Touchdown Jesus: Tube Socks and Devotion in Kobe’s “Dear Basketball”

Every Tuesday in Touchdown Jesus, staff writers Cray Allred and Valerie Dunham engage with the popular and polarizing world of sports from a Christian perspective.

I don’t know that anyone expected the news of Kobe Bryant’s retirement to be carried on the back of a poem
—but then again, the Black Mamba has always been full of surprises.

On November 29th, The Players’ Tribune published “Dear Basketball”, Kobe’s verse tribute to the game he loves. The ode’s critical reception (which broke both the Internet and Steve McPherson’s spirit) was so bad that it actually prompted a reimagining published at The Huffington Post. However, the revamped version excludes the one thing that draws me most to Kobe’s experience—the pair of socks that marks him as neither legendary nor controversial, but as a child alight with wonder and hope and love:

“From the moment
I started rolling my dad’s tube socks
And shooting imaginary
Game-winning shots 
In the Great Western Forum
I knew one thing was real:

I fell in love with you.”

This poorly rhymed declaration of love seems like a cliché; coming from Kobe Bryant, though, it’s not. Bryant has not simply participated in the legendary basketball career he’s built over twenty seasons—he has made it his life. He comes to the sport in much the same way another man might come to God, with a sort of loving reverence that is all-consuming.

The Huffington Post’s re-imagining of Bryant’s poem is littered with phrases like “if you’re a chump and a pushover I will run you over” and “winning takes precedence over all” (which, to be clear, are Bryant’s own words, and mostly fair reflections of the persona he’s honed over the last 20 years). They speak to an egotistical man obsessed with winning.

But the empty spaces between the words of the original poem are filled with a childlike faith untarnished by the wear of more than half a life in the NBA:

“And we both know, no matter what I do next
I’ll always be that kid
With the rolled up socks
Garbage can in the corner
:05 seconds on the clock
Ball in my hands.
5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1”

The boy in this poem embodies the sort of childlike faith Jesus describes to his disciples in Matthew 18:1-4—the childlike faith that is supposed to foster a teachable spirit and humility. For Bryant, this humility seems to be juxtaposed with a career fraught with ambition and an unwavering self-assuredness. And maybe it is—maybe Kobe Bryant actually is as egotistical as he sometimes seems.

But is it also possible that Bryant’s ambition has always been a misguided offering to the game that welcomed him into its fold as a child? Maybe for Bryant, the pregnant pause between 1 and the sound of a buzzer is not merely a self-serving thirst, but a sort of alleluia to the game that he loves. Maybe his entire career has been an imperfect act of worship born of the faith in basketball instilled in him as a child.

When I look at Kobe Bryant’s career through the lens of his ode, I can see it—the love that has informed his compulsion to the game—and in an obvious sense, it is terrible. Though basketball has doubtlessly instilled in him a multitude of invaluable tenets, it cannot love him back. It cannot sustain him. It cannot make him whole. Most of the bits of his soul he has invested in basketball will return void. And who can’t predict the hollowness eventually rendered by such devotion?

But his reverence for the game is beautiful, too, in a way that is less overt—beautiful despite the fact that it is intrinsically flawed. The child-like faith born by the tube sock imagery is a pale impression of the way God has intended us to love Him: with wonder and hope, humility and trust.

Bryant’s devotion to basketball is just one example of the countless ways human beings demonstrate a capacity for worship. Yes, he gets the object wrong, but there is something existentially beautiful about the faith that inspired his career—a faith entirely intact at the end of twenty long years.

Kobe Bryant’s poem may not be good; but it turns its gaze toward something that is.