FEBravo wrote:
what's the final verdict on the rape allegations? I was only casually following the NBA back then and didn't particularly like him, but I thought that was dodgy as hell. Doesn't take anything away from his accomplishments but always left an asterisk in my mind.
he obviously fucked up.
kobe is an interesting case, in that he was less than 3 years older than me, and i basically saw his entire career from start to finish, the first real superstar from this era to pass like this. makes you sort of take stock of things.
after the rape incident, he didn't really seem to show remorse and he took a bunker mentality about it, which i guess is understandable. but, he did seem to realize over time how he might be perceived about it and i think he made a lot of efforts to repair damage he did with a lot of people. his wife forgave him, apparently, and he was by all accounts a great father. im not sure anyone should ever be remembered for the worst thing they ever did while discounting all the good they did in life too. you can see from all the reactions coming in that he meant a lot to a lot of people, and he seemed to be pretty generous with his time to fellow players/people, even though he did a lot of it behind the scenes. no matter what happened off the court (and the current NBA generation was probably too young to even really be paying attention to that stuff) he inspired 2 generations of NBA players and had a major cultural impact around the world.
