2014-15 Official Lakers Season Thread, Vol: We Love Each Other

How Many Wins This Season?

  • 20-25

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  • 30-35

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  • 35-40

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  • 50-60

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  • Total voters
    0
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i would add john salley to that list, i dont even remember him playing...only memory i have of him is running on the court after we won the championship with a newspaper in his hand
 
Twilight the Saga
For even the most competitive athlete, the transition game is never easy. So what drives Kobe Bryant at age 36, as he comes off serious injury and prepares for his 19th NBA season—and all that lies beyond?
By Chris Ballard​

The thick-armed man moves quickly, establishing a perimeter and securing the entryway. This is his seventh year on Kobe Bryant’s overseas security team, and he knows how quickly things can go sideways, especially in China. Once, four years ago in Shandong Province, a guy slept overnight on the roof of a gym, curled in the darkness, and then, when Kobe approached, leaped from a low overhang, yelling, “Kohhhh-beeee!” In one fluid motion Attila Portik—for that is the muscle-bound man’s name, of Hungarian origin—intercepted the crazed fan and hurled him aside, as if bailing out a boat. Another time, the mob breached the perimeter and swarmed in, so close that one ripped out Bryant’s earring. Just a year ago teenagers in Shanghai scaled police cars to get a view. The cops didn’t stop them; they too were trying to see. Now Attila and his counterpart, a buzz-cut L.A. police officer named Robert Lara, insist on metal barricades and use decoy cars. You have not seen hysteria, Attila explains, until you’ve seen Kobe in China.

On this late-July­ afternoon, fans have been massing for hours in the humid air outside Jiangwan Stadium, here in the northeast part of Shanghai, amid the high-rises and the smog and the clamor. They arrive wearing Kobe jerseys and shirts that read ring collector and 24 on the floor. They carry poster boards and giant banners. One reads pray for kobe, above a photo of Bryant holding his cracked kneecap. Another reads forever young, with the tagline to the great father, excellent player. Two nearby outdoor basketball courts are polka-dotted with yellow-and-purple ­number 24 jerseys—short, skinny Kobes driving on chubby Kobes then passing to wiry, bespectacled Kobes. Nearby, vendors hawk homemade kobe hats and black mamba temporary tattoos. Conspicuously, no one wears generic Lakers gear. They do not care about the team, only Kobe. He is like a cross between Justin Bieber and Neo from The Matrix.

At 5:45 p.m. the riot cops arrive, wearing helmets and toting shields and long metal poles that end in U-shaped curves wide enough to corral a man’s neck. By 6:30 the street is clogged with gold jerseys. Fans climb lampposts and scramble up trees. Some have tickets for tonight’s event; others will wait more than five hours just to see Kobe walk into a building.
This summer’s stop in Shanghai was Bryant’s ninth visit to China in the past 15 years, and the fervor over his presence was greater than ever. The autorities, clearly, were prepared to handle the throngs of fans who turned out—most in Kobe gear—to catch a glimpse of their idol.

Just after sundown it happens. A black van with tinted windows pulls through the iron gates. The mob, thousands strong, begins pogoing up and down, emitting a guttural noise. Koohhhh-beeee! Kooohhh-bee! The riot cops tense, ready to hold the line. And now Bryant emerges, wearing a white T‑shirt and shorts. This is his ninth visit to China in the last 15 years, but he is still surprised every time he sees the fervor anew. So Bryant waves and moves quickly, striding up the stairs and into the gym, past a row of purple spotlights and two life-size porcelain statues of himself in mid-dunk and into what was once a gymnasium but for the week has been remade by Nike into something that can only be described as a temple, and that is unironically dubbed the House of Mamba.

Striding past the wall-sized rack of purple basketballs, down a hall lined with giant inspirational Kobe quotes and trailed by a team of nearly a dozen handlers, Bryant is directed to a room marked VVIP. There he is outfitted with a microphone headset and transponders on each triceps. In the next three hours he will preside over a bizarre basketball TV show, part American Idol, part Hunger Games, part Terry Gilliam fever dream, that is held on an LED-lit court while Chinese emcees scream in Mandarin and young women weep. And then, at night’s end, Bryant will, to the shock and dismay of his handlers, go off-script and challenge a Chinese teenager to a full-court game of one-on-one on his rebuilt knee and Achilles, footage of which will later leak onto the Web. Afterward a young man in a 24 jersey will leap from the stands and literally prostrate himself in front of Bryant, hands clasped together in prayer to a roundball deity.

And this is only Kobe’s first day in China.

Read the rest: http://www.si.com/longform/kobe/
Click to expand...
 
HBD Bean.

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Happy birthday to my favorite all time Laker. Glad to say I got to watch all of his career from start to it's inevitable finish. I'm probably gonna cry when Kobe retires... :frown: at the reality that's coming soon.
 
HBD to Kobe. Read that Sports Illustrated feature if you haven't

NBA tv is playing Game 4 vs. Sac (2001)
 
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happy bday frijole. may the lakers sign you to another 2 yr 40 mill+ extension.








































































not srs CP
 
This documentary will be better than Spike Lee's Kobe Doin Work documentary that came out a few years ago:

 
Watched his whole career from day 1, can't believe he's 36, we will all miss him when his career is over, even the haters.

It's too bad how soon people forget his greatness , maybe it's because social wasn't as big back then, everything the young studs are doing in the league now, kobe did times 10.

Happy birthday Kob
 
I'll miss his edge....everybody had it when he came into the league but now it seems like he's the only one :frown:
 
Was going to say last night "Man, give Russy some bigs like Dwight and AD w/ Coach Pop, and watch him be great," but didn't want to get that discussion going.

Oops.
 
SKA :lol: your consistency is appreciated bro


But I said he has that Kobe killer instinct not that Kobe skillset....I like Westbrook but he's not close to Beans level at the moment.
 
Russ is no where close to the technician Kobe is either.

Not even the same planet. I don't even know if Russ practices. :lol:
 
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