He Has a Sad Philadelphia Story to Share

At 23, Kobe Bryant has two NBA titles, a slam dunk crown, four All-Star selections, one All-Star MVP trophy and no home town.

Having previously taken down such erstwhile favorites as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, local fans turned on one of their own Sunday, booing Bryant progressively louder as he climbed toward 31 points.

Here’s how bad he felt: he even acknowledged it.

“I was pretty upset,” he said afterward. “Pretty hurt. I just wanted to go out there and just play, play hard. But they booed and you know....

“I still like coming home, though. I still enjoy playing in Philly, nonetheless.”

For the bulletproof Bryant, this was a rare concession. This is a young man who, in his time, has feuded with the star player on his team and found, or kept, himself isolated from the rest of the Lakers’ roster, never showing an ounce of distress or breathing a word of complaint.

Nor is this the kind of city to turn its back on a local basketball hero, wherever he goes and for whomever he plays.

Sure Bryant left, but so have all of Philadelphia’s schoolboy legends.

Wilt Chamberlain spurned the Big Five schools, went to Kansas, left town again when the NBA Warriors moved to the Bay Area, returned to the 76ers, commuted from New York, ripped his home town in the press, forced the 76ers to trade him, then refused their entreaties to retire his jersey for more than 20 years before finally deigning to accept.

Yet, Wilt remained a local hero. When they finally put his No. 13 on the Spectrum wall, the 76ers could have sold 100,000 tickets.

All the others left, too, such as Rasheed Wallace (University of North Carolina, Blazers) who would go onto stardom and Gene Banks (Duke, several NBA teams) and Andre McCarter (UCLA, several NBA teams) whose careers soon waned. None was any nicer than the sweet-tempered Bryant, but he, alone, was drummed out of the family.

The difference, of course, was that Bryant bypassed not only the Big Five schools, but college entirely.

Bryant’s father, Joe, was not only a Philly guy and a former 76er, but a LaSalle assistant. Talk radio, which is huge here, ran with it big time.

You can’t say a high school senior who asks a pop singer to his prom has been totally unaffected but on the other hand, Bryant turned out to be the real deal. In other words, he was right and everyone else, especially here, was wrong.

Then, as if to confirm the local picture of him--Punk Ingrate--Bryant was quoted during last spring’s finals as saying he was from Los Angeles, not here.

He would later say it had just been his competitive zeal talking. In fact, he had never before denied his Philadelphia heritage, which he took pride in.

Far from forgetting his roots, he had clung to them for all he was worth; in his withdrawn early days in the league, he’d be alone in his hotel room on the road, on the phone with friends from high school.

By the end of the finals, however, the resentment seemed carved in stone.

When Bryant recanted, between Games 4 and 5 (by which time the Lakers had a 3-1 lead), explaining that he had always considered himself a Philly guy, neither of the local papers ran a word of it.

By this weekend, he was hoping he had turned the corner.

He had recently been honored by his high school, Lower Merion, which retired his jersey. He was back as an All-Star and wouldn’t be playing against the 76ers. . He wore his father’s 76er jersey to the media session.

He probably thought people would be happy to see him do well, but that wasn’t how it turned out.

The local fans, who are nothing if not diehards, sat yearning for Allen Iverson to do something, but Iverson, exhausted from a hard weekend of partying, chilled.

Nor did Michael Jordan do anything legendary, other than miss a breakaway dunk.

The West plowed the East for three quarters, just as it had last season. This time, however, the East couldn’t come all the way back, as it did last season, and the final score, 135-120, was as one-sided as the game had been.

“I felt real bad because, you know, at a happy moment, a happy time like that, you just want him [Bryant] to enjoy it,” said Iverson, the unlikely bearer of compassion.

“You’d think people would say, ‘What if that was their kid,’ but they didn’t,” he said.

“Even though he’s from Philly, he’s not a 76er,” said East Coach Byron Scott, once a mentor to Bryant. “And I think he understands it.”

I think he does now, anyway.