By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
By any measure, Sunday was a sad day for sports, one of the saddest in years, maybe decades.
The mind tries to think back to a sports tragedy to rival the sudden catastrophic death of basketball legend Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash outside of Los Angeles.
Some harken back to the death of Dale Earnhardt on the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001. But that really doesn’t compare.
For one thing, Earnhardt made his living driving race cars at 200 miles an hour, where death lurks around every curve, every bump in the track. And, of course, auto racing – especially stock-car racing – doesn’t have the global following that basketball enjoys.
The murder of Steve McNair in 2009 was shocking, but again, it’s the NFL, a big deal to Americans, but not so much on the world scene. And, too, he died on the Fourth of July, when the public’s attention was away from football and sports in general.
Others brought up the death of Walter Payton in 1999 as being in that realm of sports tragedies. But Payton died of a liver disease and his death wasn’t unexpected, not the way Kobe Bryant’s was.
What made Bryant’s death so shocking, so riveting, was that it happened right in the middle of basketball season, just one day after his name had been back in the sports headlines when LeBron James passed him for third place on the NBA all-time scoring list.
It happened on a Sunday morning, a big sports day virtually everywhere, and the story evolved all day on all manner of media.
What made it even more tragic, sadder even, was that it was so mundane. At its core, this was simply a father taking his child with her friends to play a ball game.
For awhile Sunday, I thought that this was a case where someone rich and famous died doing something someone rich and famous would do, take a helicopter to a game, while Middle Class Joe would have piled into the SUV and taken the freeway.
But, after contemplation, considering the safety record of highways in Southern California, I decided that Bryant and his party could have just as easily been killed in an automobile accident as in a helicopter crash.
When the news first broke – and it broke prematurely in the view of many, before authorities had a chance to contact Bryant’s family – it was just Kobe Bryant that was involved.
Then the news got worse. Since they had at least five victims in initial reports, some outlets reported that all four of Bryant’s daughters were on the fateful aircraft.
That was quickly walked back by the media, but it was bad enough when it was confirmed that his daughter Gianna was indeed aboard and perished with her father.
And it got worse still when it was learned that three of the other victims were highly-respected junior college baseball coach John Altobelli, his wife and his daughter.
Altobelli played baseball collegiately for the University of Houston and had been the head coach at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa for 27 seasons, winning more than 700 games in his career. His daughter Alyssa was a teammate of Gianna Bryant’s on a travel ball team.
Altobelli and his wife, Keri, leave behind two older children, a son and another daughter, who now must cope with the loss of their entire family.
There are others, too, grieving for lost loved ones. Another teammate on the team, Payton Chester, and her mother, Sarah, were also killed, as was a coach, Christina Mauser, and the pilot, Ara Zobayan.
They all deserve to be remembered as much as Kobe Bryant, and, now that the dead have all been identified, media reports are including the others on board as well.
So, what happened? That will be up to the investigators. There was fog in the area, and at least one early report suggested that the aircraft was caught in a sudden wind shear that caused the pilot to lose control.
Wind shear or microbursts – sudden, violent surges of air either upward or downward – can be silent killers when it comes to aircraft. The 1982 plane crash in New Orleans that killed 145 people was ruled to have been caused by a microburst that hit the plane as it was taking off.
And helicopters are intricate pieces of machinery. You have the large rotor that powers and lifts the vehicle and stays generally parallel to the ground, and you have the smaller tail rotor that stabilizes the aircraft and generally spins perpendicular to the ground.
Keeping everything in harmony on a helicopter requires unique skills, and, reportedly, Zobayan was a skilled pilot with more than 20 years of experience flying helicopters. It will take some time for the pieces to be put together to find out how this tragedy happened.
There is no question that it’s a tragedy. It is not understating the issue to call Kobe Bryant a basketball legend.
He was a superstar in high school at Lower Merion High outside of Philadelphia who went straight into the NBA without going to college, then played for the Los Angeles Lakers for 20 seasons, leading them to five NBA titles.
Physically, Bryant was gifted, a 6-foot-6 small forward/shooting guard who had no weaknesses in his game. But what set him apart, what made him legendary, was his work ethic and his will to win.
He was in that special class of players – Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson – who made the players around him better, but who demanded the ball when it came to crunch time.
And he almost always delivered.
Was he the greatest of all time? I don’t know. That is such a subjective thing, depending on who you root for, what you like.
Personally, I never cared for Bryant the player, because I’ve had a dislike of the Lakers franchise for as long as I’ve been a basketball fan. But you had to respect his game, because he was such a winner, and even his opponents paid him their due.
If he wasn’t the greatest of all-time, he was certainly on the very short list of contenders for that honor.
The statistics alone are impressive. He averaged 25 points a game in 1,346 NBA games, along with 5.2 rebounds and 4.7 assists, and his stats for the playoffs were remarkably similar, 25.6 points, 5.1 rebounds and 4.7 assists in 220 postseason games.
As many of those who played against him attested in the many tributes that poured out over social media on Sunday, one theme was consistent. Nobody could guard him.
He could shoot the 3-pointer, he could drive to the basket from anywhere on the floor and he could even post up when called upon. And his defense was as good as his offensive game. Altogether, Bryant was an NBA All-Star 18 times.
For the generation of kids who came up in the 2000s, Kobe Bryant was The Man, their hero, in much the same way that Jordan and Bird were to an earlier generation, and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain were to the one before that.
He wasn’t just an American star or just a basketball star either. A Brazilian soccer player gave a tribute to Bryant after scoring a goal in a game Sunday, and Brett Favre and Drew Brees were among the NFL greats who posted or gave testimonies about Bryant.
And in Los Angeles, where fame and stardom are almost commonplace, Kobe Bryant was a star among stars.
Not long after the news was confirmed about the accident and the sudden death that was involved, I picked up my phone and called my mother. She’s 89 and it had been a few weeks since I’d talked to her.
I also texted my three adult children, told them I loved them and that I was proud of the lives they have made for themselves. And, finally, I hugged my wife, told her I love her and how much she means to me.
It was important to do it then, at that moment, and I suspect there were a lot of others who did the same.
We can never know when death will come for us or our loved ones, so it is incumbent on all of us to not wait to say, “I love you,” to your family and friends, and to live life to the fullest every day, one day at a time.
Stan Caldwell is a 35-year veteran sports writer in the Hattiesburg area, and most recently served as sports information director at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi.
- NOTE: An earlier version of this column said that Gianna Bryant was Kobe Bryant’s oldest daughter. That is incorrect. She was the second-oldest of his four children. That reference has been removed.
