Kobe Bryant’s legacy

Trailblazer Staff|February 4, 2020

On January 26, 2020 Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna, were on a helicopter along with 7 other people on their way to a basketball game for Gianna. The weather conditions were not best for flying; this led to the pilot losing control of the helicopter as it went into a free fall over Calabasas.  All 9 people on the plane, including Kobe and Gianna, were killed instantaneously.

“I was just playing soccer at the field when one of my friends phone started going off.  He said that Kobe died and I thought he was joking so I went over to look at his phone. But, he wasn’t joking.  My heart sunk. I couldn’t believe it nor did I want to believe it,” sophomore Kai Hamazaki, said.

The same feeling was reflected throughout the world and of course significantly deeper for people who knew him personally.

From tweets hoping that the TMZ report were not true, to major news sources reporting the tragedy was a reality.

Everybody that knew Kobe personally gave a heartfelt response just like that on twitter.

But, the NBA still had to go on.  So, the games that day were played, but before each of the games, the players took 24 second shot clock violations or 8 second backcourt violations in an effort to honor Kobe.  He wore numbers 8 and 24 for the Lakers.

The next day throughout many, schools throughout the country, kids who grew up watching Kobe showed mourned Kobe’s death by wearing Kobe jerseys, yelling kobe when they threw something in the trash, and various other subtle things.

“I just wanted to show my appreciation for him and what he meant to me and really everybody in the sports world,” Ryan Adler, sophomore at Pascack Hills, who wore Kobe’s high school jersey to school the day after the crash, said.

In a Trailblazer twitter poll, students and faculty voted on the greatest lesson they learned from Kobe–the majority voting for teaching “the value of family.”

Kobe was a great player who died too young.  People will never be able to truly recover from this tragedy, but people can try to cope with it.  That’s exactly what people tried to do locally and across the world, they coped, but did not and never will recover.