Plaschke: Five years after losing Kobe Bryant, daring to dream about what could have been

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Lakers star Kobe Bryant pauses for a moment as confetti streams down at the Staples Center following his final game on April 13, 2016. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

I remember, first, the fog.

Sitting in the back of a cab headed down from my foothills home to LAX early on the morning of Jan. 26, 2020, I remember shivering at a fog so thick I couldn’t see out the car window.

I wondered, how will the cabbie drive through this? As the mist continued to surround the car all the way down the 110, I thought, this is no ordinary fog.

Seven hours and a cross-country trip later, I was sprawled on the bed in my Miami hotel room, exhausted from the dawn journey, embracing a nap such that I ignored my suddenly snarling smartphone. It buzzed, and it buzzed, and it buzzed, and finally, after a dozen missed calls, I finally sighed and picked it up.

It was Times assistant sports editor Athan Atsales. His usually calm voice was rising with each syllable.

Read more: A Nuggets fan was hired by Nike to paint a Kobe Bryant mural in Venice Beach. ‘It was an honor’

“Bill, I have some really bad news to tell you,” he said, followed by two words that are still haunting today.

“Kobe died.”

I cried out in disbelief, threw down the phone, lay frozen for several minutes, then rolled off the bed, turned on my computer and began mourning the only way I knew how.

I began to write.

Kobe Bryant is gone.

I’m screaming right now, cursing into the sky, crying into my keyboard, and I don’t care who knows it.

Five years ago, that was the tortured lede of the column that was published in the immediate wake of Bryant’s death. That is all I’m reprinting here. I can’t bring myself to read the rest of the column. It still doesn’t seem real, and revisiting my overwrought words would make it real, and part of me still is not ready for that.

That is my story. You have yours. So many of you remember exactly where you were on that Sunday afternoon when you heard that Bryant, 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others were killed in a fog-shrouded Calabasas helicopter crash.

At a party. At a church. On your couch. Somewhere, everywhere,…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/plaschke-five-years-losing-kobe-110051718.html

Author : LA Times

Publish date : 2025-01-26 11:00:00

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