The mention of Kobe Bryant could instantly start a fight, whether in a bar with friends or a in far-flung corner of the internet.
In the 2000s, fans angrily discussed whether Bryant, the Lakers superstar guard, was as good as the man he had modeled his game after, Michael Jordan, or even Tim Duncan, the San Antonio big man who would lead the Spurs to three of his five championships that decade.
LeBron James entered the conversation in the 2010s, and Bryant’s ardent defenders shrugged off the talented James as, indeed, no Kobe — look at the rings! By then Bryant had won five titles, including in 2010, and James had not won any. There was still much else to debate: Was Kobe a ball hog? Did he shoot too much? (No, of course not! You trust Smush Parker with those shots?)
The peak of such debates came in 2014, when a man in Southern California apparently drove almost an hour to try to fight a Celtics fan who had dared say on Twitter that Bryant wasn’t an elite player. Thus the phrase “Meet me in Temecula!” entered the cultural lexicon.
Fans of Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday at the age of 41, were as relentless in his defense as he was on the basketball court. They felt like they had to be. Theirs was a different fandom than what had existed for past N.B.A. greats like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. It was severe tribalism as a counter to an aversion to Bryant outside of Los Angeles, a reaction to those constantly underrating Bryant’s exceptional skill — at least in their eyes.
“To the degree that they are more aggressive and protective of his legacy or his game, I think that’s owed to reflecting his personality,” said Harrison Faigen, the editor of Silver Screen and Roll, a Lakers fan site under Vox Media’s SB Nation. “He was someone who really was out there in championing himself and talking about how great he was.”
For each time a sports fan declared that Bryant was an all-time good player instead of an all-time great, there was an equal and opposite reaction from Kobe’s fan base — known as the Mamba Army — feverishly pointing to his five championships.
“They’re fanatical in a way where they’re unwavering in their devotion to Kobe,” said Tyler, the popular Twitter personality @DragonflyJonez who has more than 172,000 followers and hosts the Jenkins and Jonez podcast. (He only goes by his first name in public.) “They don’t care what you say. They don’t care what the numbers say. It always comes down to five rings. At the end of the day, that’s what it always comes down to: Were you a winner or were you not?”
That was the era Bryant played in. He was one of the few superstars whose career spanned the explosion of both the internet and social media. N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver, during an interview on Monday, noted that Bryant had entered the league shortly after the league’s website launched. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube emerged in between his championship runs. When he retired in 2016, two decades after he was drafted, he did so with a poem that quickly went viral on social media.
All of this meant that as Bryant’s career progressed, published opinions weren’t limited to cranky newspaper columnists. Instead, fans got louder. And louder. Suddenly, there were N.B.A. message boards and Reddit posts where fans could have at it. Twitter amplified those discussions and democratized the assessment of player legacies. It wasn’t just up to shows like ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” and “Pardon The Interruption.”
“We had to spend so much time defending him,” said Anthony Irwin, who hosts a podcast called “Locked On Lakers.” (Until recently, Faigen was his co-host.)
“It became such a habit,” Irwin said. “You saw it even after his career. Any time some player did something incredible on the basketball court, there was always somebody out there who referenced it back to, ‘Wait, is Russell Westbrook better than Kobe now?’”
Bryant deftly used the digital age to enhance his own brand, targeting international audiences and rapidly expanding his fan base. Part of the reason Bryant devotees seemed to loom large in discussions is that there were so many of them all over the world, especially in China. But that relationship with his enthusiasts was compromised after he was charged with raping a 19-year-old woman in 2003. The case was dropped before it went to trial, and a separate lawsuit the woman filed was settled out of court. Even then, many of Bryant’s fans stuck by him.
“For better or for worse, you get an ‘us against the world’ mentality,” Irwin said. He added: “Over the course of Kobe’s career, especially the latter half, if you brought it up, it was, ‘Well, he didn’t actually get convicted of a crime.’ That was the starting point of that conversation. It got kind of gross.”
For his aficionados, Irwin said, what Bryant “did on the court now carried over to off the court. I’m not saying Lakers fans or Kobe fans handled that well, but where it came from was just, ‘He’s our guy.’”
News media mentions of the case since Bryant’s death have angered some of his supporters. The Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez tweeted a link to an article about the rape accusation in the hours after Bryant’s death and was immediately deluged with criticism and, she said, death threats. Sonmez said later that she had checked into a hotel out of fear for her safety. Other news media that mentioned the accusation in their coverage also have been met with backlash.
The intensity of the supporters is likely in part because Bryant hit his prime just when the N.B.A. was desperate for a new torch bearer. Jordan had retired for the third time in 2003. Fans wanted someone to step into an impossible-to-fill abyss. The problem for Bryant was that several players also vied for that role. Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson were all guards with flashes of Jordan’s flair. Even on the court, Bryant was a divisive figure. Some opposing fans thought his game lacked aesthetic beauty, even though his brutal competitiveness was universally acknowledged.
The gap between Bryant and those players at their best wasn’t as large as the canyon that existed between Jordan and the rest of the league in the 1990s. There is even an argument to be made that Bryant wasn’t the best player on his Lakers teams during his first three championships. This created more dispute among league observers as to whether Bryant was, as some said, truly the heir apparent to Jordan.
There were also simple, more traditional reasons for the loyalty of Bryant’s fans. He played for the same team his whole career, allowing him to spend 20 years cultivating a relationship with them. He won more than most other stars in that time frame. And playing for the Lakers, a historic franchise in a large Los Angeles media market, put him right in the middle of Hollywood, filled with celebrities he could hobnob with.
Bryant, like many of those celebrities, was also in living rooms every night as a constant presence on national television. A generation of West Coast dwellers grew up with him. As the rapper Snoop Dogg said on the Fox Sports show “Undisputed” on Wednesday: “When he first got to L.A., he wasn’t great. He was a kid. He was learning, and he was making mistakes. I was a kid at the same time. So it was a beautiful story watching his story and watching mine.”
Bryant certainly was not the first superstar to have a dedicated fan base. Bird probably doesn’t have to buy a meal in Boston ever again. Ditto for Iverson in Philadelphia. Jordan has his own committed legacy-protectors. But Bryant’s résumé in a rapidly expanding digital world created a new class of N.B.A. fan: millennials with multiple platforms on which to yell and defend their guy. Perhaps this is the point of fandom — to defend your rooting interest with gusto any way you can.
