We must protect the legacies of our NBA heroes

Whenever my little brother tells me that Kobe Bryant wasn’t as good as I make him seem, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and lose myself in thought. In my mind I imagine a world just like the one we’re in, where he makes that same assertion and I punch him in the face 81 times. Then, after that moment of satisfaction, I exhale and shrug off his vile statement.

This summer, I dropped him off for his freshman year of college. As I was leaving after helping him unpack, it hit me that this was the beginning of the end. Where I once saw him every day for most of his life, now I would see him three or four times a year at best, and even fewer after graduation. Each time, he will have changed more dramatically than the last.

Familiarity makes you blind to the passage of time. Every day and everything is always the same, until an famous person’s downfall or an “only ‘90s kids will remember this” meme jars you from the moment and you realize that years have indeed passed.

I try to remember this concept whenever he makes flippant remarks about recently retired NBA legends. Perhaps I shouldn’t give him the beating he deserves. He watched Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, and Allen Iverson, but never got their full breadth.

Though he was alive for most of their careers, he was far too young to comprehend their legacies. He instead saw their shadows. But since I’m older, they became something larger because they were a part of my formative years.

This disconnect happens with every generation of great athletes, of course. Each generation thinks it is the best and the toughest, and that the younger ones are weak and naive.

We are the good old days. It’s weird for me to say this because I’m only 25, but our legends are sacred not only because of what they achieved, but because of the way we experienced their rise and fall. They are windows to our childhood. They are parts of our identity.

For some, these legends are responsible for unlocking the wonder of the game itself. We are eternally bonded and gracious to them. So, when they retire, it’s not just their careers that are mourned, but the closing of that road back to a simpler time. An attack on them becomes an attack on us.

The good thing is that we ARE better than the last generation in one respect: our heroes are not myths. We live in the hyper-information age, so that every recording of them can be readily accessible. On any given day, we can seek and find video showing Bryant’s entire 81-point performance against the Toronto Raptors.

Whereas previous generations only have numbers, we have access to careers worth of footage showing great teams and players dominate their craft. This extends well beyond their on-court lives. Our love for these legends is as much about their personality as their work, and we also have records of that, as well.

Videos of Iverson’s crossovers and his impossibility during the 2001 season can be accompanied by stories of the league demonizing him for his tattoos, the bowling alley incident in high school that almost cost him his career, and the reasoning for his counter-culture attitude. We can explain and show who our heroes actually were.

There’s a theater of information now that makes it possible to get as close to the actual experience of seeing past legends without being there ourselves. We don’t have to rely on rare grainy videos to use as evidence. Not only are we obligated to protect our legends, but we actually have the tools to do so.

Unfortunately, that still won’t be enough. These damn kids will counter your argument with a Vine of Stephen Curry dribbling between four defenders and shooting a three with his eyes closed. Then, they’ll point to his unreal shooting percentage and ask if Iverson could do that. You’ll get angry and frustrated and they will laugh at you, because kids are heartless bastards. They can get close to the full experience, but they will never fully understand. Our heroes are not theirs.

But soon, the same thing will happen to their generation. Their time will come and fade, and they too will plead for those after them to remember Curry as a whole. They will use videos of his performances, stories of his numerous ankle injuries, and subsequent rise from obscurity to try to explain his greatness. And the new generation will disregard it because Curry will not have the same meaning to them.

That’s why it’s our duty, as those who were there and fully understood their influence, to make sure that the legacies of Kobe, KG, AI, Duncan, and their contemporaries are not compartmented. And unlike those who came before us, we have the ability and resources to show the full picture.

We don’t have to deliver boring tall tales of Larry Bird winning games with his left hand that no one wants to hear. We can actually show it.