ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 8, 1996 TAG: 9604090117
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: NITA LELYVELD PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
HIGH SCHOOL PHENOM Kobe Bryant draws from strong NBA and family ties as he plans his basketball future.
Kobe Bryant was thinking ``NBA'' when he was 3 years old. His father played for the San Diego Clippers, and at home Kobe would set up his Nerf hoop in front of the TV set. From the first buzzer, the pint-size boy in the pint-size NBA uniform would imitate what he saw his dad's team do, tossing his little ball into the basket, resting between quarters, sipping from his own water bottle on the floor. When the big guys on the bench toweled off, Kobe would move to the side of the living room and dab with his own towel at his soft baby skin.
``He'd say, `Mom, feel my neck. I'm sweating,''' recalled his mother, Pam Bryant. ``He was always playing and mimicking his dad.
``And he'd tell me, even then: `Mom, I'm going to play in the NBA.'''
Kobe Bryant always had huge hoop dreams, but the life of the young man considered the nation's best high school player couldn't be further from the ``hoop dreams'' cliche.
His is not the story of an inner-city kid alone against ruthless recruiters and swarms of hangers-on. There's no tale of trouble, neglect or hard knocks.
When Bryant makes the choice soon between college and a rare leap straight from high school to the NBA, he will be drawing on a wealth of very special resources.
He is the son of former NBA player Joe ``Jellybean'' Bryant, an assistant basketball coach at La Salle University. He grew up in Europe watching his father play pro basketball. He lives in the suburbs. And he comes from an extraordinarily close, loving and protective family with great athletic talent and savvy.
``I know I have it so lucky,'' he said last week. ``I realize that there are kids growing up in a lot tougher situations than I am.''
Even though he is only 17, even though his 6-foot-6 frame is still lean and boyish, his rich and stable background, maybe more than anything else, makes it seem possible that he could adjust to life in the NBA, a teeny-bopper among giants.
By all accounts, the Lower Merion student has had an amazing senior year - not just in leading his team to its first state championship in five decades, or in leaving high school as the leading scorer in Southeastern Pennsylvania history, or in dazzling sellout crowds with his electrifying slam dunks and effortless no-look passes and alley-oops.
He has managed to stay true to himself with the national spotlight shining brightly and ever more relentlessly in his eyes.
``It's an inner strength, a quiet reserve,'' said his grandmother Mildred Cox, of Philadelphia. ``He doesn't need a lot of folks around him, but his real friends, his family, he's true to them. And the rest of the world, the outside things that are going on, he seems to just tune it all out.''
Already, Bryant can sell out the Palestra for a high school game. His shaved-smooth head and his elegant, almost sculpted face are so well-known that he draws crowds in public places. People want autographs, to chat, to congratulate.
Many believe that one day soon he will be so big a star that normal life will slip right out of reach.
None of this seems to affect him at all.
He is friendly. He is open. He is humble. And he is unfailingly polite. It surprises just about everyone - except his family.
``It's easy for you to keep your feet on the ground when you have the family that he has,'' said Kobe's uncle John ``Chubby'' Cox, a former star at Villanova and the University of San Francisco who played one season in the NBA and teaches science at Overbrook High School.
``It's not something he has to work at. It just comes natural. That's why he's going to make it. He's nurtured for it. He's ready for it. He's in full bloom.''
Family - the importance of it - is a central theme in the Bryant household and in the households of the extended Bryant-Cox clan, many of whose members live within a mile of one another.
Asked the most important lesson she tried to teach her children, Kobe's mother said without hesitation: ``Family first, period. Family's absolutely first.
``I don't know any different,'' she added.
Both of Kobe's parents grew up in Philadelphia, in strong, solid families like the one they have created for Kobe and their two daughters, Sharia, 20, a junior at Temple, and Shaya, 19, a freshman at La Salle.
Fittingly, it was in visiting family - grandparents who lived on the same West Philly street - that Joe and Pam met as teen-agers.
``I used to remember her coming to visit her grandmom, and I remember one day sitting out on the steps with a lot of friends and everybody saying, `Oh, look at Pam, she looks good.' Everybody else was whistling, and I probably was the only one who said, `I'm going to marry her one day,''' said Joe Bryant, smiling and laughing deeply at the thought.
The romance began with another family scene, when Pam was at Clarion State, her brother, Chubby, was playing for Villanova, and Joe was playing for La Salle. The two basketball teams had games on the same night in a doubleheader at the Palestra.
``So I'm sitting on one side and I see her parents, and she's sitting on the other side and sees my parents. And I was walking around to see her parents and she was coming around to see mine,'' Joe Bryant said.
``It was kind of like a Miss Piggy and Froggy thing. `Hey, how you doing?' - that type of thing. That night we went on our first date, and seven months after that we were married.''
Their married life would take them across the country and then across Europe, as Joe played first for eight years in the NBA - for the Sixers, then for San Diego, then for Houston - and then went to Italy and other parts of Europe, keeping his family abroad for another eight years.
It would also bring them close together.
``I think it's because we all grew up together in Italy. We didn't have anybody to depend on but our family,'' Kobe said. ``We had to stick together.''
The family took to Italy and its open, affectionate ways. There, Kobe learned old-fashioned basketball, heavy on fundamentals. He still speaks fluent Italian, and said that one day he'd like to take his own wife and children to Italy.
``People treat others as equals there. They don't mistrust each other. They say hello when they see you on the street,'' he said. ``And family, family is big there.''
Kobe was 14 when he returned to Pennsylvania, a place he remembered little about. ``It was pretty hard,'' he said. ``I didn't know anybody. The school was just totally big.''
Again, the family felt like outsiders. Again, the Bryants leaned on each other for support.
Anyone who has seen one of Kobe's games knows the Bryants are great at support.
They are easy to pick out in a crowd - the strikingly handsome, tall family with the regal, proud bearing and the open, brilliant smiles. Joe is 6-foot-10, with seemingly miles of legs. Shaya is 6-4. Beside them, Pam and Sharia, both 5-10, look almost short.
All are athletes. Shaya and Sharia play varsity college volleyball. Pam used to play street basketball, Kobe said, adding with a grin: ``I hear she has a mean jump shot.''
At Kobe's games, or at Shaya's or Sharia's volleyball matches, the immediate family is usually surrounded by other relatives and friends - neighborhood kids, Chubby and his family, and grandparents, including Joe's father, who carries oxygen because of respiratory problems. At one recent game, Shaya and a bevy of female cousins held up big cards spelling out ``KING KOBE.''
Once upon a time, back in 1972, a young Joe Bryant had just led his Bartram High team to the Public League title. Recruiters were everywhere, and he was trying to decide among Temple, La Salle, Notre Dame, Maryland and Holy Cross.
``It was a confusing time because my parents had never gone through this recruiting. I think my high school coach, he might have had one or two players prior, but this was relatively new to him, too,'' Joe Bryant recalled.
``It was just confusing because so many things were coming at you at one time. I think that was the problem. You didn't know who to believe, who to trust.''
For Kobe, a second-generation recruit, there is no such anxiety. For starters, he has Chubby and Joe.
``They know. They know what it's like to play basketball,'' he said.
Between Joe and Kobe, the connection is powerful, always on view. You see it in the way Kobe's hand touches his father's knee as they sit side by side talking, the way they hug with gusto in public, the way Kobe, in the final seconds of Lower Merion's win over Coatesville in a District 1 semifinal, managed to run to the Palestra sideline to slap his father a high-five.
At Kobe's games, Joe's eyes follow his son everywhere. When Kobe does something particularly brilliant, like a crosscourt drive ending in a spectacular slam, his father's face seems to overflow with joy.
This year, Joe said, he has not only been doing his own recruiting for La Salle, which would love to get Kobe. He has been recruited by other schools hoping to woo his son. He tries to keep the tangled mess of interests away from Kobe. He wants his son to decide his future for himself.
It is a complicated thing watching a child grow up. You can't control it all. You can't stand in the way of every danger.
``There are a lot of things that kids have to deal with, and whether he can deal with those things, only time will tell. I would like to say, yeah, he's going to deal with anything; when he has a bad game and the media writes about it, he'll deal with it. But I don't know,'' Joe said. ``I don't know.''
For now, Joe said of Kobe, ``he'll still hug. He'll still lie in the bed and watch movies with us, and that's special. And hopefully we can always be like that, and I think we will. But then again, we know there are going to be times in his life, in his adult life, when things are going to change, and I think all we can do is offer love and support.
``The challenges are just beginning,'' he sighed. ``Just beginning.''
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