My Beef With Kobe

If you have listened to me whine here for years about Kobe Bryant, you understand that my issues with him as a basketball player run a little deeper than whose uniform he happens to be wearing. For those of you less familiar with my rant, I will attempt to distill it into its essence: He left high school to join the NBA. This put a gigantic hole in my argument to ten year olds that they should look to possible alternative career paths other than hoops. Kobe could do it, after all. Why not them?
If you slept through this past weekend and missed the news, Mister Bryant and his thirteen year old daughter were among the victims of a helicopter crash just north of Los Angeles. All eight passengers and the pilot perished. And ESPN stopped to tell the story. All day long. Along with a great portion of the rest of America and basketball fans across the world. These were parents and children who died on their way to a basketball game.
Like so much of the rest of the country, I was caught up in the media event that was The Crash. Presidents tweeted about it. Movie and recording stars stopped making movies and recording albums to ponder their existence in a world without Kobe Bryant. Mourners who gathered outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles threatened to overwhelm the crowds gathered for that night's Grammy Awards. This was an event of epic proportions. This was an enormous media event.
So here is the friction that I feel: Like the way that kids at my school could look at Kobe and imagine themselves flying above the rim, without strings or the weight of a college degree, I have a twinge anytime someone falls from the sky in a small aircraft. That is how I lost my father. It isn't the flying that is so difficult, ask any member of Wile E. Coyote's pack, it's the landing. The speed and force involved in slipping the surly bonds of earth are as profound as any we know. I believe we should all be surprised when humans take off and land in one piece, which puts a solid crimp in my dreams of owning a flying car.
And speaking of dreams, here is what I want to say: When I dream of flying, it is very matter of fact. I don't have to race to reach escape velocity. I don't have to flap my arms furiously to stay afloat. Mostly I just hang there, not unlike those slow motion videos of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant leaping into the air. I don't worry about the landing. I will have time for that when my flight is over.
If man were truly meant to fly, he would do it on the basketball court.
Aloha, Kobe Bryant. You didn't so much stomp on the Terra but hang above it.