Even if you have no interest in Basketball or sports in general, you've probably already caught wind of Kobe Bryant's retirement.
Last Sunday, the Los Angeles Lakers star announced he was calling it a career after 20 illustrious seasons in the NBA. What made Kobe's declaration unique from other retirement announcements was its delivery method. Most high-profile athletes would simply do it during a press conference, or have their agent release a statement. Not Kobe.
To break the news to everyone, the Black Mamba opted for something a little more unique: a poem. Released on The Players' Tribune, the 52 line free verse acts as a goodbye letter; recounting Bryant's life-long journey with the sport of basketball and the joy and heartbreak that comes with it.
To the casual fan, the statement certainly was touching; but what did literary experts think of Kobe's little foray into poetry? For the most part, it looks pretty positive.
On Vocativ's stanza-by-stanza breakdown of the piece, poet Dorothea Lasky said:
"I love that Kobe chose to address Basketball as if it were the eternal beloved, with the kind of devotion one would give only to a god, I love thinking of basketball and Kobe in a kind of lifelong dance. The way he performed for us in the poem how [he and basketball] first met when he was a little boy, and the way that the poem cycles back to that moment... It reminds me a lot of an Ars Poetica form, which is a kind of poem that poets often write to poetry itself. This is definitely Kobe's Ars Basketball."
On the New York Times, poet Jane Yeh said that Bryant's work was one of the few times in recent memory that a poem penetrated the zeitgeist.
"One thought I had initially, without even seeing it, is that it'll be the most widely disseminated poem of the last decade or in recent history," she said.
