Throwback Thursday: Kobe Bryant Scores 81

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

In the moment, it felt like an odd confluence of history and novelty, a display of all of Kobe Bryant's strengths and weaknesses jammed into a single evening. For the acolytes, it confirmed Kobe as one of the greatest scorers in NBA history; for the skeptics, it confirmed him to be, in the words of one letter-writer to the Los Angeles Times, "an icon of selfish play and petulant behavior." Ten years ago this Friday, on January 22, 2006, Bryant put up the second-best single-game scoring total in NBA history when he hung 81 points on the Toronto Raptors. Even now, in the twilight of his career, that game feels like something of a Rorschach test, a lingering testament to the divide over the ethos of Kobe Bryant: Did he do it to win a game, or did he do it to elevate himself?

In a way, this is Kobe's signature moment, because it was both a beautiful exhibition and a confusing tangle of motivations. The game was "a blur," Bryant said when asked about it earlier this week. "I didn't really understand or was able to grasp what happened," he told the Los Angeles Daily News. "It was very bizarre."

It is worth recalling what an odd and contentious time this was in Bryant's career. He was 27 and in his prime, yet the Lakers were a middling team composed of Bryant and a rotating crew of NBA session musicians, an unremarkable rhythm section of Kwames and Smushes and Mihms. Shaquille O'Neal had vacated the Staples Center a year and a half earlier, amid backbiting and controversy. Kobe was still toying with what he could do on the court without Shaq by his side; his scoring average had jumped nearly nine points since O'Neal's departure. Part of the reason Kobe averaged more points per game that season was because he didn't trust his teammates to score; part of the reason Kobe put up 81 that night is because he felt that he gave the Lakers the best chance at victory by doing so. Such is the career of Kobe Bryant, where self-interest and the greater good have so often overlapped.

So here's something worth pondering in the midst of the Kobe elegies that will no doubt be written over the next few months: Is it "selfish" and "petulant" when you prove yourself right?

"I'm a scorer no matter who I'm playing with," Bryant said this week. "I was going to score the ball. But on that particular team, it was just a lot harder to score."

The evening commenced in a fashion befitting Kobe: he hung in the air, glided underneath the hoop, and made a picturesque reverse layup. Then he eased through the first half, his team trailing the lowly Toronto Raptors by 14 points. The deficit grew to 18 with less than nine minutes remaining in the third quarter. At that moment Kobe's scoring total stood at 30; he was nearing his season average of 35.4, but nothing was out of the ordinary. And then, in an instant, it was. Bryant hit a 20-foot jump shot, and he followed that with a 26-foot three-pointer, and he followed that with a 27-foot three-pointer. He scored 27 points in the third quarter alone as the Lakers pulled ahead 91-85, and wound up with 28 more in the fourth. In just under 42 minutes, Bryant made 28 of 46 field-goal attempts, went 7-for-13 from three-point range, and made 18 of his 20 free-throw attempts. The Lakers won, 122-104.

Throughout it all, according to the Raptors' Jalen Rose, Kobe said virtually nothing. He did not talk and he did not taunt. ("He was ticked off," teammate Lamar Odom said after the game.) It was as if Kobe elevated himself through anger into some unforeseen dimension, his flat jump shot dropping from all angles, his drives to the basket ending in mid-range spin moves or layups or points from from the foul line. Through it all, Rose has often insisted, the Raptors were locked into a 1-2-2 zone defense. Toronto's coach, Sam Mitchell, refused to let anyone double-team Bryant, in part, Rose said, to teach his team a lesson. And so Kobe ate the Raptors alive, perhaps just because he could.

"It means that anything is possible," Bryant said this week. "Playing the game as a kid, you have a dream and even if the dreams are extremely wild and imaginative, you work hard. You believe certain nights like that can happen."

A decade later, there are still unanswered and maybe unanswerable questions about Kobe—about how he should be evaluated as a player and a person, and where he fits in the pantheon of all-time great players. There are questions about what Kobe means, and whether the perception of him as an unyielding workaholic control freak is a net positive or negative. The questions about Kobe so often center around his motivation, and so it was even in the wake of one of the greatest individual athletic performances of its time.

"Congratulations to Kobe Bryant," another letter-writer to the Los Angeles Times said that week. "Not only has he raised the bar in sports, he has thrown it away. Thanks to the precedent he has set, high school and college football teams, when playing a lesser opponent, can now have a 1,000-yard rusher on their team the very first game of the season! And why don't we get rid of that silly 10-run rule in Little League baseball? What in the world does that teach our kids about piling it on anyhow?"

Maybe that seems like a haughty criticism, but such is the paradox of Kobe Bryant. Even one of the greatest nights of his life will be remembered both for its brilliance and for the selfishness required to achieve it. It could hardly be any other way.