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Dear Mr. Bryant Part IV

Posted in Journal, tagged , on April 16, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

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Part 1: http://thegaber.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/dear-mr-bryant/

Part 2: http://thegaberintoronto.com/2011/12/26/dear-mr-bryant-part-ii/

Part 3: http://thegaberintoronto.com/2012/08/10/dear-mr-bryant-part-iii/

“Live in a way, in which you die, everyone mourns but you rejoice.” –Anonymous

Dear Mr. Bryant,

They say hindsight is 20/20, which is why I gave myself some time before I wrote you this letter. I didn’t want it to come off as reactionary.

 

Since the injury that caused your Achilles tendon to tear, I’ve watched it around 25 times, each time less painful as the first. Time heals all, as people like to say; but raw emotion is the most genuine.

 

On Friday night when you tore your Achilles tendon on what looked like a routine drive, I was rendered speechless. Luckily, I haven’t experienced any deaths in my family at this point in my life but when you hobbled off the court after a THIRD injury to your lower body in the same night and didn’t return, it felt as if someone close to me had passed away. I felt hollow, and watched the remaining four minutes of the game in silence, numb to whatever else happened beyond that point.

 

After the game I scrolled through my Twitter feed and streamed your press conference to find out the severity of the injury. Upon finding out it was the Achilles, one writer tweeted that the previous players who suffered this injury (Chauncey Billups, Elton Brand and Mehmet Okur) never reached their pre-injury playing form. And on top of that you were fighting back tears as the media barraged you with questions. Subconsciously tears rolled down my cheek, as the reality of having to watch Lakers basketball without you became a possibility for the first time in 17 years. I was devastated.

 

We all need hope in our lives, it’s used a motive for a lot of us normal folk to continue to live. Hope that we do well in school, so we can hopefully get into university, which we hope can lead to a career that can provide for our future families, so on and so forth. You were that hope for so many of us, even when we come up a little short in our daily goals we all knew at 7:30 p.m. PST we’d be able to switch on our television sets and live vicariously through your heroics to feel vindicated. If you can make three impossible three pointers to orchestrate a comeback against the Toronto Raptors, then we could most definitely nail a measly job interview.

 

Side note: the day of the Warriors game I had a meeting with the chair of a prospective post-secondary school I was looking to transfer to. In preparation for said meeting, I watched your latest interview with TWC  and mimicked your mannerisms when the meeting occurred.

 

I refused to believe this was the end to your legendary career. That one attempted drive to the basket gone wrong would prematurely end your quest for a sixth ring to tie Michael Jordan. I couldn’t believe it, so I continued to sit through your interview, as the tears continued to waterfall incessantly, hoping you’d provide me with some sort of silver lining to this tragedy.

 

And it came. A reporter asked the million dollar question that was on all of our minds: “if anyone is going to get through this, it’s probably you right?” (in reference to how your willpower is equal to that of 25 hungry mountain lions each fighting over a piece of raw meat)

 

Then you replied as only you can: “Ah sh*t…I was really tired man, just tired in the locker room, upset and dejected thinking about this (pause) mountain man to overcome…I mean this is a long process, I wasn’t sure I could do it. Then your kids walk in, then you’re like I gotta set an example, Daddy’s gonna be fine, I’m gonna do it, work hard and just go from there.”

 

At that moment you weren’t just talking to Natalia and Gianna, you were talking to the rest of us who look up to you like a father.

 

The fear of losing my idol to injury was replaced with a sense of appreciation of what you’ve already meant. Sure, you might never come back the same player (fingers crossed that you’ll come back even better) but the way you went out that night should serve as an eternal source of inspiration in itself. On one leg you made two free throws, which ended up being the decisive two points the Lakers won by, walked to the locker room on your own accord, reflected and put everything into context.

 

You put a lot of money into the Kobe System campaign last year, but you advertised it perfectly Friday night. By handling the situation the way you did, you came off as a warrior even in your weakest moment, and that is the true essence of the Kobe System.

 

Later that night you posted a rant on Facebook saying “there are far greater issues in the world than a torn achilles. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get to work with the same belief, same drive and same conviction as ever.”

 

And for the upteempth time you were right.

 

Two nights later, your team put together one of their best performances of the season by downing the San Antonio Spurs. The day after, bombings occured at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In other words, life went on.

 

You have spoiled us with your talent Mr. Bryant, and for that I don’t have enough words to express my gratitude for. Instead I’m grateful that your injury has allowed me to see that I should cherish every moment as we never know when the goals we strive all our lives for can be taken away from us in an instant; just as they were from you Friday night.

 

Get better soon Mr. Bryant, I love you.

Sincerely,

Gabriel “Gaber” Lee

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We Are All Witnesses

Posted in Journal, tagged , , , , , on June 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

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“Sports is a metaphor for life. Everything is black and white on the surface. You win, you lose, you laugh, you cry, you cheer, you boo, and most of all, you care. Lurking underneath that surface, that’s where all the good stuff is — the memories, the connections, the love, the fans, the layers that make sports what they are. It’s not about watching your team win the Cup as much as that moment when you wake up thinking, In 12 hours, I might watch my team win the Cup. It’s black and white, but it’s not.”

-An excerpt from Bill Simmons’ latest piece “The Consequences of Caring”

Ever since my early years, I’ve had a bad habit of over caring about the result of sports games played on television despite having no correlation to the players whatsoever. Unlike most people, I didn’t grow up watching a lot of television, just the odd episode of Recess here and there. I gradually replaced Sunday mass with NBA on ABC specials, and I would organize my social schedule around when the Los Angeles Lakers played; on most games nights I didn’t join the family at the dinner table, electing to stay in the living room to watch Kobe and Shaq dominate.

As a result of my dull childhood habits, I missed out on a lot of things.  Case in point: One of my close friends growing up recently observed that I’d much rather sit at home and watch a NBA game then join the rest of my friends at a club, which is true.  And subconsciously, I started deriving meaning in my life from the results of these sports games. Now that I’m 20, I’ve now learned that doing so is semi-foolish. A little too much of my happiness in life relied on how the Lakers finished their season.

Normally once the Lakers are eliminated from the playoffs, I crawl up in my man cave, sulk about it for a couple days in solitude before spending the rest of my summer doing normal people things. But over the past two years I’ve realized that in order to be a knowledgeable professional basketball journalist in the future, I’d have to broaden my horizons in order to become a basketball encyclopedia and that meant I was forced to watch the rest of the playoffs for educational purposes. Ugh.

That being said, this year’s playoffs have near torturous to watch since the Lakers have been ousted akin to the helpless feeling I had when I sat in Math class absolutely clueless through my high school years (what’s a logarithm, is that the staple log ride at all amusement parks?).

The NBA’s final four read as follows: the Miami Heat, the Oklahoma City Thunder, the San Antonio Spurs and the Boston Celtics.

I hate the two young teams as they’ve gradually become better than my beloved Lakers; while through the years I’ve developed a hatred for the two older teams as they’ve been the Lakers main roadblocks on their quest for championships.

In order to make things interesting, I talked myself into cheering for the Celtics and the Spurs to meet one more time in the finals. The logic being that while Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Tim Duncan were three of Kobe’s biggest adversaries, in a way they’re like the Avengers (Kobe being Captain America of course) fending off this new cocky, horribly-dressed (see: Westbrook, Russell), AAU, buddy system era of basketball.

On Twitter, I compared the possibility of KG and Timmy meeting in the final to the Undertaker and Triple H’s match at Wrestlemania. The WWE advertised that match as the end of an era, if the Celtics and Spurs would’ve advanced, it would’ve been the same concept with the myriad of aging stars gifted the opportunity to finish as a champion one final champion. As we all know now, that fantasy didn’t exactly come to fruition.

Quick tangent: recently to prove my stubbornness, my friend asked me whom my favourite five players in the league are (Lakers excluded). My answers were Paul Pierce, Manu Ginobili, Kevin Garnett, Jason Kidd and Tracy McGrady.

As talented as this new era is, I didn’t have to accept them yet as they’ve combined for zero championships (besides Dwyane Wade but he needed Shaq for his chip in 2006). As much as I disdained watching Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd hoist their first championship together, it was sweeter to watch LeBron James, the self-proclaimed chosen one, crumble repeatedly in the fourth quarter (insert your own joke here).

But as they say all good things must come to an end and it appears this is the year that the new era begins their era. Kevin Durant led his Oklahoma City Thunder past the Dallas Mavericks, the Lakers (still trying to erase that from my memory) and the San Antonio Spurs in succession. Those three teams Durant’s Thunder cruised eliminated had represented the Western Conference in the finals for the past thirteen years, count em’ THIRTEEN.

The more I watch Durant and LeBron’s greatness, the harder it is to hate them. I mean what have they really done wrong besides devote themselves to become better and better at the game they love, the same way Kobe did oh so many years ago.

Even the biggest Kobe homers must accept the fact that the torch has been passed from the Black Mamba to the King. Look no further than his defining performances against the Celtics in closeout games the past two years: last year, he scored the last 10 points of Game 5 and this year with his Heat down 3-2, he scored 45 points in Game 6 while shooting a whopping 73 per cent.

Yet the truth still remains, LeBron will never be Kobe to his generation of fans akin to how Kobe will never be Jordan to the past generation. Kobe never had to join his best friend to win a championship. Kobe never had to throw powder into the air before the game to showboat. Kobe certainly never said “all the people that were rooting for me to fail, at the end of the day have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life they had before” in response to his critics; instead he delivers gems like “losing is losing, there are different degrees of it but the result is the same.”

With the Thunder and the Heat meeting in the 2012 final, there’s no more old guys to cheer for (besides Derek Fisher). It’s guaranteed that between these two teams, when the dust is cleared and the debris is swept off either Kevin Durant or LeBron James will win their first NBA championship.

My friend followed up his initial question by informing me that these guys (LeBron, Wade, Durant) will be the old guys I’m cheering for in five more years. When he put it in perspective, I decided it may finally be time to embrace this new wave of talent, unless Kobe flies to Germany annually to get that magical procedure so he can play until he’s 45.

If sports is really a metaphor for life as Mr. Simmons suggests, and because it means the world to me, it became evident that I was unwilling to accept not only a new era of basketball stars but the new era of life that is looming. A new era of life that includes being financially responsible, mortgages, meaningful relationships and all that other stuff adults have to deal with.

We’ll see where my head’s at when Game 1 tips off tomorrow night, but for now my hate for LeBron James is at an all-time low. And if I out of all people can accept LeBron’s undeniable talent then so can you. I might become a “witness” over the next two weeks or I might just re-direct all my attention to the European soccer championships to avoid the reality that the NBA and life is slowly becoming what it’s always been: a world dictated by the young and the able who inevitably supplant their predecessors.

It’s your stage now young fellas, please put on a show and don’t forget to take a bow after you’re done.

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Dear Mr. Bryant Part II

Posted in Journal, tagged , , , , on December 26, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Part 1: http://thegaber.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/dear-mr-bryant/

“If you ever leave me baby, leave some morphine at my door. Cause it would take a whole lot of medication to realize what we used to have, we don’t have it anymore.” –Bruno Mars

Dear Kobe,

It feels damn good to see you back. Even sweeter that you made your return on Christmas day.

When ABC aired your pre-recorded interview, you said something along the lines off “I could drop 40,50 if I wanted to. But now I’m a better facilitator, so expect me to do more of that today to set the tone for the shortened season. “

Back in the day you were able to drop 40 points at will, in 2003 you scored 40 or more points in nine consecutive games. But times are different now. This LeBron James guy is looking as unstoppable as ever. Your good friends Carmelo and Kevin Durant look like they’re better pure scorers than you do now, which they both displayed in their opening day games respectively.

It was an answer we’ve all heard before from the greatest two guard of our generation, but behind that newly grown beard of yours I could sense the doubt behind your words. That maybe, just maybe, your will is beginning to exceed your ability. The heart and mind are willing but the body won’t allow it anymore.  To make matters worse, you landed awkwardly in a pre-season game on your wrist. We all assumed it was a minor injury…until you got it checked out…but torn ligament or not Kobe Bryant doesn’t miss basketball games.

You’ve tried to off-set father time by having mystery two surgeries in Hitler’s Germany. The first surgery appeared to work wonders, as you dropped 45 points on James Harden in a Drew League game.

Regardless, everyone from scribes to fans are predicting your Lakers are washed up; and at this point in your career you can’t lead them to a championship anymore. I know you hear them. They were whispering just a couple years ago, now they’re telling you to your face.

I believed in you this Christmas. Trust me Kobes, there are few people who believe in you more than I do despite the fact the Lakers habitually crap the bed on Christmas afternoons.

When 2 p.m. came around, my heart filled with joy. Lakers basketball was back, YOU were back. Just as quickly as that euphoric feeling arrived, it was erased after seeing the starting lineup of Fisher, yourself, Ebanks, McBob and Pau. Even Laker legend Magic Johnson joked at halftime that he doesn’t even know Ebanks’ first name. For the record Earvin, it’s Devin.  He also claimed that with this supporting cast there is no way your boys are making a return to the finals any time soon; further fuelling the fire that Mitch needs to make a move for Dwight Howard asap.

As the game progressed, the giddiness gradually returned. It appeared the Lakers would be just fine. Pau was playing like last May never happened, and all the new additions (including METTA WORLD PEACE) were exceeding everyone’s expectations..

You went about business as usual, getting to your favourite spots before rising up for that silky jumper. You even got into the lane a couple times, something you were unable to do in the Dallas series last May.

But that’s before the roof caved in at STAPLES center.

This season began very similar to how the last one ended.

Rewind back to game one of the aforementioned Dallas series: Lakers are up 16 in the 3rd, cruising to a victory before Dallas made a run. With a minute left to play you hit a tough pull up over Jason Kidd to put your team up three points. At the other end Dirk connects on a fall-away free throw leaner, cutting the lead to one. All you guys had to do was in bound and make free throws to walk away with a 1-0 lead in the series. We all know what happened next, Pau tries to hand it off to you, you somehow slip and the Mavs regain possession. Thankfully they only make one of two at the line. With a chance to win the game, you have a clean look at a three pointer that hits back iron. And the rest as they say is history.

Very similarly, you guys were up 10 at one point in the second half against the Bulls. The door was left open again for a surprising comeback. Pau and McBob miss not one, not two, not three but FOUR consecutive free throws that definitely would’ve put the game out of reach with a minute left to play. No worries though, you were able to bail Laker Nation out again with a crafty baseline floater. Again, all you had to do was inbound and hit free throws, and you threw the ball away. Derrick Rose takes it the length of the court, gets Fish in an isolation situation and goes to work.

Coming out of the timeout with one last chance to salvage Christmas, Mike Tirico said “this is a story we’ve seen before with Kobe…”

His comment brought a smile to my face, knowing that you’ve delivered more clutch moments than Santa has delivered presents.

You drive past the initial defender before putting up a high arching floater reminiscent of the one you had at the end of regulation in-game four of the Phoenix series in 2006. The ball hangs in the air for two very long seconds before Deng recovers and swats it. Game. Set. Match.

Sure I was dejected that you couldn’t close another tight game.  But what’s different this Christmas from all the other ones is that I’ve finally comes to grasps that a Christmas day game means the same as a snooze-fest in February against the Bobcats. In the past, I would’ve let it ruin my Christmas, allowing the result of your games to dictate the rest of my evening.

But as I grow up with you Mamba, I think we both realize there are things in life bigger than basketball (such as your divorce).The game merely serves as a bridge between all the shitty moments in life.

The LA Lakers are 0-1, but there will be a game tomorrow night in Sacramento. So I’ll see you there Kobes. Win or lose, it was splendid for you to drop by this Christmas. A present I would’ve never expected two months ago.

Your performance on the court may change, but our relationship stays the same. I promise.

Sincerely,

Gaber

Follow me on Twitter.

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Home for the Holidays 2.0

Posted in Journal, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

“Experience is the teacher of all things.” –Julius Caesar

Things change. People change. Everything changes eventually.

It started with something miniscule. A parody of my face on Drake’s body of the Take Care album received 40 likes on Facebook. I noticed how about half of the likes came from my friends in Toronto; a year ago that would’ve never been the case.

Then two days before I hopped back on my plane to Vancouver, a friend and I visited Tim Horton’s after an intensive swimming workout consisting of getting changed only to discover the pool’s available exclusively to women on Saturday afternoons

I saved us a table after ordering my hot chocolate.  He came to the table with his order in one hand and a mystery bag in the other. Inside the bag was a chocolate dip donut, my favourite.

“Bon voyage,” he said as he handed me the donut.

I started to think of which friend of mine in Vancouver knows my donut preference. I drew a blank. Hell, even my mom doesn’t know what it is.

I guess what everyone was saying all along was right, in order to develop friendships in Toronto similar to the ones back home it would take time and effort.

Before flying home after exams last year, I had a week filled with engaging activities culminating in the Lakers and Raptors game. This year, I spent the time doing things I didn’t have time for during the semester; like shooting baskets for hours at time, catching a movie with a friend and reading books I actually care about.

Regardless, the night before the flight I was suffering from mild insomnia. I was petrified of going home a failure. For the second semester in a row, I underperformed academically while excelling socially. I’m still unable to find the formula to succeed in the city.

Sitting five hours on a plane not knowing how your family and friends will react to you is Chinese water torture.

It’s no man’s land, an impasse, whatever synonym you want to use. I wasn’t sure which city I belonged in anymore.

That all changed very quickly when I landed, akin to the parable of the Prodigal Son. Sure, I may have done poorly in my history course but upon arrival my family didn’t care, they were just happy to see me. Similar to how the father threw his younger son a feast when he returned home after spending his half of the inheritance, my family took me out to my favourite restaurant.

This time, last year one of my best friends since elementary school informed me of how his cousin, who goes to school in Boston, changed up his social habits when he came home for Christmas a second time.

“The first year he’d want to see everyone from high school, and as time went on he only saw his close friends,” he said.

It’s a motto that I disagreed with at first, but now I see why it’s worth adopting. Life’s not about the number of friends you have, it’s about the ones who are willing to accept me for being Laker obsessed, chocolate dip donut loving, Chinese guy. I learned the hard way this semester that not everyone can like you.

This morning my sense of failure was replaced with the familiar Gaber swagger that I’ve been searching endlessly for.

Revving up the Cube for the first time in four months while blasting Drake’s Underground Kings is a feeling that can’t be replicated anywhere but home.

Failure? Fuck it, those who think about it too much are the ones who end up doing it.

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Thanks for nothing, Twitter

Posted in Journal, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

(J.E. Skeets/the Score)

My mom always reads spoilers for all of her favourite television shows in Chinese entertainment magazines. She would know every detail of the coming week’s episodes before they aired, and when the shows came on she would still watch them. Anyone who knows me will tell you I don’t watch much television besides the news, NBA basketball and the WWE. Out of the three programs, only one is susceptible to spoilers (WWE); to this day I do everything in my power not to read about what might transpire on the next episode of Monday Night Raw. I never understood the concept of knowing what to expect at every turn. Last night it all changed with the Chris Paul fiasco.

Twitter has become the digitalized version of my mom’s magazines. Since being coerced to keep a relatively active account as a journalism student, nothing comes as a surprise anymore because of the social media tycoon. It’s become my primary method of learning about the days’ top stories, or “trending topics” as the site would call it.  Often a friend will bring up a monumental story, ex: Occupy Toronto protestors being evicted and my response will be “meh, I’ve already read a tweet about it.”

I’m okay with learning about news this way, it sure beats sitting through a half an hour telecast. But to find out that Chris Paul is reportedly being traded to the Lakers for Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom in 140 characters via Twitter. That I’m not okay with.

I remember when the Lakers first acquired Gasol in 2008, I was at home with a dubious illness. I woke up in the early afternoon, made myself a bowl of fruity pebbles (kudos to those who get the John Cena reference) and opened up ESPN on the family computer. And there it was…Gasol’s face splattered across the homepage of ESPN, with an article that reported the Lakers had just acquired Pau Gasol for a bag of balls (correction: Marc Gasol and a bag of balls). Suddenly whatever illness I felt the previous night was alleviated and all I could do was run around my living room celebrating the heist of the second best center in the NBA.

That moment can never be replicated in the Twitter era. The average user must read at least 1,000 tweets a day from the people they follow. This certainly is a very fast way to spread news, but it is also disposable; because all news is transmitted at the same volume, everything starts sounding pretty much the same.

Do you get why I’m upset now? CHRIS PAUL BEING TRADED TO THE LAKERS SHOULD NOT BE GROUPED UNDER THE SAME TIMELIME AS THE ITALIAN ECONOMY FAILING YET AGAIN. ONE IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE OTHER, FIGURE IT OUT PEOPLE. By the time the trade was completed and cancelled within two hours, I had read about the trade in 75 different variations. It’s the equivalent to finding out my imaginary really hot girlfriend (the Lakers) just got a boobjob (Chris Paul) but got it removed (the trade’s cancellation) all before I got a chance to feel them up in person.

I hate how things are only important for a day at a time now. Events used to retain significance for days, weeks even months. Say 9/11 happened in the Twitter era, tweets about it would blow up the Twittersphere but then the next day everyone will be looking for something fresh to tweet about. With the boom of these social networking websites, society has taken a step back in that aspect. We now communicate instantly but ultimately less meaningfully. During the NBA lockout I was borderline depressed reading about one failed meeting after another. But once the lockout ended, it feels like everyone was too busy tweeting about the lockout ending to remember there was a lockout in the first place. Day after day, yesterday’s news becomes tremendously less significant.

This is what society is now. A slave to social media networks that you have control over what you read but not where you read it. Survey anyone under the age of 25 and ask them where they found out about the Chris Paul situation. I guarantee you 95 per cent of them will say Twitter; the remaining 5 per cent are people who don’t have access to the internet on their phones. Need proof? 8 of the 10 trending topics were about the NBA last night. I’m really happy the NBA is back, but I couldn’t be more discontent about how a website is shifting the dynamics of the league’s stream of information.

Since about 2 p.m. yesterday, Twitter was buzzing when Yahoo Sports first reported of the Paul to LA trade. At 7 p.m. the trade was confirmed by several reporters on Twitter. A few minutes after that, ESPN finally put an official story up about it. I was as shocked as everyone else when David Stern vetoed the trade two hours later, but it goes to show even the know-it-all website has its limitations. On the site, it constantly feels like a race to get something out there before someone else says tweets it.

Today I am not infuriated that Chris Paul isn’t coming to STAPLES center, because the truth is I prefer having Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol over Chris Paul and what management really needs to do is ship Andrew Bynum and Matt Barnes for Dwight Howard to solidify the middle. The reason I’m angry is because I inevitably partook in the endeavor my mom finds the most pleasure: reading all about something before watching it transpire. Maybe I should just get rid of my Twitter account…

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