Hang Up and Listen - Remembering Kobe Bryant
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2020
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joel Anderson, Stefan Fatsis, and Josh Levin talk about Kobe Bryant’s on-court and off-court legacies with NPR’s Gene Demby and Lindsay Gibbs of the Power Plays! newsletter and the Burn It All Down podcast.
Kobe’s shocking death (00:50): What we felt when we heard about the helicopter crash, and why his peers thought Kobe was Michael Jordan’s heir.
Kobe on the court (14:09): Why so many fans loved his game and so many didn’t.
The sexual assault allegations and Kobe’s support for women’s basketball (35:48): How the case against him is and isn’t remembered, and how to reconcile it with Kobe’s post-retirement life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:03.9 | Hi, I'm Josh Levine Slate's national editor and author of The Queen. |
| 0:08.1 | This is Hang Up and Listen for the week of January 27th, 2020. |
| 0:12.8 | This week's show is about Kobe Bryant's life and legacy on and off the court. |
| 0:17.3 | On Sunday morning, Brian's private helicopter crashed in Calabasas, California, killing him and the other eight people on board. Among them was Kobe's 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. We'll be joined later by Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch, as well as Lindsay Gibbs, who writes the Power Play's newsletter. But first, I'm going to welcome in my co-hosts, joining me in Washington, D.C., |
| 0:38.1 | the author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic, Stefan Fatsis. |
| 0:41.0 | Hey, Josh. With us from Palo Alto, Slate, Staff Writer, and the host of Slow Burn Season 3, |
| 0:47.2 | Joel Anderson. Hey, Joel. Good morning, girls. So on Sunday, it seemed like pretty much |
| 0:53.1 | everyone in the world was sharing their thoughts on who Kobe Bryant was, what he meant. |
| 1:00.2 | Before any of that, Joel, was just the utter shock that he was dead at age 41. |
| 1:06.0 | It felt unreal and unfathomal. |
| 1:08.7 | Originally, it felt like maybe it was a mistake like it couldn't possibly |
| 1:14.9 | have happened. What were your initial thoughts when you heard that Kobe had been killed in a |
| 1:20.8 | helicopter crash? Well, obviously, you know, my thoughts went in a lot of different directions, |
| 1:24.9 | right? The first that occurred to me, and I did tweet about this, is the parallels to the day that Michael Jackson died, and that the absolute |
| 1:32.1 | shock of it, like, I remember looking at my computer as it came across, and I just said, |
| 1:37.1 | that can't be real. Like, you know, there must be something wrong. Am I looking at like a fake news |
| 1:43.3 | story from American Eagle.net or something, |
| 1:46.2 | right? And then the idea that TMZ was the first news source to report it. And you're like, |
| 1:51.5 | oh, wow, but you know, how did TMZ find this out? Who, you know, where they're getting this |
| 1:55.9 | information from? And then, you know, the scramble over the next few hours about, you know, |
| 2:00.5 | how many people actually died, how did this happen, who was involved? And then, you know, the scramble over the next few hours about, you know, how many people actually died? |
... |
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