The Kid’s GOT IT!

Teen all-star, teen all-star, answer their prayers. . . .

What do you do for an encore when you’re the youngest player to make an NBA All-Star team, not to mention the first still living at home with his parents?

What do you do when you’re 19 and make $1.2 million a year plus endorsement income that should reach $5 million soon, between current deals (Adidas, Sprite, Spalding) and pending deals (a pizza chain, a fast food restaurant)?

Then there’s the upcoming guest shot on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno and the Sports Illustrated profile, not to mention all the anchors who wanted a few minutes here this weekend, only to be turned down by the Lakers, they didn’t care if it was Chris Rock, Spike Lee or Barbara Walters.

Two years ago, Kobe Bryant’s parents sat in the bleachers, watching the Lower Merion, Pa., High Bulldogs in a gym that held 2,500. Now they’re among thousands at the Great Western Forum, watching their son, the idol, not to mention his fans from coast to coast.

“The interesting thing about him being selected for the All-Star game,” the Lakers’ Jerry West says, “we do not stuff ballots, period. These votes came from other people that obviously like to watch him play.”

Actually, the Lakers did some campaigning--for Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones. No one dreamed Bryant had a chance, right up until the last two weeks when Kobe’s fans must have begun bicycling to McDonald’s in massed formations to vote.

It was a surprise and a reach, but it wasn’t off the wall. Only the elite scorers--Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Karl Malone--have better points-to-minutes ratios. Bryant doesn’t even start and isn’t his team’s No. 1 option.

But it’s more than basketball; this is the stuff of blessed transcendence. Like Jordan, Bryant has the flair, the smile, the charm, the hunger. Like Jordan, the child Kobe wants to posterize the world. If he keeps his head on straight--ah, there’s the rub--the world had better duck.

Here’s the really amazing part: So far, so good.

Teammates occasionally roll their eyes at Bryant’s audacity and shot selection, but they seem to dote on him, like a kid prodigy they’re baby-sitting. His industry is exemplary. After his rookie season, he kicked back with an off-season largely spent on summer league, weightlifting and summer school, earning 12 credits at UCLA, getting an A in an intensive Italian language course. He celebrated Sunday’s victory over the Chicago Bulls by going to Gold’s Gym with his personal trainer and lifting.

No, this isn’t like anyone we’ve seen before.

A New Icon for the Kids

Just checked out your new issue with WEBBER on the cover. It’s about time you put that [Kevin Garnett] SLAMADAMONTH in! I’m out!

Cordell Mann

Bismarck, N.D.

P.S. When you gonna get a cover with my boy Kobe?

I got an idea for your next cover . . . Kobe Bryant sportin’ his “I’m better than Jordan” smile and in bold print, Just Gettin’ Started. . . . I’m out like Yinka Dare.

Thanks,

Adam

P.S. I saw Malone’s game on a milk carton.

P.P.S. Please give the enclosed comb to Sam Perkins for me.

--Letters to Slam magazine

As Stuart Scott, resident ESPN young person, might put it, this is Kobe’s world and we’re all only renting space in it. And the rent’s going up.

Youth sells these days, and who’s younger or more salable than Bryant? Try his sneaker, Adidas’ KB8, $100 at your local mall (credit cards accepted or maybe you can work out monthly terms.) In the key November-January season, the company says Bryant’s shoe outsold the Grant Hill, Penny Hardaway, Allen Iverson and Shaquille O’Neal models, most of which were far more heavily promoted, finishing second only to (what else?) the Air Jordan.

Even Adidas, which signed Bryant for five years and might pay him $2 million this year, including royalties, didn’t expect this.

“I think that’s a fair statement,” creative director Peter Moore says from the corporate office in Portland, Ore.

“He didn’t play all that much last year and he is 19 years old. And it’s a crowded field. And he’s playing on a basketball team that’s got a big chance to do something, so it’s not like they’re a team that’s looking to play young people for their experience. . . .

“If you just look at the sale of Laker jerseys, the little ‘8,’ the little kids’ jersey, is probably the No. 1 jersey, even over Shaq’s. Kobe has a magical appeal to young people. I think they sort of see the kid in him. . . .

“Most of our consumer base is, frankly, between 14 and 20. I mean, that’s who’s buying this stuff. The endorsement world is slightly different today than it was certainly five or six or 10 years ago. Then it would have been the older guys who set the example. Now kids are emulating kids.”

Bryant has the crowd-pleasing game and, perhaps most important, he did it his way. He didn’t wait for the adults to tell him when he was ready to go pro. He went pro.

“Our readers are 13 to 24,” Slam editor Tony Gervino says. “What Kobe has is what Jordan has, the ability to be different things to different people. My mother loves Jordan, I love Jordan, my nephew who’s 8 years old loves Jordan. Jordan sort of spans generations.

“Kobe’s the same way. He’s handsome, friendly, polite, understands the media game, plays the media game well--at a very young age. He’s a hip-hop kid, listening to hip-hop. I mean that’s the key. That’s what binds all 18-, 19-year-old kids together. This is a hip-hop generation, and they grow up listening to rap, not the rock that we grew up listening to.

“He’s also the kind of guy the NBA’s been waiting for, a kind of guy they can put in their marketing push, and you’re pretty confident there’s not going to be a 4 a.m. drug arrest.”

In KidWorld, you get old fast. Gervino says Slam hasn’t done an article on the 26-year-old O’Neal since 1995.

The Bryants of Pacific Palisades

If it weren’t for the honor of the thing--and if it wasn’t what Kobe wanted--Pam and Joe might just as soon have passed on this celebrity parent gig.

When word got around that Kobe wanted to go pro from high school, family decisions were second-guessed as if they were public policy. College coaches pleaded with them to think of the example they were setting. Philadelphia, where they were born and raised, prayed for Kobe to attend a Big Five school and couldn’t understand skipping the entire process, resulting in flak on the airwaves and hurt feelings.

They moved west together--at Kobe’s request. He says it never occurred to him to go alone. It was like when Joe was playing in Italy and the family was all the family had.

Joe, known as “Jellybean” in his free-spirited NBA days, is now uncharacteristically reluctant to do interviews, eager to avoid looking as though he’s living through Kobe. Actually, if he were pursuing his own agenda, Joe, then a LaSalle assistant, would have steered Kobe to college--since he was getting head coaching offers, in a package deal, of course.

“No doubt about it, that happened a lot,” Joe says. “There’s a lot of people offered me jobs if I brought my son along. That even pushed me further away from that particular school.

“I mean, we were comfortable and we were safe. Financially, it wasn’t like they could offer you money and all like that because it really didn’t matter. I mean, if I could work at LaSalle, making peanuts and have three kids, I’m doing all right.”

Anyway, that wasn’t how it worked between father and son.

“To tell you the truth,” Kobe says, “we never really talked about it. We never discussed it. It was just a matter of, he knew that was something I wanted to do so we just left it at that.”

Kobe was so poised, so earnest, so good. He had been playing pros for years, when then-Philadelphia 76er coach John Lucas let him come down and work out. Just off his junior year at Lower Merion, Kobe says he beat Jerry Stackhouse one-on-one.

“They had all the coaches watching and so forth,” Kobe says. “I think I kinda took him by surprise ‘cause he had no clue who I was. I got a letter from Dean Smith, like two weeks later.”

Of course, Kobe was only 6 feet 5. The prevailing view among Philadelphians, college coaches and NBA general managers too, was it was a mistake.

“In the beginning, after he announced, before he worked out with any team, a lot of teams thought he’d go at the end of the first round,” says Arn Tellem, Bryant’s Santa Monica-based agent. “He was a perimeter player, he wasn’t Garnett, he wasn’t 6-11. I really wanted to get a gauge, so I brought him out to meet Jerry [West], have Jerry work him out. . . .

“After the workout--I’ll never forget it--when Jerry called up, he said it was the best workout he’d ever seen in his life. At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘We’ve got to figure out a way to get him here.’ ”

Says Laker assistant Larry Drew: “We interviewed Jermaine O’Neal when he came out. He was a high school kid. But Kobe, I saw him do some things I hadn’t seen in a long time. I was surprised and shocked at his skill level, but I was more amazed at his level of confidence, a kid coming out of high school.

“We had another guy here working out with him, Dontae’ Jones. They were playing one-on-one. As you know, Kobe’s not a real big kid. Dontae’s a much bigger kid. But Kobe really held his ground.”

So they got him here.

They had to trade Vlade Divac for the Charlotte Hornets’ No. 13 pick, but they were stripping down for a run at O’Neal, anyway. The New Jersey Nets wanted Bryant at No. 8--until Kobe and Tellem, aware what the Charlotte trade meant, called New Jersey to say Kobe wouldn’t stay, it was too close to home, anything they could think up. General Manager John Nash voted to take him, anyway, but Coach John Calipari, the boss, switched to Kerry Kittles.

So Bryant became a Laker. Of course, it wasn’t everything he thought it would be.

“It was real hard for him,” Coach Del Harris says. “There were some December moments, some January moments. . . . At the time we were bringing him along pretty slowly. If he didn’t have a pretty good performance in the first half in a game we were trying to win, he might not get back in in the second half. . . .

“But he never got in a funk and stayed in it. He’s very tough-minded. He never was disrespectful. He didn’t complain publicly and he easily could have because he had a great fan base.”

Bryant and Byron Scott, 18 years apart in age--several generations in NBA time--competed directly for playing time. Byron started out, wondering how a high school kid could function at this level, and found out.

“I did, at the beginning, when we were in training camp because he wasn’t able to work out with us and I really didn’t know him,” Scott said from Athens, where he plays for the Greek team Panathinaikos. “But as the season went on, I got a lot closer to him. . . .

“He’s different. He would have done well in the ‘80s with us. At least, he showed me a tremendous amount of respect, back when we were working at practice and I would tell him things that we would try to work on, and I don’t think he was doing it for show.

“He was very interested in hearing about our team in the ‘80s and we would sit down and talk about that. He is totally different than a lot of the guys that are coming into the league, with the big heads and the egos and things like that.”

The Boy Wonder in the Bubble

Question: Wasn’t it scary, thinking about jumping to the pros?

Bryant (smiling): No.

Q: You never thought to yourself, “I might get there and find out they’re too good?”

Bryant laughs out loud.

--Interview, Jan. 28, 1998

Actually, there is one thing about jumping to the NBA that surprises Bryant--the fact that everybody is so surprised.

In a world that seems to be going nuts around him, either stoked out on praise or intent on tendering advice, Bryant is calm as a Buddha. He knows where he wants to go, always did. He knows how to get there. So far, it has always worked. What’s the problem?

Even fame, which is never what anyone thinks it will be, is a cinch, so far, anyway.

Of the Lakers, O’Neal, who carries a tremendous public relations load, is considered dutiful, much better than he was his first few years, although it’s still not his idea of a good time. Van Exel is described as having a “love-hate” relationship with fame. Jones isn’t even that enthusiastic, says a Laker official, he’s more “like-hate.”

With Bryant, it’s “love-love.” The Lakers get as many requests for him as they did for Magic Johnson in his prime, and Kobe wolfs it down. If his life turns out like Jordan’s, with the loss of privacy and the pressure of expectations, he says that will be fine with him.

“It just looks like a responsibility you have to deal with, if you want to be the best,” Bryant says. “You have to deal with everything else that comes with it. You have to deal with the full package, you just have to handle it in a responsible manner.

“Sure, why not? I think it should be everybody’s goal to be the best.”

For the Bryants, the hits keep happening. Their oldest daughter graduates from Temple this weekend, with a degree in international business. She’ll work for Kobe, who will have lots of business. Start with the Lakers’ intention of re-signing him this summer for who knows how many tens of millions of dollars.

Kobe pursues his destiny. Joe and Pam watch from their non-prime location, at the corner of the court.

“We don’t go to the Forum Club,” Joe says. “We sit here and eat our nachos. This is Kobe’s life. This is Kobe’s time. He wants us, needs us, we’re there, but there’s a lot of things he has to figure out for himself. . . .

“It’s the same at home. Mom has breakfast, lunch and dinner ready. He goes, watches videotapes. Take out the trash. All those things. Just a normal life. It’s nothing special.”

OK, a little out of the ordinary.

“His room is a big room,” Joe says, laughing. “It’s his world in there. He has a nice room.”

Picture enough electronic gear to track satellites. The dream is coming true, just the way they and nobody else thought it would. Two years ago, John Nash asked Joe how he saw his son’s career. Joe said Kobe would spend the first season adjusting . . . then become an all-star in his second. Nash kept a straight face, as if he’d just met someone at a cocktail party who claimed he’d seen Martians on the White House lawn.

Now who’s keeping a straight face?

“Last year, I expected to play a little more, but unfortunately, I had the injury the beginning of the year, that kind of set me back a little bit,” Kobe says. “But to myself, I’m pretty much on schedule.”

If you haven’t noticed, this is a young man who likes to do his own scheduling.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

On the Rise

How Kobe Bryant’s 1997-98 per-game statistics compare to last season’s numbers: *--*

CATEGORY 1996-97 1997-98 Minutes 15.5 26.7 Field Goal % .417 .450 Free Throw % .819 .785 Points 7.6 17.9 High Game 24 33 Rebounds 1.86 3.3 Assists 1.28 2.4 Steals 0.69 1.14

*--*

All-Star Game at a Glance

When: Sunday, 3 p.m.

Where: Madison Square Garden

TV: Channel 4

Radio: XTRA 690