In a way, I’ll always feel tied to Kobe Bryant.
For years, I’ve liked to joke that my birthday is on a sacred day in Canada — Wayne Gretzky’s birthday. Seriously, there’s been talk in Canada over the years about declaring Jan. 26 Wayne Gretzky Day.
Jan. 26 is also Paul Newman’s birthday. One of his most famous movies was a hockey movie — “Slap Shot” — what an amazing coincidence. It’s also the birthday of Vince Carter, a future Hall of Fame basketball player who played most of his career in, you guessed it, Canada.
It’s also the birthday of Ellen DeGeneres, Douglas MacArthur and Eddie Van Halen. An amazing day. I don’t think any other day has so many famous birthdays.
It’s also my birthday. And now, it’s the day that Kobe Bryant was killed.
I have relatives and friends whose birthdays are on Dec. 7, Dec. 8 and Nov. 22 — Pearl Harbor, the days that John Lennon and John F. Kennedy were killed. And they’ve always told me it’s a weird feeling to have a birthday on an infamous day. Now I know how they feel.
There’s always going to be a “where were you…” element to Bryant’s death. I was working and got a message on Facebook when I found out. I checked the AP wires and there was nothing, then saw TMZ, which is a bit reckless but right more often than wrong about breaking news, was reporting it first.
I’m too young to remember JFK or Pearl Harbor, but I actually was one of those people watching Monday Night Football in 1980 when Howard Cosell announced that Lennon had been killed.
The only time I can think of something similar, such a sudden death of someone who was still young, was when Stevie Ray Vaughan, one of my favorite musicians, was killed in a helicopter crash in 1990. I was actually home sick with the flu and bronchitis when it came on the news.
These are the deaths you remember for some reason. Not of the people who were older and sick. I can’t even remember where I was or what I was doing when David Stern died and that was only a couple of weeks ago.
Maybe the tragedy feels heavier. Kobe Bryant had a whole other post-basketball life ahead of him with a family to raise and basketball camps to run. Many people don’t realize he had actually won an Oscar for a short documentary film. Perhaps he had a future as an artist and filmmaker.
It all made Sunday a profoundly sad day, especially after hearing Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter and another child were also killed. Also among the dead was John Altobelli, a longtime college baseball coach from Orange County.
For whatever reason, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard that Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain had killed themselves, and Cornell’s death in particular hit me heard, but I’ll always remember the moment I heard about Kobe Bryant’s death. Maybe because it was my birthday.
Kobe Bryant kind of came after the era that I stopped being really enraptured with the NBA. I was a huge fan of the Showtime Lakers and their battles with the Boston Celtics were absolutely legendary. Back then, you would have to watch the NBA Finals games until 2 a.m. on tape delay and I would actually stay up that late watching and get really angry that CBS wouldn’t show the games live. That’s how big of a fan I was.
I continued to be an NBA fan through the Michael Jordan era, but the game got too slow and too defensive for me and I got tired of seeing games with scores like 85-78. Seriously, for you kids out there, that was the average NBA final score in about 1995. Thank goodness the Warriors came along and opened the game back up.
But even through those times, I still always watched the NBA Finals and Kobe Bryant was in a lot of those. And he was truly amazing. It will be a sad week in the NBA and the world became a little bit of a darker place this week.
