To honor Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, let’s look at every time Kobe told us about Gianna’s love for basketball.
Today commemorates two years since Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi were killed in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, California.
It still doesn’t seem real since that awful day. How could someone like Kobe, who dedicated his entire life to the game of basketball before eventually giving it up to be a family man, have that all cut short just as the next chapter in his life began? Every day, you see or hear something about Kobe, as if we collectively refuse to realize he’s gone. Gianna was chosen to carry on the legacy of Kobe’s larger-than-life basketball persona, which he bragged about every moment he got.
“[Gianna]’s pretty fierce. She loves playing, she loves shooting. She came to me last summer and asked if I would teach her the game a little bit, so she really just started playing, but she picked up things innately.” -Kobe on Extra (2017)
“What I love about Gigi is her curiosity about the game. She’s very curious. Even in a heated situation in a game where it’s going back and forth, she can detach herself and come to me and ask a very specific question, which is not common. She’ll come over and say, ‘OK, on this particular trap when I’m trying to close the gap but she’s getting on the outside, do I need to change my angle?’ It’s a very specific question. That’s pretty damn cool.” Kobe to the L.A. Times
“[Gianna] will be standing next to me, and [fans] will be like, ‘You gotta have a boy. You and [wife Vanessa] gotta have a boy, you gotta have somebody carry on the tradition, the legacy.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh! I got this. Don’t need no boy for that! I got this.’” – Kobe on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2018).