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There’s a story that Jayson Tatum and his mother, Brandy Cole-Barnes, have told several times. As a kid, Tatum used to say that he wanted to be Kobe Bryant, the N.B.A. legend, when he grew up. His mother would tell him that he shouldn’t want to be another person, that he should try to be the best version of himself. Once, she said that he should dream of being better than Bryant. “I was like, Can’t nobody be better than Kobe!” Tatum told Slam magazine. “It didn’t even make sense to me.” The story is sweet, in the way that childhood infatuations can be. But I’ve always found it funny, too, because it seemed so distant from Bryant’s own mindset. Bryant, who was famous for his fierce competitiveness and supreme self-confidence, never would have said that he couldn’t be better than anybody.
to me.” The story is sweet, in the way that childhood infatuations can be. But I’ve always found it funny, too, because it seemed so distant from Bryant’s own mindset. Bryant, who was famous for his fierce competitiveness and supreme self-confidence, never would have said that he couldn’t be better than anybody.
I thought about Tatum’s obsession with Kobe Bryant last Thursday, during Game Six of the second-round playoff series between the Boston Celtics, Tatum’s team, and the Philadelphia 76ers. The 76ers were up 3–2 in the series, needing only one win to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals. Tatum, who had just been named to the All-N.B.A. First Team for the second consecutive season, did not score a field goal in the first half. But he kept shooting. Bryant would have, too. I thought of another childhood exchange between Tatum and his mother. Tatum has recalled telling his mother that he had no backup plan in case his basketball career didn’t work out. Never have a Plan B, he said. He learned that from Kobe—terrible advice, really. And yet. On Thursday, Tatum missed fourteen of his first fifteen field-goal attempts, including his first six attempts beyond the three-point arc. Then, in the game’s final four minutes and fourteen seconds, he hit four three-pointers. He finished with nineteen points, nine rebounds, and six assists, leading the Celtics to an almost miraculous 95–86 comeback. In Game Seven of the 2010 N.B.A. Finals, Bryant famously shot six for twenty-four, as his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, clinched the championship. Tatum, in last week’s Game Six, finished five for twenty-one.
Many of the N.B.A.’s younger players grew up idolizing Bryant. He was their icon, what Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan were to earlier generations. But no one seems to have lionized him quite like Tatum, who has said that he spent days watching videos of Bryant’s jab step on a loop. Tatum fashioned his fadeaway from repeat viewing of Bryant’s YouTube clips. When Tatum was picked third in the 2017 N.B.A. draft, by the Lakers’ longtime rivals, the Boston Celtics, he seemed possibly more miffed that Bryant’s old team had not taken him at No. 2 than he was that Philadelphia had passed on him with the first pick. After Bryant retired, he created an ESPN series, “Detail,” which closely analyzed the moves of particular players. The summer after Tatum’s spectacular rookie season, the show featured him, and Tatum then went to Los Angeles to work out with Bryant, honing some of the older star’s signature moves. This didn’t sit well with everyone, particularly when, during the following season, Tatum seemed to have picked up some of Kobe’s outdated habits, such as a fondness for long two-pointers—shots now scorned for their inefficiency. (“Shoot every time,” Tatum remembered Bryant telling him in Los Angeles. “Pass if you have to. But if not, shoot it.”)
