Just Saying, Is All...Kobe Bryant's Escape from LA

There’s no prison quite so mean as Paradise.

We don’t have to rehash the entire Kobe Bryant saga here. Suffice it to say that all is not well around the Staples Center. As it stands, No. 24 has a bum knee, and a bruised ego, and a case of creeping existential angst that Phil Jackson Himself couldn’t Om away.

You know how it goes, Bubba: Sometimes, a scene’s so played out you just can’t bring yourself to stick around.

Unfortunately, as Kobe Bryant’s learning the hard way, that doesn’t always mean you get to leave.

Breaking up is hard to do—but it beats staying together for lack of an alternative. Kobe doesn’t want to be in Los Angeles. I can’t imagine Jerry Buss is too keen on keeping him in town. If there were a deal there for the doing, the thing would already be done.

Instead, the status quo obtains.

What is will be.

As for what was, well—Kobe will have to puzzle that one out for himself.

Kobe Bryant had the world by the tail, once upon a time—a loaded team, a platinum Q rating, a VIP table at the center of the pop universe. Things fell apart, though, and wherever you lay the blame there’s no disputing the fact of the collapse as it actually happened:

The Lakers were It.

And then they weren’t.

And now all that’s left for Kobe is the bitter broken hope of what might have been.

They will tell you LA is a place where you can rot without feeling it. That’s not right. I’ve done my time in the Basin, and I felt myself rotting every instant I was there—felt it all the more for everything juxtaposed to it: for the ocean and the palm trees and the wretched endless sunshine.

It’s the unkeepable promise, Bubba—the unlivable dream.

It’s a Roman Polanski flick based on a Joan Didion book, with a score by Randy Newman.

It’s Los Angeles, no matter how much you blur the focus, and anyone who’d knock Kobe Bryant for wanting out really would be only just saying, is all...

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