It was the day before the 1996-97 NBA regular season. The Lakers were still in the Forum. Richard Riordan was running Los Angeles. Dilbert was on the best-seller lists.
Jerry West sat in the Forum and watched practice, particularly the teenager that had passed through the Charlotte Hornets’ hands and into his.
“He’s the Tiger Woods of basketball,” West said.
Nineteen years later, at sunset, Woods and Kobe Bryant still march together.
On Oct. 6, 1996, Woods won his first of 79 PGA Tour events, in Las Vegas. Bryant would ease into his professional world more gently.
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He averaged barely 15 minutes as a rookie. But he and the Lakers won NBA titles in 2000, 2001 and 2002, years in which Woods won six majors. In 2008 Bryant was the Most Valuable Player, and he grasped that trophy a month before Woods won his 14th major.
Now the curtain begins to descend on both Kobe and Tiger. Neither are quite ready, but their bodies have caved in to the accumulated years and the obsessive work. You never officially retire from golf, so nobody knows about Woods, but Jeanie Buss said she looked at 2015-16 as a “celebration” of the Bryant years.
Bryant will be the first non-center to play 20 consecutive NBA seasons, tying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one behind Robert Parish. He hasn’t finished the previous two, but he said on Monday that he expected to finish this one.
“I don’t spend too much time thinking about it,” he said. “I can’t control any of that speculation. I’m moment-to-moment. I’m looking forward to being a mentor to some of the younger players, but everybody can be a mentor. You talk about patience, but it’s also a matter of pushing, pushing, pushing to figure things out. I don’t know how the pieces of the puzzle are going to fit together.
“But I’m excited to be around the young guys. It’s the beginning of their careers.”
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Bryant will also be the first player to get to 20 consecutive seasons with the same NBA team, just as Woods has not removed his Nike cap since he said, “Hello, world,” in August of 1996.
The Lakers held their Media Day, which, as always, featured too much media and left too little day. It was the first time to see all the parts that Mitch Kupchak had acquired. Somewhere on the shelves of this AutoZone there is the diagram of an actual basketball team. Maybe a pretty good one.
Roy Hibbert can safeguard the rim. Brandon Bass and Louis Williams can add savvy and scoring. Jordan Clarkson has looked like a winner amid all the losing. Metta World Peace is back, talking about “keeping it simple.”
And Julius Randle could be like Blake Griffin, a lottery pick made stronger by a year of knee rehab.
“I feel amazing,” Randle said.
“I’m tired of playing against him,” Tarik Black said. “He’s the kind of guy who can get the rebound and take it coast-to-coast. It’s going to be hard for other teams to figure out how to play us. We can slow it down and take our time, or we can get out and run.”
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But it won’t be easy for Byron Scott to throw Bryant into the midst of all these young strangers and then adhere to whatever the pitch count is.
“I don’t need to worry about that,” Bryant told the media audience. “You guys can worry about that for me. I don’t know what my role is going to be. My philosophy has always been that, whatever is asked, do it to the best of your ability. It’s up to me to figure it out, see how to plug those holes.”
Bryant will sit next to D’Angelo Russell, the rookie point guard, this season. He paid Russell the ultimate compliment: “He wants to be great.”
Woods’ career was always measured against Jack Nicklaus’ 18 majors; Bryant’s, against Michael Jordan’s six championships. Aiming for supremacy and falling just short is not a bad thing. Woods has 14 majors and the knowledge that he changed professional golf forever. Bryant is third in all-time scoring, 10th in minutes played and even 30th in assists. By ruthlessly refusing to be anybody but Kobe, he became the best-loved and most magnetic athlete in city history.
Celebrate this season, especially because you know Kobe won’t. Asked about the retirement talk, he said that it initially was a “pain in the ass. But when you sit back, it’s pretty cool.”
You could say the same about Bryant, and his partner in time.
