Review: ‘The Rise’ recounts Kobe Bryant’s high school years

Serious basketball fans know the broad strokes of the Kobe Bryant story. The five NBA titles won during a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, the sexual assault allegation against him in 2003 that was eventually dropped when his accuser refused to testify, the Academy Award he won for a short film about basketball following his retirement, and his tragic death in 2020 aboard a helicopter on a foggy Southern California morning while flying with one of his teenage daughters to her basketball game.

In “The Rise,” Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist Mike Sielski focuses on what happened before any of that, when Kobe was just a kid. Sielski starts at the very beginning, on Kobe’s birthday — Aug. 23, 1978 — and paints a portrait of a kid from a loving family who spent his adolescence in Italy, where his father, Joe, played basketball, before they moved back to suburban Philadelphia in part so the family could nurture the basketball prodigy.

“He was a kid obsessed,” writes Sielski, as he chronicles the single-minded drive of the young Kobe, who if he wasn’t practicing his crossover or competing in weekend AAU tournaments, was watching VHS recordings of NBA stars Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan, studying their moves with absolute conviction that someday he would be performing on the exact same stage. Sielski drew from a series of interviews recorded with Kobe in the mid-90′s by one of his high school assistant coaches at Lower Merion High School, a tony suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line.