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I posted it-- 260 views and one reply.
Everybody Colined it. It's a little long but far more insightful than this 45 minute interview. (And it's only a 10-15 minute read, so it's about a third of the time commitment-- I guess people just really hate reading.)
He has no problem talking about it as a defining moment in his life and goes far deeper into it (and everything else) than he does in this Grantland interview.
"It wasn't that people thought I was soft," he says, slightly wincing at the implications of the word. "It was more of a street credibility thing: 'He grew up in Italy. He's not one of us.' But what I came to understand, coming out of Colorado, is that I had to be me, in the place where I was at that moment."
Which brings us to the hinge-point in the career of Kobe Bryant: the week he checked into a Colorado hotel room, had sex with a woman who worked there, and was subsequently arrested on a sexual-assault charge. A year later, the charges were dropped and Bryant apologized. But the incident will (obviously) never go away. When Bryant dies, the accusation will probably appear in the second paragraph of his obituary. And he knows this.
"I started to consider the mortality of what I was doing," he says. At the time, he was 24. "What's important? What's not important? What does it mean when everybody loves you, and then everybody hates your guts for something they think you did? So that's when I decided that—if people were going to like me or not like me—it was going to be for who I actually was. To hell with all that plain vanilla shit, just to get endorsement deals. Those are superficial, anyway. I don't enjoy doing them, anyway. I'll just show people who I actually am.... The [loss of the] endorsements were really the least of my concerns. Was I afraid of going to jail? Yes. It was twenty-five to life, man. I was terrified. The one thing that really helped me during that process—I'm Catholic, I grew up Catholic, my kids are Catholic—was talking to a priest. It was actually kind of funny: He looks at me and says, 'Did you do it?' And I say, 'Of course not.' Then he asks, 'Do you have a good lawyer?' And I'm like, 'Uh, yeah, he's phenomenal.' So then he just said, 'Let it go. Move on. God's not going to give you anything you can't handle, and it's in his hands now. This is something you can't control. So let it go.' And that was the turning point."...
Part of what makes interviewing athletes difficult is the way they purposefully misunderstand questions, and the way they ignore certain questions, and the inflexibly straightforward manner in which they answer the handful of queries they perceive as relevant. This is not the case with Kobe. "Me sitting here, doing this interview—I don't have to do this," he says. "Ever since Colorado, I control my shit. If I don't want to do something, I don't fucking do it. Nobody is going to control my career or my life."
