How I learned to stop hating and love Weird Old Kobe Bryant

But something changed in the past year. Now, I find myself appreciating that monster a little bit more every day.

Why is this happening? Why am I feeling a bit of glee when those four letters pop up in front of me when I used to feel instant anger? Here are three theories.

Fatherhood, a recognition of the work it takes to stay fit once you hit 30 and self-hate at my own team’s perpetual mediocrity may just be the underlying culprits. But I don’t think this is right: just two years ago I wrote my Laker Hater cri de coeur. I still feel the hate every time I see purple and gold paired up.

Social media is a window not into celebrities’ true selves, but to a part of their personalities they’d like you to see. Kobe is no different. On Twitter and Facebook, he shows us the same thing he showed us in those eye-rolling Nike ads and all those neatly packaged midnight shooting sessions. He is constantly trying to prove to us how hard he works to be the best and how much he hates losing.

But as he takes the reins of his own narrative exposure, we see just how unstable, how unglued he is about it all. A seminal moment in this theory: the infamous “Moonlight Sonata” tweet from the nightmare Dwight-Nash season. That same night, Kobe introduced us to a recurring character in Kobe’s War On Time: the bear.

The bear came back in April 2013 when Kobe tore his Achilles, as Bryant basically ripped open his soul in a long Facebook rant. There was something endearing about seeing what goes through Kobe’s brain during such a difficult moment.

He’s shown other sides of his personality lately, too. He basically made fun of Nick Young for getting injured trying to pick Kobe’s pocket during a scrimmage. He has in some ways been the conscience of the players’ union (while also being the most highly paid player). And he got incredibly philosophical and weird in a New York Times-published conversation with Arianna Huffington, going so far as to claim his footwork on his famous fadeaway was inspired by studying how a cheetah moves its tail. All of the goofiness, the anti-owner outrage and the outright weirdness -- it’s all endearing enough to make us forget what Kobe once represented. Hell, it even retroactively puts things like “White Hot” in perspective. (Even in this perspective, “White Hot” is the most hilarious thing Kobe has ever done, and is the richest heckling resource imaginable.)

This theory has merit -- as we’ve gotten to know the “real” Kobe as much as that is even possible, we can better appreciate him. We can laugh at him, and with him. But there’s one other idea that seems a little stronger.

Even if Kobe is as great as he was in the mid-aughts or before the injury in 2012-13, L.A. is no serious threat in the West. The poison has dried up. He can’t hurt us when it matters most, because he doesn’t have the help he has always needed.

He was awesome during the Dwight season, the last one in which he actually played much. But even that was a different Kobe: not the assassin we remember and loathe, but a pass-happy, anti-explosive gamer. He was the old guy in the pick-up game, a player dominating by virtue of skill and pluck and not physical dominance. He’s gone from a lethal snake devouring everything to a panda bear on roller skates, scooting around and getting the job done. Pandas are deadly, yes. But no one actually fears them. They just want to hug them. You wouldn’t hug a mamba.

Therein lies the problem for Kobe: his career is built on inspiring fear in his opponents, and he thrives on that. There is no longer anything to fear given the state of Kobe’s game (older, wiser and exponentially less explosive) or the Lakers (hilariously bad). The mystique, the threat of heartbreak, the darkness that we once associated with what Kobe did to us -- it’s all gone.

Without the stress of fear, we can better appreciate the bizarre id of Kobe Bean Bryant, finally laid bare before us.