It was just one exhibition game, but Kobe Bryant scored 27 points Thursday night. After the ruptured Achilles and then the broken leg … I wasn’t sure he would score 27 again in a backyard game, let alone against an NBA team.

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I concede I thought Kobe Bryant could beat this, too. I covered the guy for more than a decade, and I saw him come back, time and again, from injuries that would sideline the average athlete. “Badly sprained” ankle? Kobe would be back in a week, or sooner. He would keep playing right through things […]

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A weird thing about being in Thailand — which is physically closer to the U.S. than is the UAE, and by several thousand miles — is an even bigger sense of disconnect from American sports. It’s the time zones. By 10 a.m. UAE time, just about every sports event “last night” in the U.S. is […]

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… out of mind? Presumably scores, even hundreds of print and electronic journalists turned up for the Lakers’ media day, today, many of them interested in Kobe Bryant, above all else. But it would appear as if no one asked him about his long trip to the UAE and back. I would just like to […]

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I hope Kobe Bryant got paid for this. And I am certain he did. He arrived in Dubai on Wednesday and was three hours late for a press conference (plane delayed, apparently, and most every press conference in the UAE starts at least an hour late) at which he talked about healthy living, and staying […]

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The Los Angeles Lakers open camp for the 2013-14 season on Saturday, with a media day. If Kobe Bryant is there at all … he will be the bleary-eyed guy suffering from jet lag. Why? Because the night before, Kobe will have coached a celebrity team. In Dubai. On the other side of the world, […]

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I never really believed Dwight Howard would leave the Lakers. Right up till it leaked today that he would do just that. Who leaves the Lakers? Especially when leaving them means walking away from the extra $31 million in guaranteed money the Lakers could pay? But I also never thought committing $118 million to the […]

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This is an awful time to be a Los Angeles-area sports fan. It has been mostly dreary since I left the region to live and work in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, but it seems to be bottoming out, the past four or five months. Aside from hockey, which has no significant hold on Southern California […]

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I suddenly am impressed with this Lakers team, after having despaired of them, most of the season. (Pretty much from the 1-4 start forward.) Kobe Bryant out till sometime next season with the ruptured Achilles, Steve Nash hurt again, a playoffs berth clinched when Utah lost earlier in the evening … Not needing to win […]

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I always thought the Walt Whitman poem eulogizing Abraham Lincoln was over the top. “Fallen cold and dead …” But my reaction to what appears to be Kobe Bryant’s torn Achilles tendon led me to think of the Whitman poem: O Captain! My Captain! (The one that, of a time, was required reading in American […]

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