The legend of Gianna Bryant’s basketball potential was just starting to grow
Gianna Bryant was more than Kobe Bryant’s daughter. She was planning to follow her famous father’s footsteps in the world of basketball, hoping to one day play for Geno Auriemma at UConn and the WNBA.
Those dreams were tragically cut short on Sunday when the 13-year-old died alongside Kobe in a helicopter crash that also killed seven others as they were on their way to one of Gianna’s basketball games at the Mamba Sports Academy. The second-oldest of his four daughters, she had gotten big into basketball.
“She was a little kid looking up at our players,” Auriemma told Sports Illustrated. “She was so excited. Imagine the absurdity of that. Your father is Kobe Bryant and the most excited you’ve been in a long time is being around college women’s basketball players. But that’s what it meant to her, what she aspired to be.
“You’ve got Gigi and her role models and people she looks up to, and then you’ve got our players looking at her dad. It was a real head-shaking scene. When she came up here on campus, if she could have stayed, I think she would have stayed.”
Kobe and Gianna watched basketball every night and traveled around the country for games. Highlight clips of her had begun to circulate on the internet, showing an advanced player for her age.
“Gigi was really turning into a special player,” Russ Davis, the women’s basketball coach at Vanguard University in Southern California and someone who became close with Bryant in recent years, told the Associated Press.
“It’s hard to predict her future, but with the way she was improving and the way she understood the game, she was going to have a bright one.”
There is a famous clip of Kobe and Gianna at Barclays Center for a Nets-Hawks contest, in which Kobe can be seen giving his daughter insight. He once told Reggie Miller she was “hellbent” on playing for UConn. The stories Kobe told of her have gone from sweet to heartbreaking.
In 2018, Kobe went on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and told the host that Gianna wanted to play in the WNBA. He recalled how fans would come up to him and say he needed to have a son. But Gianna would interject.
“She’s like … ‘I got this. Ain’t no boy for that. I got this,’” he said.
“I’m like, ‘That’s right. Yes, you do. You got this.’”
And before that, there was the story of how Gianna first started getting into the game and asked her dad for guidance.
“It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool,” Bryant told SNY, while the two attended a Nets game together. “She started out playing soccer, which I love. But she came to me … and said, ‘Can you teach me the game?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ We started working a little bit and the next thing you know, it became a true passion of hers. So, it’s wonderful.”
Gianna seemed to share the passion for the game and the determination needed to succeed. Kobe posted a photo to Instagram, which had become a way to express his pride in his four daughters, in September of Gianna’s team celebrating a 115-27 rout of an opponent with the caption, “Two years ago we lost to the same team 22-21 #hardwork #mambas.”
“I try to watch as much film as I can,” Gianna said in an interview with Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS in 2019, when she and her dad attended the Las Vegas Aces’ WNBA opener. “More information, more inspiration.”
Monday night, UConn kept a seat open in the middle of its bench in her memory with flowers and a No. 2 jersey. Gianna and Kobe attended a lot of Huskies games and the players on the team looked at her like a younger sister.
“The love you saw when she came through the gym, we knew that she really wanted to be a part of this someday,” point guard Crystal Dangerfield told reporters. “That was probably the biggest thing that hit for me. She won’t have that opportunity. Growing up I had the dream to be here and to know that she won’t have that, it hurts.”
— With AP