own. I would never pretend that Kobe's story and mine are the same. They aren't. His accomplishments belong entirely to him, as do the experiences that shaped him. What I have noticed instead are strange symmetries. Not comparisons, but echoes. Pieces of another person's story that, years later, unexpectedly give language to pieces of your own.

Sport is one of those echoes, but perhaps not for the obvious reasons. Golf and basketball ask completely different things of an athlete, but I understand something about giving years of your life to details almost nobody else can see. I understand repetition. I understand believing that one small movement matters enough to spend hours trying to understand it. I understand finishing a practice and already thinking about what could have been done better. I understand how a pursuit can become so intertwined with identity that sometimes it becomes difficult to know where the athlete ends and the person begins.

I also understand isolation. There have been enormous stretches of my life spent practicing alone. For years, much of what I wanted existed only inside of me. There is a particular kind of solitude in pursuing something other people cannot see yet. People can love you, encourage you, and believe in you while still not completely understanding what you are chasing. Eventually, you become comfortable spending a great deal of time alone with yourself and with a future that, for now, exists mostly in your imagination. Maybe that is part of what I always recognized in Kobe. The world saw the performances. I was fascinated by whatever was happening when nobody else was around.

Then there is Italy. Kobe was an American whose childhood was profoundly shaped by years spent living in Italy before returning to the United States. My life has moved almost in the opposite direction. I grew up in America, and Italy entered my life later. It has become a place where I have trained, competed, built relationships, learned, changed, loved, and discovered pieces of myself I don't know that I would have found had I remained entirely inside the life I already understood. I sometimes think about that inversion. Italy helped shape the person Kobe eventually brought back to America. In my own much smaller story, Italy has expanded the person America sent there.

There is something about living between places that changes the way you see the world. Home becomes more complicated. Language becomes more interesting. Culture stops being something you observe and becomes something you participate in. You realize there are many ways to construct a meaningful life. That part of Kobe's story means considerably more to me today than it ever could have when I was young.

And then there is storytelling. This may be the symmetry that has surprised me most. Basketball wasn't the end of Kobe's curiosity. He created. He wrote. He told stories. He became interested in imagination and in communicating something through a medium other than the sport that made him famous. I understand that desire more and more. Golf matters enormously to me, but I have never wanted golf to be the only language through which I experience the world. I want to write. I want to tell stories. I want to understand people. I want to build things. I want to take what sport teaches me and allow it to travel somewhere beyond sport.

Maybe that is another reason my connection to Kobe has deepened rather than disappeared as I have gotten older. Things I once felt intuitively about him, I now have experiences through which to understand. But perhaps the most personal part of what Kobe means to me began when I was eighteen. In 2017, Kobe began appearing in my dreams. It is important to me that this began then, years before his death, because these dreams were never born from losing him. They were already part of my life, and they have continued ever since.

There is a familiarity to them that is difficult to put into words. In those dreams, he is rarely Kobe Bryant the basketball player. He feels more like a friend, sometimes an older brother, someone whose presence I know and whose perspective I trust. In a way, I think he has always been something of a North Star for me. Not someone whose life I have tried to replicate, and certainly not someone whose choices I have blindly followed, but a point of reference. There are moments when I am trying to understand a decision, a pursuit, a relationship, or the person I am becoming, and I find myself wondering what he might see in it. What question he might ask. What detail I am overlooking. Whether I am being honest with myself about what I really want.

Maybe that is why the dreams feel the way they do. Sometimes we walk together and talk for what feels like hours. We talk about life, the future, decisions I am trying to make, sport, love, work, purpose, and whatever else seems to be occupying my mind at the time. Sometimes he gives advice. Sometimes he listens. Other times we are on a basketball court together. There is no crowd and no game. We simply take turns shooting. One of us rebounds for the other, the ball changes hands, and we talk. We vent about our lives and our futures. We talk about where we are going, what we are trying to figure out, what worries us, and what we hope might be waiting ahead. I find it interesting that even there, basketball is rarely the subject of the conversation. Sport is simply where the conversation happens.

Sometimes there isn't a conversation at all. We see each other in passing and exchange a nod and a familiar smile, the kind shared between two friends who already know each other well enough that stopping isn't necessary, and then we continue in opposite directions. Those may actually be some of the dreams that stay with me most. There is no introduction, no excitement at seeing someone famous, no urgency to ask him something before the moment disappears. There is only recognition. There you are. And somehow, I know you.

I understand how strange that might sound. I know that I did not know Kobe in life, and I would never confuse what I experience internally with a relationship we actually had. But I also don't feel a need to dismiss something meaningful simply because I cannot explain exactly where it comes from. I don't know what the dreams mean. Maybe my mind has given a familiar face to the qualities and questions that have guided me for much of my life. Maybe the person I saw something in as a child eventually became a voice through which I sometimes speak to myself. Maybe when I need perspective, my mind reaches for someone whose energy has represented a certain kind of truth to me for as long as I can remember. Or maybe some things are allowed to remain unexplained. I increasingly think there is beauty in leaving room for that.

There are people we encounter whose energy reaches us before their accomplishments do. Something about the way they move through the world feels recognizable. We don't necessarily want to become them. We simply see something in them that awakens something in us. That is closer to what Kobe has always been for me. When I was young, I didn't have the language for isolation, identity, living between cultures, storytelling, or trying to understand who you might become beyond the thing you have spent your life pursuing. I simply knew there was something about this person that felt familiar. I think I always saw the person. I just understand more of what I was seeing now.

When I think about what Kobe represents in my life today, I don't immediately think about championships, points, trophies, or even basketball. I think about a standard. I think about curiosity, detail, creativity, storytelling, discipline, the courage to care enormously about something, the willingness to be alone with a pursuit for a while, the refusal to believe that being an athlete means you can only be an athlete, and the desire to keep discovering what else might exist inside of you.

And I think about impact, because eventually, no matter what we accomplish, the question becomes what any of it meant to other people. Kobe's life reached mine without him ever knowing it. His presence gave something to a kid he never met. Years later, that kid grew into a man who still occasionally looks toward him when trying to find his direction. There is something extraordinary about that.

I don't know exactly what my own life will become. There are still enormous things I want to accomplish. I want to see how far I can take my golf. I want to write stories worth reading. I want to build things that matter. I want to love people well. I want to remain curious enough that my identity never becomes a cage around everything else I might become. But by the end of my life, I hope the accomplishments are not the most important thing I leave behind.

I hope somewhere there is a person I may never meet who feels more capable of becoming themselves because of something I did. I hope a story I tell gives someone language for something they have been unable to explain. I hope the way I pursue my own life gives somebody else permission to pursue theirs. I hope kindness travels further than I ever get to see. And if I am fortunate enough to leave something meaningful behind, I hope it continues beyond the people who knew me personally, into children I will never meet, communities I will never visit, and generations that will know nothing about the ordinary days that created whatever they eventually receive.

Maybe that is the part of Kobe's legacy that means the most to me. Not simply that people remember him, but that people who never knew him were changed by him.

I am one of them.

Yesterday would have been his birthday. Today is 8/24. There will be photographs, highlights, quotes, jerseys, stories, and memories shared everywhere, as there should be. But when I close my eyes and think of Kobe, I don't immediately see him with a basketball in front of thousands of people. I see an empty court. A ball bouncing between two people. I take a shot. He gets the rebound. We keep talking. Or I see us walking somewhere without knowing exactly where we are going. Sometimes we simply pass each other, exchange a nod and a smile, and keep going.

Eventually I wake up, and the conversation ends before I am ready for it. But something usually remains. A thought. A question. Sometimes only a feeling. Then another day begins, and I continue walking.

And every once in a while, when I am not entirely sure which direction to go, I still look for my North Star.

Dino

Photo by Christopher Johnson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.