Kobe, Mambacita died living a basketball dream

Los Angeles, January 27

Kobe Bryant called his daughter Gianna “Mambacita” after his own court nickname, “Black Mamba,” confident she would follow in his footsteps and become a professional basketball player.

Bryant and Gianna were killed traveling to his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, California, where he was to coach her team in a tournament, citing stunned players and coaches at the sports facility.

Bryant was known as a family man, and his Instagram account is filled with pictures and videos of his wife, Vanessa, and four daughters, aged 17 years to 7 months old.

But it is Gianna, or “Gi Gi,” who was the star of many of the photos and videos, showing basketball skills that ESPN Women, only three weeks ago, compared with those of her father.

Since he retired from the National Basketball Association in 2016, Bryant had been coaching Gianna’s middle-school basketball team. In a November video Bryant posted on Instagram, she finishes a solo dribble by scoring the kind of fadeaway “swish” basket known as a “Kobe” after her father’s signature shot.

In 2018, Bryant was caught on video saying his daughter was “hell-bent” on playing for the University of Connecticut Huskies, one of the top teams in women’s college basketball. The next step for Gianna after college would have been the Women’s National Basketball Association, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Joe Bryant, who played in the NBA before coaching the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.

Bryant in January said that when fans came up to him and Gianna and said he had to have a boy to carry on his family’s NBA tradition, Gianna would tell them: “Oi! I’ve got this!” and he would say: “Yes, that’s right, you got this.” — Reuters

"Kobe has been one of my mentors. I’ve had several phone conversations with him and when we met each other in the past couple of years. When I was going through an elbow injury and struggling to handle it mentally and emotionally and all these things were happening to me... dropping in the rankings and then having to work my way up, he was one of the people who was really there for me. He gave me valuable advice and guidelines to kind of keep trust in myself, trust the process that I’ll be back" —Novak Djokovic, on how Kobe Bryant mentored him