R.I.P. to the unlikeliest Oscar winner

Kobe Bryant was always a villain in my world.

I lived in Los Angeles during most of his career with the Los Angeles Lakers, but the Lakers were not my team. I grew up in Boston, so not only were the Lakers not my team, they were the mortal enemy of my team. They were the Yankees to my Red Sox. They were the Republicans to my Democrats. Whatever binary you wanted to choose, they were on the other side of it from me.

And Bryant broke my heart a couple times. Yeah, the Celtics got the best of him in their matchup in the 2008 finals, the only championship the Celtics have won since the days of Larry Bird. But Bryant turned the tables on pretty much the same roster two years later, helping his Lakers win a finals series that the Celtics had led 3 games to 2. It crushed me.

What was worse, Bryant's Lakers had also won the year before, meaning the 2010 championship put them only one behind the Celtics' record total of 17. Unlike with the Sox-Yankees rivalry, where our nine championships trail their 27 by an insurmountable margin, this was a real rivalry on level playing ground. And the Lakers were knocking at the door of unseating the Celtics for all-time supremacy.

Bryant was, in many ways, the face of that.

Neither team has won again, leaving the Celtics with that slimmest of margins, though the teams could play again this year, with the Celtics led by Kemba Walker and the Lakers led by Lebron James. None of the players on those 2008 to 2010 teams are still playing on either roster.

Amazing as he was, Kobe Bryant could possibly still be on this Lakers team, as he was only 41 at the time of his death on Sunday. But injuries did eventually get the best of him and he retired in 2016, with a whopping 20 NBA seasons under his belt.

Bryant's death is the kind of thing that cuts across all culture, from sports to entertainment, and has obviously been a front-page news item the world over. Basketball is reaching to farther corners of this earth than almost any sport nowadays, save soccer, and Bryant was one of its ambassadors. Maybe not always for his attitude, behavior or personal life -- don't forget he was accused of rape back in 2003 -- but as one of the hands-down best players of all time. When one of arguably the five best in any pursuit dies, the world takes notice.

Still, it didn't occur to me that there was a reasonable way to memorialize him on my film blog until I remembered that he was also an Oscar winner.

Very improbably it seemed at the time, in 2018, Kobe Bryant won an Academy Award for best animated short film for his 2017 film Dear Basketball. He wasn't the director, as that credit went to Gil Keane, but he did write and narrate the film, which was based on a heartfelt letter Bryant wrote and read as the announcement of his impending retirement.

What made the win so unlikely is that no professional athlete had ever won an Oscar of any kind, and he was also the first African-American winner of the best animated short feature award. To me, it also just didn't seem like something Kobe would be involved with, even if it was, essentially, a celebration of himself.

But what a celebration. In glorious, swirling, pencil-drawn animation, the film dramatizes the subjects Bryant touched on in his letter, such as the genesis of his love for the sport, his attempts to play it to the best of his ability, and his ultimate need to yield to the realities of a body that would no longer allow him to play at the highest level. And though it is, indeed, an essentially self-centered enterprise, his words expressed a modesty and a humility that Bryant did not always display in press conferences or other public appearances. He seemed genuinely grateful to have had the opportunity, and never considered himself bigger than the sport that made him famous.

And that's kind of when I became a Kobe Bryant fan. I was touched by this little project that had grown out of a similarly touching expression of his heart. It struck the right tone and it contained just the right quantity of wonder, perhaps in no small part due to Keane's history as a Disney animator.

I've said before that retired Republican politicians tend to grow on me, even someone I considered as loathsome at the time as George W. Bush. While I do expect the current occupant of the White House to be an exception to that rule, he may be one of the few. Bob Dole was/is a particular example of someone who seemed really problematic when he was running for the presidency, but by the time he was out of office, he was kind of alright in my book, even damned funny when he wanted to be. Once you are no longer pushing a particular political agenda, your basic humanity has a lot more opportunities to shine through.

I think similarly about Kobe. His "political agenda" was being a part of the Los Angeles Lakers, whose viewpoints I just could not side with. But once he was done with basketball, Dear Basketball showed me that there was a real human being in there behind all the tongue wagging and trash talking. A real human being who started out as a real kid shooting rolled up socks at a trash can, and who never stopped being that kid. A real human being who just wanted to pick up a basketball and play, as long as the world would let him.

The world took him and his 13-year-old daughter and a bunch of other good people when his helicopter crashed into a Calabassas hillside. And I think that's a damn shame.

The final shot of Dear Basketball shows Kobe leaving the court for the last time, slapping hands with adoring fans with just a tinge of melancholy, though more than that, a sense of pride and accomplishment over a life well spent. The back of his jersey then fades to the white of oblivion, just as he himself did on Sunday.

Rest in peace, Black Mamba.