Kobe Bryant's final game was always unforgettable - now it is remembered in a special way

[Lexman.]

 

It is the last game of Kobe Bryant's career, on the final day of the 2016 NBA season, and his Los Angeles Lakers are down 10 with three minutes and change to go.
 

The result of this game has little meaning. His Lakers team, well past their prime, are not heading to the play-offs, and neither are their opponents, the Utah Jazz. The NBA story of the day is north of LA in Oakland, where the Golden State Warriors are about to become the most successful regular season team in NBA history. This is Kobe's final game, but the action is elsewhere, and he is going to lose.
 

The Lakers were the worst team in the Western Conference that year, having finished second-last the year before. Kobe, then 37, was a titan of the game - a winner of five championships - but he had hobbled towards retirement, overpaid and underproductive, barking at young and inadequate team-mates all year. Two years earlier, an Achilles injury had robbed him of his powers, closing the window on 15 years of greatness after he had, in 1998, become the youngest All-Star in league history. He was 19.
 

Three minutes 11 seconds remain in the game. Kobe has the ball on the left block, his back to the basket. He surveys the NBA floor, as he has done 1,565 times before. Only two men have scored more points than him. He is built no differently than the average NBA player - 6ft 6in, strong, athletic - yet he has eclipsed almost all of them, not least his idol Michael Jordan, who is one place behind him on the all-time list. Kobe spins, drives and hops to the basket, evading two defenders. Lay-up. Eight-point game.
 

I fell in love with the game of basketball at 13. When I visited my grandparents soon after, in the hoopless hillside gloom of the Welsh countryside, I dribbled a ball every day until dark, down flat, empty roads. I have since spent more time playing basketball - usually alone on a hoop - than I have doing just about anything else. I have spun, driven and hopped to the basket, and evaded the countless defenders in my mind. I have come back from impossible deficits and drained the game-winning shot. And I have walked off an empty court, as alone in that knowledge as any daydreaming kid.
 

Two minutes 23 seconds to go. After a Utah bucket, the Lakers' deficit is back to 10. Kobe, on the left wing but now facing his defender, dribbles from side to side. He makes for the middle of the floor, then spins and dives to the hoop, drawing a foul. He heads to the line, making both free-throws to muffled chants of "MVP". Eight-point game.