THE RISE

A winning portrait of Kobe Bryant (1978-2020) in his formative years.

“Remember this name: Kobe Bryant.” In 1992, that’s what a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote when he saw Bryant in action. He was far from being the star that he would become. Scouts noted that he was scrawny and comparatively weak, and one of his opponents said, “He wasn’t athletic. He was just tall….He wasn’t anything special at that age, to be honest with you.” Even so, veteran Philadelphia sportswriter Sielski notes, young Kobe was very nearly foreordained to play pro basketball. His father, Joe Bryant, had logged service with the Sixers and later moved the family to Italy so that he could play professionally there. Naturally enough, for young Kobe, “immersion in basketball began in the earliest days of his life.” Numerous themes that would appear later in the young man’s life emerge. One is his unparalleled work ethic: As a high schooler and then, in the closing pages of this account, as a rookie, he demanded championship play of his teammates, and he practiced endlessly under the tutelage of his father and a phalanx of coaches and trainers. Another is an arrogance born of insecurity, evidenced by “a seventeen-year-old prima donna dictating terms to the entire NBA.” Some of the author’s set pieces are rote play-by-play accounts of critically important games, and these are less interesting reading, overall, than the between-the-lines hints of what made Bryant tick as a human and as a player. By Sielski’s account, he was an ambitious, motivated young man with an interest in writing poetry and a talent for self-promotion (and later for the good works of philanthropy), but he was also someone that, as one man who knew him in his earlier days, demanded attention: “People kissed this dude’s ass from the time he was eighteen until his dying day.”

A fine study of a legendary athlete in the making, of interest to any fan of basketball.