Kobe: The man in the Arena
Kobe: The man in the Arena
“Oh My God,” the Snapchat message said. From my son. Something about Kobe. I thought it would be followed by his selfie with Kobe.
“Kobe Died”
I felt something in my stomach. He wouldn’t say that unless he knew it wasn’t a prank, some social media stupidity.
I opened Twitter to see the flood of messages. And then ESPN.
It is hard to explain our emotions, the cause of pain, of losing people who were never a physical part of our lives, flesh, and blood in front of us. I was transfixed and devastated. I could not believe it.
For a cricket, crazy sports addicted Chennai transplant in the early nineties Silicon Valley, the go-to sport was football and the Niners. MJ was great and we followed the Bulls but for me, the arrival of Kobe was the beginning of my love for basketball.
The Lakers were in my living room and Kobe front and center. There he was digitally in our presence, in front of us from November to June every single year for 20 years.
I cried. As did millions who have never met him. A tough loss.
“You have to dance beautifully in the box that you're comfortable dancing in. My box was to be extremely ambitious within the sport of basketball. Your box is different than mine. Everybody has their own. It's your job to try to perfect it and make it as beautiful of a canvas as you can make it. And if you have done that, then you have lived a successful life. You have lived with Mamba Mentality.”
That was Kobe. Even as he walked into the sunset of his sport, he awoke to a promising dawn of being a dad. And what a bright shining day it was to be. And then it wasn’t.
The incongruity and dissonance of a near-perfect human perishing in a pool of fire, an accident of time and weather, shakes the very foundation of our belief in an imaginative immortality of superstars.
Kobe was probably too valuable to the man upstairs to be left with mere mortals on Mother Earth.
He leaves behind so many lessons of life in his short stint here, striving to be a winner, dancing in your box as best as you could. A dream wasn’t an end state for him. A dream was the process, a ritual of hard work a no-compromise, single-minded devotion to be the best you can be at whatever you do.
He had his critics many who have never touched a basketball.
To me, he was the embodiment of Roosevelts “Man in the Arena”.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
We miss you, Kobe. I am sure you are dancing in your box in God’s Arena.