My father, sitting on the floor of the downstairs den, his forearm resting on a knee bent upward, casually informed me in the summer of 1996 that there was going to be a professional women’s league, something like the NBA, but for the ladies. We watched every game of the United States women’s national team during the Atlanta Olympics and grew increasingly excited about the prospect of getting to see some of our favorite players — Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, Dawn Staley — beyond their college years.
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It was a familiar scene: My father and I, situated in front of the TV, watching games and talking about hoops. A father and daughter bonded by basketball.
Just weeks earlier, we had been talking about Kobe Bryant entering the NBA right out of high school and being traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, my father’s favorite team throughout the 1980s until Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls tested his loyalty in the 1990s.
“Kobe grew up in Italy,” said my dad, an apparent master of conveying information that would be important to me with almost half-interested indifference. I was demonstrably excited by this fact. Although my dad played it cool, I know he — a man who began working at age 12 to help take care of his family, rose to the rank of Sergeant Major in the U.S. Army, and along the way gave his three African-American daughters the atypical, yet trajectory-changing experience of growing up in Italy — was inwardly chuffed.
We lived in the northern city of Vicenza, roughly 100 miles from where Kobe grew up in Reggio Emilia. I had fellow Army Brat friends who grew up abroad, in Japan, Germany and other places. But Kobe was the first black person outside of my family that I knew of who shared this unique upbringing, and this knowledge was special to me and my family.
“Alright, Tam, we’ll speak again soon.”
That’s how Diana Taurasi left things the last time we spoke, in April 2019 over Final Four weekend, when she accurately predicted the Baylor Lady Bears to win the NCAA championship.
“Tam,” a nickname my father called me and no one else. While I was usually annoyed by people randomly nicknaming me without my consent, this felt appropriate — familiar — coming from Taurasi. It was reminiscent of the warmth of my childhood in Italy, boisterous and open greetings, a duty to make new friends feel like family, hugs and kisses.
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As with so much of my basketball education, it was my father who introduced me to Taurasi’s game while she was a UConn Husky. Not only were we mesmerized with her shooting abilities, we were also wowed by her swagger, the fire of a headstrong young woman powered by the Italian and Argentinian blood raging through her veins.
The future White Mamba in the making.
On his way to building an NBA legacy consisting of five championships with the Lakers, Kobe nicknamed himself “Black Mamba.” He later said it was to cope with a low point in his career, the period after he was arrested for sexual assault following an alleged incident in a Colorado hotel room in 2003. To continue to play, he felt he needed an alter ego. “You’re not watching David Banner,” Bryant said in a 2014 interview. “You’re watching the Hulk.”
A year later, he further explained, “When I step on that court, I become that (Black Mamba). I am that killer snake. I’m stone cold, man.”
It takes one to know one. Bryant thus bestowed the moniker “White Mamba” onto Taurasi, a badge she wears with pride.
“They don’t anoint people anymore,” Taurasi told me in 2018. “They don’t put the sword on your shoulder anymore. So when they do, you have to take it really serious. And I’ve taken it really seriously.”
On June 18, 2017, with 45 seconds left in the second quarter, the White Mamba scored that bucket that made her the all-time leading scorer in WNBA history, passing Houston Comets legend Tina Thompson. As if fated, Taurasi, who grew up in Southern California, did this at Staples Center in Los Angeles, her family in attendance to witness the momentous occasion. When the diehard Sparks fans rose to their feet to give the Mercury’s Taurasi a standing ovation, the Black Mamba did, too.
On one side of him, oldest daughter Natalia cheered, “Diana!” On the other side, daughter Gianna stared with an intense expression. The Mambacita in the making.
Kobe Bryant, 41, died tragically on Sunday in a helicopter crash that also claimed the lives of Gianna (“Gigi”), 13, and the seven others aboard the flight to a basketball tournament at Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, Calif. They were: Mamba point guard Alyssa Altobelli and her parents John and Keri; mother and daughter Sarah and Payton Chester; Mamba Academy coach Christina Mauser and pilot Ara Zobayan.
Yes, Gigi had a mean fadeaway, just like her father.
As Taurasi had done, Gigi wanted to play for Geno Auriemma and the UConn Huskies, who honored her and her father before last night’s game against the U.S. women’s national team.
(AP Photo / Jessica Hill)
In addition to creating Mamba Sports Academy and coaching Gigi, Kobe, who retired from playing in 2016 and scored 60 points in his final game, had invested his time and energy in advancing the women’s game. He bought into BODYARMOR and featured Taurasi in a national ad that aired during the 2019 Final Four championship game.
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“As a woman, I feel honored,” Taurasi told me in 2019. She also praised BODYARMOR for “doing things a little bit different than the status quo.” In other words, Bryant’s influence with the company, and love for the women’s game, had given her a long overdue sports drink endorsem*nt. He didn’t just go to the most popular male basketball player du jour. He chose the basketball player most deserving of national recognition and endorsem*nt dollars befitting her accomplishments.
Bryant narrated the ad, a tribute to the Mamba he admired.
Through tears before Monday night’s Team USA matchup against UConn, Taurasi said of her fallen friend: “He meant so much to a city, that fighting spirit that he had. He found comfort in that unapologetic way of playing basketball.”
So did Taurasi, the White Mamba. By modeling her game after Kobe’s, imbuing it with creativity, versatility and a killer on-court persona, she became one of the best players in WNBA history, forcing the rest of the WNBA — year over year — to elevate their level of play. Carrying on this tradition is Jewell Loyd, the Gold Mamba, who considered Kobe a mentor and friend.
After the national team defeated UConn, Taurasi spoke at length about Kobe’s impact that far transcended sports, Gigi and their special father-daughter bond rooted in a shared love of basketball.
“It’s funny, someone today on TV was like, ‘I don’t know why I miss him, but I miss him,’” Taurasi said. “And I think a lot of people feel that sentiment, whether you were a Kobe fan, whether you hated him, whether you were a Celtics fan, a Suns fan. There’s just this emotion that you can’t control over the guy, and I think ‘cause you saw him grow up, you saw him vulnerable, you saw his flaws, you saw how he willed himself to be someone different. I think a lot of people can relate to that in life. When you wanna do better, when you wanna outwork your potential, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to do that in life, and he did it at the highest level.”
Bryant’s love for the women’s game was deep and authentic, and he accomplished so much off the court just three years into his retirement, including winning an Oscar in 2018 for his animated short film “Dear Basketball.” Taurasi laments that the world will never know what more Bryant could have done with more time.
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“They were just in our (Mercury) locker room right before the WNBA season,” Taurasi said Monday. “He brought all of the Mambas up, he was there. We spent about an hour in the locker room, they came down and watched practice and then they practiced on our court afterwards. The sad part is we’ll never know what happens in the next 41 years of his life, which I think, just not playing basketball for three years, there was just this energy about him that he was gonna do something great. And we’ll never get to know what that was.”
Taurasi, infamously anti-social media, said in 2018: “Growing up watching Kobe, admiring Kobe, getting to know Kobe a little bit more over the years … There’s a deep understanding that Kobe and I have, without being Instagram buddies, which is nice. Because I know he has a lot of friends.”
But the moments they did share, person-to-person, not gadget-to-gadget, were special to Taurasi.
“The one thing from being around Kobe and knowing him a little bit, he didn’t fake anything,” she said. “He wasn’t one to say things that he didn’t mean. He wasn’t one to do things that he didn’t believe in … (H)e’s always loved women’s basketball. We were together in Beijing in 2008 — he was our biggest fan. We’d go to the suite, we’d have conversations about basketball for hours and share a wine. I mean, he just loved the game. If you were willing to play the game and put everything into it, he didn’t care what level you played at.”
Gigi was a biological carrier of the Mamba gene and the world won’t get to see what she might have done, either at UConn, where she wanted to play collegiately, or in the WNBA, where she hoped to win professional titles. Yet, Bryant’s influence lives on in the women’s game through the players who learned from him — whether indirectly by mimicking his moves in pickup games as children or through personal relationships with the fallen star.
The WNBA is the most competitive professional sports league in the world because of this evolution of the players and their skill sets, with non-blood relatives of the Mamba lineage reigning supreme.
“I love Diana Taurasi,” Brea Beal, a freshman starting guard for No. 1 South Carolina, told The Athletic in November. “I absolutely love her. Well, she’s mean. On the court, she’s, like, mean and she knows what she wants and she goes and gets it. That’s what I love about her. She’s very clutch.”
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In essence, Beal admires Taurasi’s Mamba Mentality and already is showing inklings of that edge herself. A future Mamba in our midst?
Still, the father-daughter relationship between Kobe and his daughters, especially Gigi, is what has melted the hearts of even the biggest cynics amid tragedy. It is a relationship to which Taurasi relates, her father sacrificing much during her childhood for the pair to share experiences centered around basketball.
“I mean, my dad used to take me to the Forum to watch games,” said Taurasi, who grew up in Chino, Calif. “He used to go to work, 15 hours, drive two hours, then he’d come home with company tickets to go see the Lakers at the Forum, then it was the Staples Center.”
Taurasi noticed the similar dedication in Bryant toward Gigi, a father and daughter bonded over basketball.
“And just that relationship that he formed with his daughters, that’s when he was at his happiest when he was coaching his daughter,” she said. “You could just see it in his face. The times that we spent, he was just so dead set on that team being really good, running the triangle. Like, he was really, really into it. And it’s just sad that we’re not gonna know what he could’ve done in any capacity.”
(Top photo: Allen Berezovsky / Getty Images)
