With Kobe Bryant’s retirement announcement, Italian sports fans have one last season to see their NBA superstar in action

After 20 years in the NBA, Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant has announced this season will be his last.

"I had to just accept the fact that I don't want to do this anymore, and I'm OK with that," a smiling Bryant said on Sunday after his Lakers’ team lost 107-103 to the Indiana Pacers. The 37-year-old shooting guard who became one of the NBA’s most dangerous scorers made his long-anticipated announcement in a poem posted on The Players' Tribune that begins "Dear Basketball." 

When Bryant first arrived in the NBA, he famously declared that he "wasn't going to be the next Michael Jordan." Instead, he would be Kobe. And through the years, he’s broken all kinds of records. Bryant currently ranks third both on the NBA’s all-time post-season scoring and all-time regular season scoring lists. He was selected to 14 all-NBA teams. The accolades go on and on.

Bryant is leaving the league just as the NBA has penetrated more countries around the world than ever before. He’s helped to make it a global game.

“I think he’s been Mr. Basketball, probably for the last 15 years and especially here in Italy — where everyone remembers that he grew up here. He was here for so long with his dad, and he still speaks pretty good Italian,” says Davide Chinellato, a sports reporter for La Gazzetta dello Sport. Bryant helped secure his legacy as a global superstar last year, says Chinellato, “when he passed Chicago Bulls' Michael Jordan who was first his muse, then his mentor, for third overall [on the] NBA all-time scoring list.”

Bryant brings a global view to the game. It’s a perspective Bryant got playing soccer in Italy. “He grew up not idolizing basketball players, but soccer players. And he grew up as an AC Milan fan, then he moved back to the States and of course fell in love so deeply with basketball as he so wonderfully said in his farewell letter. Everyone remembers too when he went to Beijing for the Olympics, he was the most popular player on Team USA team, and I'm pretty sure if he's going to the Brazil Olympics next year, he's probably going to be the most popular player there too.”

The controversy surrounding sexual assault charges leveled at Kobe Bryant by a hotel employee in Colorado in 2003 nearly derailed Bryant’s basketball career. But while the accusations and allegations reverberated in places around the world, Chinellato says it mostly blew over.

“Of course, when a big sports name does something wrong, something that is perceived to be wrong, that gets global attention. But with Kobe, everyone here was with him. I mean the allegations were tough and bad for his reputation but Kobe Bryant still managed to maintain all the fans he had. As soon as the season started, everyone was focusing back on what he did on the court, not on what he did off the court.”

So for most Italian fans, says Chinellato, Bryant is a global basketball legend. It almost doesn’t matter whether they are Celtics fans or Clippers fans, he says Italian NBA fans “kind of lose this team rivalry and just appreciate the great players.” In Italy, Bryant soars over and above all of those team rivalries.