PHILADELPHIA _ On the day after Kobe Bryant died, a friend and high school classmate of mine sent me an email that carried the force of a punch I couldn't see coming. "Thought you'd find this interesting," Ben Relles wrote. Embedded in the message was a link to a 36-second video. I clicked on the link, then gasped.
On the right side of the video's split-screen shot was Kobe, wearing a charcoal hoodie, sitting at an expansive cherry desk, riveted to flickering images on a laptop. He was in the executive offices of YouTube, where Ben was working to find original content for the platform. Kobe had come to the company's Southern California headquarters in January 2018 to pitch a show based on Wizenard, a series of children's books he had created that combined the themes of sports, fantasy and magic. As it turned out, YouTube wasn't funding children's programming at the time and didn't buy the show, but "it was genuinely one of the most impressive pitches I've heard," Ben said. "He was incredibly passionate about the idea and clearly hands-on in every aspect of it."
On the video's left side were the images that had grabbed Kobe's attention: footage of a high school basketball game from 1992, Lower Merion vs. my alma mater, Upper Dublin. Ben and I were seniors then. He was a backup forward on the team. I was an editor of the student newspaper and lacked the skills and athleticism to play organized ball beyond intramurals. Kobe Bryant was a freshman at Lower Merion. It was the first game of his high school career.
In those 36 seconds, an Upper Dublin player close to the camera, the No. 24 gigantic on the back of his red jersey, whipped a crosscourt pass to a teammate, Ari Greis, who caught the ball on the right wing, used a left-handed dribble to surge past Kobe, and banked in a floater from the lane. A family friend of Ben's had filmed the game, and Ben, having kept the tape all these years and knowing he would be sitting down with Kobe, had converted the recording to a digital file. Then, once the YouTube meeting had ended, Ben had played the footage on the laptop, and one of his coworkers had taken care to capture Kobe's reaction to it. There it all was, in cosmic juxtaposition. You could watch Kobe, as a 39-year-old, watch himself, as a 14-year-old, in real time.
"That is hilarious," he said. "Great defense, Kob. ... That's horrible defense. ... You can replay that all f------ day. ... Oh. My. God. ... Nawwwww! ... That's funny. ... We only won four games that year."
Memory is a gift often hidden away within a box locked tight, and that game film was the gliding, turning key, allowing Kobe access to sights, sounds, places and people made tactile and intimate again, allowing me the same. I posted the link on my Facebook page immediately. I posted it because Kobe was in it, but mostly because someone else was, too.
