Seeing these two shoe releases in print made me question Kobe’s decision making, his inner circle, his business acumen, and anything that had to do with taste. As in, if there was a fly on the wall and you wanted to kill it, you couldn’t even use the Kobe Two unless you were positive that the bug was going to die on a stud. These shoes were a comedy of heavy errors. First of all, this is not a shoe - this is either a weapon or a miniature trundle bed. Of all the things these shoes make me think to do, putting my foot inside them is 13 th on the list. The Kobe Two is that last project you put out when the record label won’t release you until there’s one more album. This was Kobe’s final shoe at Adidas and that should not be a surprise. And it wasn’t a positive experience: It was alarming. What I saw in that Eastbay, I’d never seen before. There is that five percent, however - be it The Picture of Dorian Gray or Eastbay August 2000 - that you do know is not worth your time. Circling an Eastbay was a lot like the early stages of underlining important passages in an assigned classic novel: They all seem important, which leads you to highlight 95 percent of the text. As usual, this was the highlight of my day and I grabbed a marker, ready to sit on the toilet for two hours and circle every pair of shoes that I wanted and would subsequently not get. It was either late summer or early fall of 2000 when that fateful Eastbay catalogue showed up in our mailbox. That was prior to his rookie campaign in 1996, and what a terrible time it was, producing two of the worst creations that God has ever let out of the sweatshop: The KOBE and the KOBE TWO (the latter, actually NSFW).
It will be a bittersweet evening - but I can finally write my petty Kobe Bryant piece, on this, his last day in the National Basketball Association.īefore Kobe was signed to Nike, a place that turns great athletes into pop-culture gods (typically with the help of Wieden + Kennedy), he signed a six-year contract with Adidas. True to my Williamsburg residency, I was kind of over it by the time he left Lower Merion - but even I can acknowledge the mark he’s left on the game, very clearly the player of the post-Jordan/pre-LeBron generation. But you only hate the ones you truly respect, so even haters are forced to honor him as one of the greatest to ever play the game. Others have hated Kobe for almost two decades.
Many see this as the end of a beautiful era - their hero taking his final bow.
Tonight, Kobe Bean Bryant plays his final NBA game.