Kobe Bryant’s Achilles Injury: Coincidence or Fate?
In classical mythology, the rage of Achilles doomed him to an early death: given the choice of living peacefully and living to a ripe old age or and dying young in battle, Achilles chose to go to Ilium and fight alongside Odysseus and Agamemnon. His mother, seeking to grant him immortality, dipped him in the river Styx, leaving only his ankle bare.
There are many ways classical mythology continues to pervade modern life and one was at the forefront Friday night: on a seemingly routine looking play, a drive toward the basket, Los Angeles’ Kobe Bryant went down in a heap. According to Golden State’s Draymond Green, Bryant asked if he’d been kicked in the heel. He wasn’t, that feeling was his Achilles tendon snapping, the one end slapping the back of his heel.
The Achilles tendon connects the calf muscle to the heel. As per WebMD, it’s the tendon you can feel at the back of your foot. And when it breaks, the tension snaps it back to it’s connecting points, hence that kicked in the heel feeling. In any athlete, it’s a serious injury and often has a recovery time of months and months. With Bryant, estimates start at six months. But Bryant isn’t the average athlete, either. Despite a ruptured tendon, Bryant walked off the court. After hitting two free throws.
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Like Achilles, Bryant is a singularly driven personality, bent on immortality even at personal cost. Few, if any, players in the league have the same determined drive, the same sense of being cold blooded, what sports scribes like to call “Killer Instinct”. Bryant’s one of the most focused players in basketball history: he seems bent on bettering history’s other famous 6’6” guard. He doesn’t let things get in his way.
This is a player who took 46 shots while dropping 81 points on Toronto. Throughout 2006, he carried a half-powered Lakers team on his back into the playoffs and dropped them in Game 7, taking just three shots in the second half of a blowout 121-90 loss. He teamed with Shaquille O’Nel to create one of the most fearsome combos in NBA history and his feud with him sent the team into splinters.
He’s a proud, driven player who likes to do things his own way, even if it means angering his teammates or coaches. So was Achilles, who brooded in the long ships at the shores of Troy until Hector killed his friend Patroclus.
There’s never been anyone quite as polarizing as Bryant in the NBA. He has legions of haters and a cadre of vocal superfans. There aren’t many in the middle. Between everything from the Shaq/Kobe spat to his incident in Colorado to his role in getting people like Andrew Bynum or Mike Brown shipped out of Los Angeles there are plenty of reasons to hate the guy.
And yet, there’s almost as many to like him: he’s reinvented himself from one of the best dunkers in the league to a shooter, giving his career a second stage few achieve. His career numbers have him among the NBA’s elite: Jerry West, John Stockton, Magic Johnson. He’s won five titles, was named league MVP in 2008 and is fourth all-time in scoring. Even this late in his career, after 16 seasons and over 45,000 on-court minutes (third-most among active players), he’s still one of the most important players in the league; it’s hard to make a similar case for those around him in minutes, too. Without Bryant, will this Lakers team wash out of the postseason?
In a league filled with interesting personalities, Bryant is maybe the most enigmatic: he doesn’t seem to have as much fun on the court as LeBron James does and doesn’t have as much fun off it as, say, JaVale McGee. His social media accounts seem more staged than anything: photos of shoes, tweets where he calls himself mamba. But his post-injury Facebook rant is curious, a mix of doubt, introspection and him psyching himself up. It’s the most human thing Kobe’s done in years, maybe ever.
It’s already being asked if Bryant’s career is over. But that’s an easy question to answer: barring any unforeseen setbacks, there’s no way he’s finished. There’s nobody as determined as him in the NBA. After a loss to Miami last year, he spent the better part of two hours shooting jumpers in front of the media.
It was part publicity stunt, sure, but it was the move of someone consumed. He has to be better than, his peers, than Jordan, than everyone else. As he said to Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski, “I want what all men want. I just want it more.” Achilles said that, too.
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