How to Retire From the NBA in Style

Kobe Bryant announced his retirement from the Lakers with a poem entitled "Dear Basketball," which crashed the site of its initial publication The Players' Tribune today. Surprised? "There couldn't be anything more Kobe" Rolling Stone remarks. More, via RS:

Kobe Bryant has never been a man to know his limitations, and so it was entirely appropriate for him to publicly acknowledge his own mortality in one of the oldest, most respected and least understood art forms, the poem. This is what poetry has become in this day and age: not the pinnacle of artistic expression it was for Donne or Keats or Yeats, but the vessel you reach for when shit gets like, too real, man. But props, Kobe: This has to be the first time a poem crashed a website.

In his "Dear Basketball" ode on The Players' Tribune, Bryant announced he would retire at the end of the season, but he gave us no great insight into either himself or the human condition. It was written in free verse, the refuge of college freshmen. (Come to think of it, maybe this is the best argument for upping the age limit for the NBA, so players can get a couple years of college under their belt to better prepare for retirement poetry.) In places, it glances against rhyme ("socks" and "shots" in the opening stanza; "go" and "know" in the third-to-last; "socks" and "clock" in the penultimate one), which is the only thing worse ­– from a poetic standpoint – than regular undisciplined free verse.

I'll tell you, when I first heard Bryant had announced his retirement in a poem, I had a brief and thrilling thought: What if it's amazing? What if the real reason behind Bryant's precipitous fall-off in performance this season was not time catching up with him, but late nights spent poring over volumes of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Alexander and Cornelius Eady in preparation for writing this, his own basketball eulogy? [...]

Continue reading at Rolling Stone. And for that poem, go here.