ball is afterlife

Part of the reason I made a website for Ball is Afterlife (working title) is to hold myself accountable and actually work on my thesis before crunch time. Another reason is to re-familiarize myself with writing frequently and to get used to verbalizing my ideas again. I’m not saying I haven’t been writing since my brain stopped working in 2022 — I’ve written a ton! — but I need to get comfortable with writing small things that are not my magnum opus, because not everything has to be super profound and well-rounded in order to have value, especially in a project like this. My creative director says I need to do the same thing with my YouTube channel, too, so this is a welcome challenge.

Anyway, over the weekend, I went thrifting in order to avoid working on a final project on Kobe Numerology and Mamba Mentality as a spiritual practice, and I came across this t-shirt:

Yeah. Talk about the universe having a sense of humor.

I’m not a Kobe fan at all, and unlike a lot of the other players I write about, I don’t think he’s haunting me whatsoever. He definitely has bigger fish to fry in the afterlife, and as we all can tell, he by no means needs to beg and send signs in order to have his story told. This is simply a coincidence.

However, this shirt got me thinking about the ways we mythologize athletes. The text on the bottom of the shirt says “Mamba Forever 1998-2020.” Kobe Bryant was born in 1978, and 1998 was the first year he was an All-Star in the NBA. This means what whoever made this shirt believed that Kobe’s life started not with his birth, or even with his entering the NBA, but with his breakout season. The shirt also states that his life ended with his death, not with the end of his NBA career — therefore, an athlete’s life begins when they become something Special, something with Star Power, and that this specialness does not end when they retire, but when they die.

Or, maybe, it was just a typo.

I also find the graphic of Young Kobe and Older Kobe really fascinating. I feel like we often split Kobe into two selves — 8 and 24, Bean and Mamba, whatever. I am not sure what differentiates one Kobe from the other apart from age, hairstyle, and which number he wore. They both seem to be the same guy to me. But regardless, we do it a lot. You see a lot of graphics like this, where an Older Kobe guides the Younger Kobe. You don’t see it a lot with other players. Maybe it’s because Kobe had two distinct ‘eras’ — 8 and 24. Maybe it’s because his image matured over the course of his career, and the bad-boy Kobe, the trash-talking Kobe with a sexual assault case, was erased in favor of a gentler, more palatable, more lovable ‘girl dad.’ Maybe it represents the duality of his memory — which Kobe was the real one? Did we ever get to see the real one? Do we ever see the real version of anybody? Do we all contain a duality?

Either way, this shirt got me talking about Kobe. Maybe that’s all this shirt is meant to do — spit Kobe’s memory into the ether, even if the numbers are off, even if the graphic makes no sense. Regardless, it exists. I did not buy it.

(If you liked this one, drop a dollar)