Kobe still seems very mad his parents tried to auction his stuff
After getting all that gold slime off of him — I swear, it’s like going to the beach; it gets in every crevice! — former Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant took some time out of his busy post-retirement schedule to set pen to paper on a new open letter for The Players’ Tribune, the athletes-first website of which he is, as you surely remember, the editorial director. Unlike the one he wrote back in November, directed at the sport of basketball and informing us he intended to retire at season’s end, this one is addressed to Bryant’s “younger self,” the brash and gifted 17-year-old who was about to embark on a 20-year NBA career that would mark him as one of the game’s all-time greats … but that would also feature no small amount of personal strife.
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Bryant didn’t write to advise his younger self about the biggest off-court saga of his two-decade career: his July 2003 arrest for the alleged sexual assault of a 19-year-old hotel employee in Eagle, Colo., a case later settled out of court and after which he publicly apologized to his accuser without admitting guilt. Nor did he write to try to steer his younger self to a cleaner resolution of the on-court and locker-room drama he experienced with superstar teammate Shaquille O’Neal, a creative and destructive partnership that yielded three NBA championships but disintegrated before it could yield even more.
He also chose not to hit the same note he did back in December, when he told reporters that the one piece of advice he wished he could give Rookie Kobe was to “understand compassion and empathy,” because winning, leading and relationships are all “about understanding others and knowing what they may be going through.” Instead, Present Kobe’s message to Young Kobe was about “investing” in family and friends rather than just “giving” them things — “the day will come when you realize that as much as you believed you were doing the right thing, you were actually holding them back” — and, most pointedly, about separating business and family:
The next time I write to you, I may touch on the challenges of mixing blood with business. The most important advice I can give to you is to make sure your parents remain PARENTS and not managers.
Before you sign that first contract, figure out the right budget for your parents — one that will allow them to live beautifully while also growing your business and setting people up for long-term success. That way, your children’s kids and their kids will be able to invest in their own futures when the time comes.
Your life is about to change, and things are about to come at you very fast. But just let this sink in a bit when you lay down at night after another nine-hour training day.
Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and heartache, some of which remains to this day.
According to some reports, the schism between Bryant and his parents, former NBA player Joe “Jellybean” Bryant and Pamela Bryant, dates back to his 2001 wedding to Vanessa Bryant, née Laine, which they chose not to attend “because they thought at 21 he was too young and because his wife is not black.” Their relationship reportedly mended some over the years before falling apart in 2013, when Bryant filed suit to keep his mom from consigning more than 100 pieces of Kobe-related memorabilia to an auction house in exchange for $450,000 to put toward the purchase of a house in Nevada, after reportedly rejecting Kobe’s offer of $250,000.
Kobe claimed that he never told his mother she could have his property, let alone auction it off, and that she agreed during a phone conversation that he’d never said that. Pamela Bryant said her son was lying, that the phone call in question never took place, and that Kobe and Vanessa’s filings in the case contained “many false statements.” The two sides eventually settled the lawsuit, with Kobe allowing a far smaller number of items to hit the auction block after Joe and Pamela Bryant issued a public statement saying they regretted their actions and statements: “We apologize for any misunderstanding and unintended pain we have caused our son and appreciate the financial support he has provided over the years.” The few items that were consigned netted more than $400,000 at auction.
Their apology didn’t mend the broken fences, as Bryant told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne earlier this year:
Kobe hasn’t spoken to his parents in nearly three years. Not since 2013, when they tried to auction off his high school memorabilia without his consent.
“Our relationship is s***,” he says. “I say [to them], ‘I’m going to buy you a very nice home, and the response is ‘That’s not good enough’?” he says. “Then you’re selling my s***?” […]
Kobe says his sisters, Sharia and Shaya, have learned to accept that Kobe has removed money from his relationships with them. “They’re very smart, college-educated [women],” Kobe says. “I’m really proud of them. They were able to get their own jobs, get their own lives, take care of themselves. Now they have a better sense of self, of who they are as people, instead of being resentful because they were relying on me.
“It was tough for me to do,” he says. There’s pain in his voice, not anger. “But it’s something you have to do, something you have to be very strong about.”
Whether it was pain or anger that motivated Bryant’s latest letter, it seems pretty clear that, years later, the wounds from the dissolution of his relationship with his parents remain fresh.
“The relationship with family is extremely important,” Bryant told Andrea Kremer during an interview on HBO’s “Real Sports” back in February. “But you also can’t force things. And so I hope, I pray, that one day, things will be better between us. And unfortunately, today’s not that day.”
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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