Saying goodbye to Kobe (and a large chunk of my generation's childhood)

“Three seconds on the clock, Kobe with the ball at the top of the key,” I’d tell myself as I dribbled to the right wing in my driveway in Lakeland, FL as a kid. “Three, two, one,” I’d count down as I shot the ball, wanting to hit a fake game-winner, all while hoping the ball didn’t bounce into my dad’s beloved azalea bushes. “Errr!” I’d make the buzzer noise after landing on my feet from mimicking Kobe’s signature fade away, hoping to see the ball swish threw the net like it did for my idol so many times before.

I was born in April of 1990, so for my generation, Kobe was our guy.

I have very distant memories of watching Michael Jordan, but he retired from the Bulls when I was 8, so my generation is a little too young to totally capture his greatness live. We are also a little too old for Lebron, who came in the league in 2003—a year after Kobe had won his third-straight title.

Why does this matter?

Kobe’s first six or seven years in the league were when I was 6-13 years old, which I’d argue are your most impressionable years as a sports fan. You spend those innocent years in awe of your heroes. You ask for their signature shoe, jersey, and apparel for every birthday and Christmas, you tack their poster on the wall with care like it was a $2,000 art piece—and really, anything resembling your hero becomes your most valuable item at that point in life.

If your house was on fire you’d grab your hero’s jersey first.

For my generation, Kobe’s jersey is the one we’d protect from the flames.

We loved Kobe for the lob to Shaq in the 2000 Western Conference Finals, for the 81-point game in Toronto, for the 62 points through three quarters against Dallas, and for he way he would celebrate title after title in pursuit of Jordan’s six. Conversely, we sided with Kobe over Shaq, we hated the Sacramento Kings, the Spurs, and any other opponent that stood in the way of our hero, so much so that my first instinct is to still hate those teams to this day, some 20+ years later.

We didn’t know Kobe personally, but we spent so many hours pretending to be him that he felt as close to us as family.

But for my generation, this tragedy hits in a unique way.

A lot of us are turning 30 right now—like I will in April—or have already turned 30 in the past handful of years. This transition to a new decade has felt like a drawn-out farewell to my childhood. In my 20’s, my childhood memories were only one decade behind me, but the deeper I got into my 20’s the more they started to fade away, causing a strange grieving process of these lost younger memories.

I felt it first two years ago in a big way when my parents moved out of my childhood home—the only home I had known since birth—to East Tennessee, causing me to cry behind the wheel of their moving truck as I drove it north on I-75, saying goodbye to that era. I feel it in a smaller way when I see a name on Facebook and think, “Who the hell is that?” before realizing it was someone I went to school with from K-12.

All of those childhood memories that were once crystal clear have been distorted by the new memories made in my 20’s, and saying goodbye to those younger ones has been a sad process.

One of those people—and memory maker—that remained crystal clear from that era was Kobe. On Sunday when the awful news broke that he had passed away in a helicopter crash, I immediately felt like a large chunk of those childhood memories went down with him. For the first 24 hours, the overwhelming sadness felt like a mixture of grieving the loss of life of everyone involved and grieving the loss of a magical time in my childhood, feeling it ticking away as quickly as the, “Three, two one,” I used to count in my driveway.

The next day, however, felt a little different. Scrolling through social media and seeing non-stop highlights of Kobe from the early 2000’s has actually provided a time portal for me to remember those feelings I had watching his games as a kid. These feelings have reminded me of a time when I was less worried about if my crawl space is properly capsulated or worrying about getting in with a new primary doctor and more worried about making that last fake game-winner in the driveway before dinner, pulling my shirt to the side in front of the imaginary Staples Center crowd.

If you’re in my generation, maybe you have recognized this portal into your childhood, too.

I’m not ready to look for a bright side yet, especially when you think about Gigi, the rest of the Bryant family, and the other families involved in this horrific tragedy. Also, I know time moves on and your 30’s aren’t supposed to be spent trying to think about your childhood. But I am grateful for the way Kobe Bryant lived his life, providing non-stop memorable moments during my most impressionable years, and now, through his death, offering my generation a chance to relive those memorable moments as we transition into our 30’s, even if just for a week.

Thanks for everything, Kobe. We miss you like hell.