Really, Reilly?

Reilly has an ego, sure, and there was too much Reilly in the writing, but I enjoyed the piece. Many of the little tidbits he elicited were things even hard-core NBA fans like myself had never heard before. (For what it's worth, the excellent and intelligent NBA blogger Henry Abbott of TrueHoop called the piece a "must-read.") An insightful if self-indulgent peek into the life of a guy we still don't know that well.

 

The life of a superstar athlete is hectic? I call bullshit.

 

Shit are you guys tough.
For what it was, that piece was excellent. Reilly wasn't trying to go in-depth. He wasn't trying for Gary Smith. He was trying to be light-hearted and easy, and he nailed it.

 

Yeah, I thought the "look how busy he is!" stuff was too much. And probably insulting to people working two minimum-wage jobs while raising three kids and so on. But it was interesting to find out just what happens before we see the Kobe we see at 7 o'clock.

 

I'm just bummed that he cut the scene where he blew Kobe in the car.

 

Also, I'm not sure why you think it was a "PR" piece and so on! Reilly mocks a whole bunch of things - the ice jug being driven in its own car, the fact that the super-rich athlete never has to pay for anything...several others. Read this passage:
--
"Mr. Reilly? Kobe is going to need to leave in exactly one minute. He was mistaken as to the start of tonight's game. Can you be expedited down here immediately?"

"Uh, well, yeah, I can expedite."
--
This is mocking! He is mocking the treatment of Kobe as some president-like figure who must go places in "exactly one minute" and has minions who "expedite" acquaintances out of rooms.

"Gods do not park," moreover, was certainly not fawning! At least that's not how I read it. I read it as another tongue-in-cheek comment on the fawning world that lets guys like Kobe get away with never parking. In other words, Reilly isn't calling Kobe a god. He's channeling the yahoos on the freeway who see Kobe that way.

This, all, is why I didn't mind all the banal "I-am-nice-person, believe-me" quotes from Kobe. When writing about the utter ludicrousness of the man's existence, he has to give him a chance to explain how he's a normal person despite the ludicrousness. Even though he's almost certainly not a normal person, it was only fair.

 

You spill coffee in Kobe's car, you gots to pay for that.

 

(One thing to add to that last paragraph: I think that's what makes the piece interesting - the man talking about his normality while we get to observe him as he lives out his supremely abnormal existence.)

 

So, what exactly did we learn? That he works out, goes to a shootaround, gets hounded by fans and naps in a free hotel room? Whoop-dee-do. I've read plenty of good stuff from Reilly over the years, and this ain't it. Kobe Kommute? Really?

 

Rule of the road.

 

We learned that he works out at 3:30 a.m. That he sometimes charters helicopters to make relatively short commutes. We've always heard people rave in generalities about Kobe's work ethic and workout regimen, but here we learned a revealing new detail about what that regimen entails. (Suicide pec-slapping pushups with Tim Grover? Late in the season? Damn.) We got to hear him talk, albeit briefly and vaguely, about his struggles with his wife. That he reads Tom Friedman! (This does not interest you in the slightest? That Kobe reads, or claims to read, Tom Friedman? Even if it makes you dislike him more, it's a non-sequitur to ponder.) That his freaking ice jug gets its own car. The man-with-identical-tattoos story is priceless.

And...several other things.

"Kobe Kommute" is horrible. But the piece was a nice little peek into the dude's existence.

 

If it took you this long to finally be disappointed in Rick Reilly....... then you got a much longer ride out of him than a lot of us did....

You shouldn't be sad, you should be happy.

He's been doing this for years now, to the point that SI felt he was "fat that needed trimming" because he was no longer willing to do anything other than this type of writing.