Growing up in Philadelphia, I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard the name Kobe Bryant. It was the last day of a mid-year dance camp and the boss welcomed a group of stars from the local secondary school to play a scrimmage in the evening as we saw, with the intention of getting some tips. The vast majority of them headed to school in later years on their path to the NBA and were essentially living out our fantasies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Be that as it may, it was the skinny 15-year-old from Lower Merion High School who had all the more accomplished kids in the cafeteria humming. He won't go to college anyway, they said. He will go directly to the championship. In fact, even in those days, I was aware enough to know that it all seemed a little unrealistic. At that point Kobe turned to everyone. Plus, we immediately knew we were looking at something great. As the next few years passed it became clear that he was destined for extraordinary things. We went away one night during the week to watch him face future NBA champion Richard Hamilton in the season-ending state games and butted in jealously when he took pop star Brandy to prom. Over the next two decades, we saw how the ball prodigy with unimaginably clean play from our driving edge turned out to be, surely, an overwhelming figure in the world game. Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday, aged 41. , he was wild on the field, which probably only amplified his flaws. However, when we confront the false idea that competitors are good examples and not something that advertising divisions created to sell more tennis shoes, we can calmly assess exactly where Bryant stands in the pantheon of incredible American competitors. The short answer is above, in the unusual mononymous behavior of Tiger, Serena, LeBron. Bryant played the entirety of his 20-year professional career in Los Angeles for one of the NBA's blue-lace structures. Arguably the biggest names in b-ball's entire existence have suited up for the Lakers as the years have passed, including Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James. Be that as it may, only Bryant, of these names, spent his entire professional career in purple and gold, winning five NBA titles and stepping down as the team's unrivaled leader in at least twelve real classes. Tim Duncan, who also won five plays in a profession that by and large covered that of Bryant, was simply the better player, yet a destructive, thoughtful person with a workmanlike game who toiled in a small San Antonio market he couldn't come close to the star power of Kobe, a razor-sharp, made-for-Hollywood player who came to embody the Michael Jordan-LeBron connection in the NBA's legacy of radiant alphas. Bryant's detractors criticized him as disingenuous and image-fixated. His on-court introduction seemed to be an intentional duplication of Jordan's (actually pretty difficult!), from the performative steal to the uniform number swapping. There was his strange penchant for self-made nicknames: like Black Mamba (which stuck) and Vino (which went the right way). To experts, he seemed to be a bit of a tough guy, making him ideally suited to the way the vast majority of Americans view Los Angeles. However, there was nothing inauthentic about Bryant's strength..