Staunchly, vol. 122: We Get the Knees
2/4/20
Hi all,
I’m currently regrouping and resetting at a cabin in the woods. Off-brand, I know, but not a metaphor. I am actually in a cabin.
I have tried really hard during the past week to work out my feelings around Kobe’s death. I can’t say I’ve come to any grand conclusions, only the realization of how powerfully the news and the subsequent debates over his crime and his legacy have affected me. The following is an (excessively hefty) essay I wrote in which I explore what Kobe meant to me, and means to me, in death.
Will be back soon with regular Staunchly content. We really need to talk about Cheer.
xoxo
We Get the Knees
Pollution portmanteau. SMAZE. (52-Down)
My mom and I have a ritual. I drive to her house on Sunday mornings. We read the paper, watch MSNBC, do the crossword, and comment on the appearances of the weekend anchors (“Wow, they did her eyes too heavy today” or “Alex’s highlights are softer now, they just needed some time”). Impeachment coverage becomes white noise as we struggle through clues. My sibling starts making something very complex and scientific on the counter behind us, soaking cherries in rum or measuring out precise amounts of the special flour they had shipped from northern California.
“That ship has sailed.” TOOLATE. (78-Aross)
Last week was no different. My sibling collected their pans for the day and checked their sourdough starter. My dog, whose balls never dropped, squeak-barked at a squirrel, who proceeded to take a leap of faith off the wisteria branch, parkour from the spongy mesh of the Italian cypress trees, and emerge safely on the neighbor’s side of the fence. Louie lost his shit. I noticed something new and blue in the garden. The rosemary was flowering. I walked down to smell it and admire its tiny blue buds. I remembered reading somewhere that rosemary is both an antiseptic and a symbol of remembrance, which feels impossible, because some memories are septic. I still haven’t figured out what to do with rotten memories.
“How disastrous!” OHNO. (59-Down)
Back in the kitchen, MSNBC had switched from the trial to news of a helicopter crash in Calabasas. Zoomed-in footage of a wreck in the brush. I recognized the canyon, or at least I thought I did. If I could recognize the canyon, I thought, this whole thing must be too small and local for national news. The helicopter smoked. The anchor offered no details. I wondered if we were waiting for a wildfire to start. We so rarely get crisp, live footage of the birth of a disaster.
“A fickle food,” per Emily Dickinson. FAME. (116-Across)
I noticed my phone had been lighting up with texts. I checked them, even though I usually don’t on a Sunday morning. One friend had typed, I’m so sorry. Another linked to a TMZ article: Um, this is bullshit, yeah? Another sent a screenshot from the Wikipedia page, “Kobe Bryant sexual assault case,” from which she’d pulled out a quote of his: My hands are strong. I don’t know.
Soon his face was on the TV screen.
Kobe Bryant, at 41. DEAD.
***
Being a Lakers fan was the closest I ever came to having a faith. I went to church every other day after school. I sat in front of the TV in my bedroom with two Diet Cokes and my math homework. I almost failed calculus. I tried to read Hamlet between quarters. I got a B in an AP English class I could have taught.
Derek Fisher was my favorite. I maintain his game-winning jump-shot in the 2004 western conference semifinals with 0.4 seconds on the clock in the house of the Spurs is the single greatest athletic feat of my lifetime. When I was thinking about my first tattoo a few years ago, I strongly considered the words Kobe + Fish held in the outline of a heart. My friend Melanie wisely told me it sounded like a surf and turf order at a fancy restaurant with internationally imported beef. Friends are a blessing.
I also had loves that were not so everlasting. I famously got crushes on the weirdest players to walk through the Laker tunnel. Brian Shaw sank three-pointers like hot butter through a sieve and had big, watery eyes you could swim in. Citing safety concerns, the security guards at the southwest VIP entrance once confiscated a “MARRY ME CHRIS MIHM!” sign I had labored over for hours. Most mortifyingly, one year a friend’s dad called me during a championship game expressing justifiable surprise: “Your boy is killing it!” He was referring to Ukrainian power forward Slava Medvedenko. (Shortly after the phone call he did, indeed, stop killing it—which is classic Slava). This memory is such a humbling reminder that my taste has not been kind to me.
I stuck to Derek Fisher and my rotating cast of weirdos because I sensed an underdog tenderness to them, or I just thought they were hot (Mihm, yikes). Also because I believed on principle that Kobe couldn’t be your favorite Laker player. In hindsight, and with anachronism, I can’t think of anything more basic. Your favorite star can’t be “North.”
***
To watch Kobe play was to witness a man capable of the sublime. Just thinking about it now collapses my breath. He was the opposite of a crash. He was so sharp and precise and intense and almost scary, when he got that look in his eye, when he became Black Mamba, when he did that thing with his jaw, sticking it out and screwing it open like he was making room in his mouth to swallow a weaker man’s dreams. He was a Leo. Imagine a snake that roars.
I think it’s particularly hard to incorporate his death into my reality because he seemed indestructible. It is easier for me to picture him emerging, limping from the wreckage, telling himself to walk it off, than it is for me to accept the opposite. How could I? For years, he made game-winning threes on injuries that would have sidelined other players for the rest of a season. His right knee was so skimmed of cartilage at one point it was described as playing “bone on bone.” Bone on bone. He split his body for our entertainment, our Laker pride. For me.
Writing that now, it’s impossible not to see a racial element in all this, a sort of Get Out lite. Kobe threw all his strength at the court. And who was there to watch? Front rows of extraordinarily rich white fans, close enough to smell the sweat and see the tendons snap. Laker fans are as diverse as the city, but the racial striation from courtside to nosebleed exemplifies the power structures of elite athletics at play: Black athletes get millions of dollars. We get their knees.
***
Twitter is not a place for mourners. We all relearn this when there is communal mourning to be done. Online grief is not digestible. What got me this time though, was the smugness. The rush of white feminists to claim the space of absolute moral truth, to arbitrarily assign themselves judge and jury and thus deliver a final, posthumous ruling on a man who meant so much to so many people, including millions and millions of people of color. As tweet after tweet rolled in, I thought: Kobe is not the villain you’re looking for. And also: why you?
Within minutes of the announcement of Kobe’s death, it became clear that the dominant take among white feminists on Twitter was: We don’t mourn rapists. They were referring to the sexual assault allegations filed against Kobe by a 19-year old hotel worker in Eagle, Colorado in July 2003, for which he was never formally convicted. He said the sex was consensual; she said it was not. So, by definition, it was not. She had bruises around her neck, presumably from those strong hands, which she said tightened their grip around her every time she said no.
I believe her. I also believe, on a gut level, he didn’t mean to hurt her, which does not diminish the tremendous pain he caused or the impact of a life derailed. I believe he couldn’t conceive of someone not wanting it, at a time when his brain was so clogged with youth and power and fame and sex and ego and all the ways we build up black athletes into gods so long as they keep sinking threes in our basket. Which makes everyone who has ever watched a sport, myself included, complicit in this woman’s suffering. And yet, I’m also hesitant to call it suffering, because I don’t know this woman, and it seems condescending for me to presume a universal response to rape that saw this woman’s life ruined, the woman herself ruined, by a night in Denver. I respect her pain, but I do not know it. Because it is hers.
Others believe, on the level of their own personal gut, Kobe did intend to hurt her, or he cared so little for her personhood it’s almost worse. Our guts will never be able to resolve this. To the effect that correctness on Twitter means total alignment with one’s demographic, I immediately knew I was going to be on the wrong side of this one.
When I say that white feminists were tweeting, “We don’t mourn rapists,” I am being intentionally reductive. The women weren’t saying that in a bubble (they also weren’t all women). They were trying to claim space in a moment that was dominated by fawning coverage of a complicated man. But in response, they weren’t saying he was complicated—at least on my timeline. They were saying he was bad. One friend compared him to Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby and O.J. Simpson. (She couldn’t think of three examples that weren’t all black men?) Any illusion of nuance evaporated.
I understand why. After literal millennia of women’s pain meaning shit to anyone, we finally have a moment. We are deep in a reckoning. We are stripping away (very, very slowly) power as a protectant. Everything is at stake. The era requires broad strokes. Nuance distracts from a narrative of the world as one folded down the middle by people who cause pain and people who receive it. A world of victims and abusers. As a victim of abuse myself, I have found this narrative intermittently comforting and false.
Before Kobe’s death it was so much easier for me to write off men with allegations of misconduct as “trash,” because I felt no personal connection to them, and, well, there have been pretty obvious cases of trashdom. I didn’t watch the Cosby show. My taste outgrew the Woody Allen movies that were once so precious to me. Harvey Weinstein has always looked like he an ogre who eats babies for breakfast and rapes princesses in castles.
This is the first time since the beginning of the #MeToo movement that I have thoughtfully sat with the idea of male redemption. I hadn’t really cared before. I don’t have answers now. But I believe we do a disservice to everyone, victims included, when we lump men like Kobe Bryant, who did not display a pattern of behavior that suggested he thought of women as chattel, with men like O.J. Simpson, who beat the shit out of his wife for years before he murdered her, stabbing her so many times she was found with her head practically detached from her body. I don’t know how to talk to people who think these men are the same kind of men.
Even amongst all the comparisons of Kobe to serial rapists, serial pedophiles, and a murderer, the tweet that finally got me to delete Twitter from my phone was a dumb joke from someone I like. I can’t find it now—I think it’s been deleted—but it went something like:
Ok but what kind of monster takes a helicopter from orange county to downtown???
It’s a joke that incorporates two of my favorite references in comedy: SoCal geography and the eccentricities of very rich people.
I suppose I would have laughed if it weren’t in reference to a still-smoking helicopter crash that killed nine people, including Kobe’s daughter Gianna and two other teenage girls who just really loved basketball.
***
In return for Kobe’s talent and loyalty all those years, I offered to hate for him. He didn’t ask for it, but I did it anyways. I hated the Celtics (that was almost too easy). The Heat. The Trail Blazers. I tried to hate the Spurs but you try hating Tim Duncan.
Of course, as a true fan, my deepest, most ferocious hate was reserved for the Sacramento Kings. At home games I dutifully called them, “the Queens.” (Mindless homophobia was an essential ingredient at Staples Center in the three-peat days). I boycotted America’s Next Top Model because Tyra Banks was dating Chris Webber. I laughed every time Vlade Divac’s giant, shaggy body hit the floor; screamed, “flopper,” as he rolled around on his butt, clutching his knee in pain (to be fair, he is a famous and extremely unconvincing flopper). I delighted when Mike Bibby’s face met Kobe’s elbow during the ’02 series, and booed when he took too long to get up—his nose swelling with blood. At a young age, I learned the real difference between tragedy and comedy is your guy falling versus theirs.
Sports make us a home but they also make us so dumb. I recognize that now, a good decade away from the height of my Laker mania, as I watch fandoms reabsorb bad, abusive men into their folds because they play a good game. 15 years ago I was the hysterical fan: rabid, purple-faced, screaming, “Go home, Queens!” at the players from Sactown.
Was I one of those fans who absolved a man of his crimes because he played for my team? Probably. I was 13 when Kobe sexually assaulted a woman in Denver. I was 13—Gianna’s age—and I really just needed Kobe to be good. I needed it so bad, it made any dissent impossible. Necessity bred tunnel vision. It hurts to say it but I think I probably hated his accuser back then, too. She wasn’t on our team.
I’ll say it’s all much more complicated, now that I believe her. Because I love and miss a man who did this. It’s easier not to believe.
***
Today I look at pictures of Kobe with his daughters and I ache. I have to believe Kobe was more than the worst thing he ever did. No, I’m telling you I have to.
***
I was reminded last week in all of the coverage of Kobe’s death why he was even in Colorado in July in the first place. Knee surgery in Vail. Bone on bone.