Rise to Fame
The Charlotte Hornets drafted him 13th overall in 1996, then traded him to the Lakers for Vlade Divac before he played a single NBA game. He was 17. Jerry West had seen him destroy Michael Cooper, a former Defensive Player of the Year, in a private pre-draft workout, and decided the Lakers needed him more than they needed a veteran center. By his third season he was starting alongside Shaquille O'Neal, and by 2002 they'd won three straight titles. The Shaq relationship was always combustible, but the championships were real.
In the Spotlight
The 2003 sexual assault case in Eagle County, Colorado never went to trial; prosecutors dropped the criminal charges after the accuser declined to testify, and the civil suit ended in a settlement reportedly exceeding $2.5 million. He kept playing through all of it. The basketball remained undeniable: the 81-point game in 2006, five championships total, the 60-point farewell in his final NBA game in 2016. After retirement, he won an Oscar for an animated short and turned a $6 million BodyArmor investment into roughly $200 million in value. The second career had real momentum, which is what makes January 2020 sit so heavy.
Side Notes
His father Joe Bryant played professional basketball in Italy, which meant Kobe spent several adolescent years in small Italian cities and came back to Lower Merion, Pennsylvania fluent in Italian and visibly unlike every other kid trying to go pro from the Pennsylvania suburbs. The Black Mamba persona was his own creation, built around 2003 as a psychological tool during the sexual assault case. By retirement, he'd turned it into a brand, a book, and eventually an Oscar. He started Granity Studios because, he's said, his daughters stopped taking his direct advice, so he wrapped the lessons in stories instead.
Final Chapter
The crash killed all nine aboard, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others flying to a girls basketball tournament. That evening, the Grammy Awards at Staples Center in Los Angeles became an unplanned national memorial. The NBA renamed the All-Star Game MVP Award the Kobe Bryant Award. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in May 2021 as part of the Class of 2020.