Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant

“I just want to be the man,” he told me, reaffirming his goal of making himself into the NBA’s top player. “I don’t know how I’m going to get there. I just have to find a way.”

Though that night as a rookie in Cleveland he said that he didn’t know how he would get to the top, he had settled on an answer he had known all along. He was going to grind his way there—implacably, relentlessly grind away at the challenges of the game, night after night, game after game, until he found a dominance born of his ability to outwork e