Los Angeles (AFP)
On January 26, 2020, the world of sport learned, with amazement and pain, the accidental death of Kobe Bryant, idol of the Lakers who by his tragic fate suddenly reached the status of basketball legend.
A year later, the emotion remains strong, but confined.
Usually the first month of the year is when Lakers and basketball fans celebrate his 81 points against Toronto on January 22, 2006, repeating the best individual performance in a five-time champion's game. NBA in the purple and gold jersey.
However, after a year 2020 which was one of the most upset that the contemporary world has known because of the coronavirus pandemic, without 2021 starting for the time being a return to normal, they cannot pay tribute to the "Black Mamba" as they would like.
Confinement requires, they cannot gather en masse, as they did for several days after his death, by gathering around the Staples Center where his exploits forged his glory.
They won't even see the Lakers, currently on a road trip, playing that day.
- "Heartbreaking moment" -
LeBron James, who gave a poignant speech at the time and kept his promise to carry on the legacy of his elder brother, by bringing back the champion's trophy in October, ten years after the last one won by Bryant, is moreover little inclined to look back on those dark hours.
"I'm trying not to put myself back in this situation ... I don't want to find myself in the same state of mind as at the time of the tragedy. He's looking at us from there with + Gigi +, and he must be proud of what we're trying to accomplish with the franchise. I don't want to live in the past, and I certainly don't want to relive this day, "he said recently.
Stephen Curry, star of Golden State, was kind enough to tell him how he learned about the drama.
“I'll remember it all my life. I was in training, everyone's body language suddenly changed, the session stopped. There was a lot of sadness - an overwhelming moment. We didn't want to. Believe it was true. It was surreal and it's still difficult. It doesn't look like it's been a year already. "
Like him, the Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving for the elders, the Jayson Tatum, Jamal Murray for the youngest, grew up and dreamed of the exploits of Bryant.
They should not fail to honor in their own way "their own Michael Jordan", so called by Paul George.
- Flowering of "murals" -
In Los Angeles, it is with the flowering of the murals bearing the likeness of the local hero that the tributes paid over the past year have been measured.
A group of joggers even got into the habit, every Monday, of symbolically running along some thirty murals located in the outskirts of Staples Center, for 8.24 miles, the two jersey numbers of the idol. deceased.
"A lot of people shout at me + Kobe forever! + And thank me," Tehrell Porter, the street artist at work on the wall of a textile factory in Downtown, told AFP.
According to the site Kobemural.com, which lists the number of frescoes created over the past year and locates them, there are 321 in the United States, including 246 in southern California, and 113 others in more than 30 countries, from Uganda to Haiti through France.
Proof that Kobe's memory is alive in the streets around the world.
At the NBA level, honor will be returned to him in May for his induction into the Hall of Fame, in the presence of his three other daughters and his widow Vanessa, who will have lived a year between mourning and legal proceedings.
Against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, for disseminating unauthorized photographs of the accident scene, against the companies that own and operate the aircraft, against the pilot's beneficiaries and even on behalf of his mother , who asks him for money.
© 2021 AFP