Great Esquire feature on Kobe, written by Mike Sager...with an EPIC paragraph

The ending was a bit flat, but a fantastic profile on what it's like to live with a bitch-on-wheels....

And the first photo is magnificent...

http://www.esquire.com/features/the-game/kobebryant1107

 

Actually, two great grafs...

"Clutching tight to Kobe's hand is the former Vanessa Urbieta Cornejo Laine, twenty-five, she of the infamous $4 million purple makeup diamond. Kobe met Vanessa -- and her mother, who was along as chaperone -- on the set of a video shoot for his rap album, an experiment in cross-marketing that came and went with little fanfare. (Note: Try Googling the lyrics of "K.O.B.E.," performed in duet with the model and TV personality Tyra Banks.) At the time, Vanessa was still a seventeen-year-old high school junior. Kobe himself was only twenty-one, a four-year veteran of the NBA. (You will recall, perhaps, that he took the pop singer Brandy to his own senior prom.) Criticized early in his career for holding himself separate from his teammates -- while they were playing cards, going to clubs, and discussing child-support payments, Kobe was playing pay-per-view Nintendo and ordering room service -- Vanessa seemed more his speed. A sheltered Catholic girl from Orange County, she was as close to her family as he was to his; after residing with his own parents for two years, Kobe had only recently started living on his own. Vanessa had been discovered outside a hip-hop concert by a music producer and had recently begun booking jobs as a dancer and an extra. Kobe tells me unabashedly that when he met her, it was love at first sight. They've been together every possible moment since. The first week, he flooded the administrative office at her high school with flowers for her; he'd pick her up after the bell in his big black Mercedes, causing a stampede of lookie-loos.

Vanessa's dark beauty and silken coal-black hair bring to mind the kind of idealized Mexicana frequently seen in tattoos sported by Latino gangbangers. She is known by some as Kobe's Yoko. I have seen her, purring and demure, at Kobe's side in her four-inch heels, her makeup and wardrobe obviously the work of someone with ample time and money on her hands, bringing to mind the image of a tower-kept princess before her mirror, primped to the last eyelash, the last curl, the last bangle. In public, she patiently endures the endless cell-phone pictures taken by all comers, who seem to be lying in wait around every corner, all the time, graciously thanking each and every person who comments on her looks: You're so very kind, she will say, her smile royal and Splenda sweet, thank you so very much. And I have seen her go off -- off like a mother bear, like a cornered cat, like a streetwalker on D.C.'s notorious Fourteenth Street strip, zero to sixty in a snap of her manicured fingers, hurling a string of expletives outside the Lakers' dressing room at a fat guy who she perceived had been looking at her daughter in an inappropriate fashion. She might well own the record for the most motherfuckers in one sentence. "

 

Re: Great Esquire feature on Kobe, written by Mike Sager...with an EPIC paragrap

Nearly did a post on this story today.

This paragraph and detail IS tremendous. HOWEVER ... it is absolutely buried in the article. This is on the third page. You have to wade through 11 LONNGGGGGG paragraphs to get to any new information. The first three pages are all rehash.

Sager is usually a good writer, but I felt like this was a heavily pro-Kobe piece for the first three pages. I don't know if Kobe's people got in his ear, or he felt the need to be generous ... but it opened very, very soft and friendly in a pro-Kobe kinda way. All summer, the world knows what the story has been ... and instead of advancing it (or even addressing it) in the first three pages, he only glosses over it.

* Note ... i have not finished the piece yet, and my thoughts could change on the ending. But the first half lulled me to sleep.

 

Re: Great Esquire feature on Kobe, written by Mike Sager...with an EPIC paragrap

Well, there was apparently one moment they weren't together. Happened in Colorado.

 

At first I wasn't sure who you meant.

 

What happened to Snuka? Did Patera beat him in a loser-leaves-board match?

 

Just wondering the same thing

 

My guess is this had something to do with it. http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/

 

Re: Great Esquire feature on Kobe, written by Mike Sager...with an EPIC paragrap

As did the user named PinSuperfly, I suspect. Been some discussion of this issue over on the subscribers' board. Whoever led Superfly to nuke himself is a piece of shit and hopefully Webby has or will do some nuking, as well.