Spirited Away

In high school, I worked at a summer camp-type locale called Summerbridge, where every day, one of the sixth- and seventh-grade attendees would receive an award. This award, called the Spirit Stick, went to a student who demonstrated exceptional program spirit and displayed a generally positive and constructive attitude.

Believe it or not, this meaningless summer camp award has a lot to do with Kobe Bryant. You see, at a meeting at the end of every day, the Summerbridge staff would determine who would win the Spirit Stick the next day, and it was often a highly contentious process. Frequently, one of the teachers would decide to nominate one of the program's worst discipline problems because they'd had, for them, a relatively good day, in that they didn't hit any of the other students. Sometimes, students who had made a legitimate case to win the award, through genuine friendliness and good deeds, would lose out to a student who had done absolutely nothing, and who had simply refrained from misbehaving for a day.

That student who won the award so undeservingly is the sixth-grade summer camp version of Kobe Bryant. Kobe used to be, in short, a discipline problem. He called out his teammates and threw them under the bus. He inspired his coach to write a book about how much he hated his star player. He might have raped somebody. While his incredible skills made him the kind of guy you'd want on your team, he was not the kind of guy you'd want on your team.

Then Kobe changed. He curtailed his petulant behavior and stopped giving the media bratty quotes and trade demands. He started passing the ball to his teammates. He continued to cheat on his wife, but at least stopped committing borderline sexual assault. He was not a model citizen any more than Derek Fisher was (actually, much less than Derek Fisher was). But at least he'd stopped hitting his classmates.

This would all be well and good, except we've given Kobe the Spirit Stick for it. Of course, there's no actual award for being a great teammate, but there is no shortage of media stories on Kobe's rebirth. And that's fine in theory, since he has been reborn--I'm just sick of reading articles fawning over the fact that Kobe now sometimes passes to teammates rather than taking all the shots himself. Not ball-hogging, the absence of a basketball crime, has become praiseworthy in its own right. We might as well credit him for every defensive set in which he doesn't commit a foul, or every postgame press conference in which he doesn't insult Sasha Vujacic.

Personally, I find Kobe Bryant to be one of the more hateable athletes out there, but I suppose I can see how someone could legitimately disagree. What I can't comprehend is why we seem so intent on praising him. His talent is as elite as it has always been, but as a team leader, he's finally (and maybe not even permanently) risen to somewhere in the neighborhood of average. And for that, I refuse to give him a Spirit Stick.