Kobe Bryant and the Endless Battle

There is a scene in The Iliad in which Achilles, the great Greek warrior, finally confronts Hector, the leader of the Trojan army. Hector has killed Achilles' dear friend Patroclus, and Achilles is out for blood. When the two finally meet, outside the walls of Troy, Hector wants no part of Achilles. In fact, Achilles has to chase him three times around the city walls before Hector finally fights back.

Hector takes one inept lunge at Achilles, and quickly realizes that he is defeated. So he does the logical thing: he asks Achilles for a dignified death so that his body may be returned to his family and buried in its entirety. Achilles, forever seething, wants no part of such dignity.

"Beg no more, you fawning dog—begging me by my parents! Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw—such agonies you have caused me!"

This is not exactly state of the art 21st century trash talk, but you don't have to stretch your imagination far to imagine Kobe Bryant delivering the contemporary equivalent of Achilles' speech to some poor, misguided NBA opponent. And in the past—the much more recent past—Kobe in all likelihood would have done to that opponent exactly what Achilles did to Hector: kill him and tie his body to a chariot that he then dragged around Troy (or, say, Portland) for all to see.

In The Iliad, rage is Achilles' greatest strength and greatest weakness (well, second-greatest, but we'll get to that.) His fury drives him to be the bravest, toughest, most dangerous soldier in the war. It also wreaks havoc on the people around him. Sound familiar?

I don't compare Greek mythological figures to NBA players often. But to make any kind of sense of Kobe Bryant, one must be willing to plumb the full depths of human history, and this a moment in which Kobe is deserving of our thoughts. On Wednesday, he will undergo surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff and the Lakers will formally announce what is already known: he will not return this season.

The injury was suffered as Kobe went up for a seemingly innocuous dunk last week in New Orleans. But at Kobe's age (36 in human years, only slightly more ancient than Achilles in basketball years), there is no such thing as innocuous. Kobe being Kobe, he checked back into the game a few minutes after the injury and hoisted a couple of pointless shots to demonstrate his toughness before exiting the stage for good. He did all this despite knowing that the Lakers' season was over before his team took the floor that night.

Which begs a simple question that has nonetheless recurred throughout this Lakers campaign: Why? For a man whose reputation has always hinged on his obsession with winning, Kobe had seemed to be out there sacrificing a lot for very little obvious reward. The Trojan War was a tragic, bloody, and ultimately pointless mess all fought over a single beautiful woman. The last days of Kobe's career have seemed equally pointless. He continues to wage his own personal war—but over what? The most Lakers fans can hope for are occasional free tacos, and fleeting moments of transcendence. Now even those are gone.

So why keep fighting? Maybe it's because Kobe is angry. Not in an especially pointed or political sort of way. Not even in a bitter, chip-on-the-shoulder sort of way. Perhaps because, like Achilles, Kobe's wrath is inherent; it's how he works, it's what makes him great. Remember the final playoff game of his rookie season? He airballed four straight shots in the fourth quarter and overtime as the Lakers fell to the Jazz in the first round. You don't keep shooting airballs because you're having fun. It has always been like this. Even when Kobe's shots started falling, and kept falling, it still wasn't that fun.

Now the shots are back to not falling, or worse yet not being launched at all. Kobe's body has become the agent and the target of his wrath, a piece of machinery, nothing more. He treats it like a car he wants to get every last dime out of, driving it harder and harder even as it breaks down, even as the wheels come tumbling off and the engine stops turning, until finally it stops working altogether. This season it was the rotator cuff. Last year, it was the broken leg. The year before, the old Achilles heel.

Imagine Achilles himself in old age. He's sailing around the Mediterranean, looking for battles to to fight, generals to slay. But there's nothing left for him. The fatal arrow struck his heel for a reason. He wasn't supposed to keep fighting.