Comparable, but no comparison

Sporting News, The, June 26, 2000 by Dave Kindred

When Kobe Bryant speaks, some people hear Michael Jordan, and it's more than just the FM-radio sexiness their voices share. We hear in Bryant a bright young man with no need to play the fool screaming for our attention. He knows who he is. You hear Kobe Bryant, and you also hear Tiger Woods. In both prodigies there is more than a little Michael Jordan, for all but forgotten is that MJ set an example of how to work on a public stage with dignity.

He did it himself, even as a kid. A story: On their way to Chicago in 1984, the agent David Falk thought to educate his new client, the North Carolina star Michael Jordan, chosen third in the NBA draft by a team with a history of failure. Falk made notes of the negative questions Jordan could expect at his introductory press conference in Chicago, maybe America's best sports town, which then was on fire with the Bears and happier than usual with the Cubs. Falk also came ready with suggestions on how Jordan might answer those nettlesome questions.

In a limousine leaving the airport, agent and client spoke for five or six minutes. "He listened very intently," Falk told author Jim Naughton, whose book Taking to the Air traced the rise of Jordan from basketball player to marketing phenomenon.

Before Falk came to his second note, Jordan said, "Thanks, I think I get the gist of what you are saying, and I'm pretty comfortable, and I think I'll be able to handle it."

Falk: "Well, he sat down at this round conference table with all the microphones in front of him. There were about 40, 50 people in the room, and he was like Johnny Carson. He took the mike off the stand. A guy asked him what it was like to play for Bobby Knight (on the Olympic team), and he'd wink at him and give sort of a nondescript answer. You could see in the very beginning this was a made-for-the-media athlete. He had a natural ability to communicate, to provide intelligent answers to questions, to delicately handle the tough questions. He was incredible."

Jordan that day was 21 years old and people who recognized his talent and maturity saw in him the brilliance of Julius Erving. And today, the torch passed again, there is in Kobe Bryant a suggestion of Michael Jordan.

A suggestion, a whisper. Not a shout. Yet even a suggestion is a good thing. As Tiger Woods made Jack Nicklaus his standard, Bryant has made Jordan his. "I want to be the greatest basketball player ever," Bryant said as a teenager growing up in Europe, the son of a nomadic pro, a prodigy who knew at 16 he'd go from high school to the NBA, skipping even one or two years of college warmups. Inevitably, then, anyone appraising Bryant invokes Jordan's name. They are connected even by their first NBA All-Star Games. His rookie season, Jordan was considered such an ego case by established veterans--Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas to name two--that he was frozen out of play. Bryant, ego-tripping at 19, so annoyed Karl Malone that the veteran threw a snit about the kid.

Small stuff, that. More important is this: Jordan and Bryant have bodies perfectly made for basketball, neither too big nor too small, quick, lithe, strong. And as Jordan's intelligence applied to his instincts made him a master, Bryant also seeks out knowledge to complement his prodigy's instincts. Listen:

"It's a matter of realizing when to attack (explaining his offensive work). It was, like, just investigating the floor, really. You penetrate. You know that you can get to that spot, so you say, `OK, I know I can get there. I'll come back there later.' I might come back there in the fourth quarter."

Bryant said that line of thought was prompted by his coach, Phil Jackson, who likely did the same for Jordan. "It's little mind games you play," Bryant said. "That's how Phil approached it with me. It was just so interesting. He taught me very, very well."

In one way, Bryant leads Jordan. He has made it to the NBA Finals in his fourth season; Jordan needed seven years. It was in this championship round, in Game 4, that Bryant did a late-game performance of such drama and virtuosity as to cause a breakdown of common sense. With Shaquille O'Neal fouled out, Bryant scored three critical field goals, including a sensational reverse put-back of a rebound with 5.9 seconds left in overtime, to win it for the Lakers.

Even my columnist buddy, Tom Callahan, the world's youngest curmudgeon, called Bryant's work "a tour de force." Many a commentator, similarly taken, rushed to a word processor to declare open The Age of Kobe.

Not so fast.

One game it was and not even that: the defining moment was a sliver of an overtime period. And that came after earlier anxious moments when Jackson saw in Bryant what he calls the "impulsivity" born of a player's immaturity: "He took a shot that wasn't quite at the right time. I saw him reach out there too quickly, a desire to drive that dagger home, to go for the kill too early."

How many hundred times, how many thousand times, did Jordan make the kill precisely? Yes, they belong in the same paragraph, Jordan and Bryant, and that paragraph should end with a sentence saying: Bryant is precious and precocious, and he is a baby who, if he improves hourly for the next decade, may become a reasonable facsimile of the greatest player who ever lived, Michael Jordan.