Word: kobe
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Another star athlete charged with sexual malice? Such an item is usually confined to that burgeoning beat, the sports-page police blotter. Kobe Bryant makes it front-page news--not simply because he and Shaquille O'Neal are the Guts and Godzilla of the star-studded Lakers, not because he scored 30 points a game last season or because he went straight from high school legend to NBA phenom. Not even because he recently inked a $45 million endorsement deal with Nike. But because he is one of the NBA's prime icons of clean and keen...
With handsome features and a name that sounds like a Pokemon toy, Bryant has the rep of a star a prim mother or an innocent kid could love. "For teenage girls especially," says Peter Zollo of the polling firm Teen Research Unlimited, "Kobe is way up there. Where Allen Iverson's been the bad boy, Kobe has been the pretty...
...general, a good guy. The son of journeyman NBA forward Joe (Jellybean) Bryant, Kobe speaks fluent Italian from having lived in Italy for the eight years when Joe played pro ball there. At suburban Philadelphia's Lower Merion High, where he led his team to the state championship and broke the region's all-time high school scoring record once held by Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe had good grades and SAT scores. "He never really talked to women," says Emory Dabney, 22, a high school teammate who stayed friendly with the star after Bryant turned pro. "He concentrated on basketball...
Bryant proved last week that he can be a charismatic testifier. But he may have a tougher audience in Eagle County, a Colorado district in which blacks total only 0.3% of the population. Even here, though, Bryant's benign image may trump his color. "Kobe the superstar is in some ways raceless," says Kenneth Shropshire, author of In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. "He could be like Michael Jordan, someone nonurban white folks think of as a superstar, and not primarily a black...
...tarnished. "The court of public opinion is a little more fickle than the court of law, and the same due process does not apply," says Kevin Adler, whose Relay Sports and Event Marketing firm represents companies like Nintendo and Lego in sports partnerships. "I hate to compare Kobe to O.J., but Simpson was acquitted in his criminal trial, and you don't see him getting a lot of deals these days...