THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — The kick of it is just how close they were. Fifteen minutes by car, 20 tops, right up the 101 North. That highway, by all accounts, was the guiding path that Ara Zobayan, piloting the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter carrying Kobe and Gianna Bryant and six others, was following Sunday.
This was after they’d been hit by a bad stretch of weather, after they’d been offered to land at Burbank Airport, after Zobayan was given permission to proceed ahead. Flying the copter manually, he would’ve kept his eyes glued on the 101, which would have brought him right to the Mamba Sports Academy, which sits just off Rancho Conejo Blvd., and to a waiting basketball game for Gianna and her teammates.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops.
“I’m still numb,” Sarah Menendez said, standing alongside a sizeable vigil outside that facility’s front door, the sidewalk landscaped by flowers and balloons and hand-crafted notes. “I know it shouldn’t be this way. I never met the man. I didn’t know any of the victims. But I feel so … sad. Relentlessly sad. For him. For his daughter. For everyone on that helicopter. Just so … so awful.”
Los Angeles tried to recapture a sense of normalcy on Tuesday, but that isn’t easy when every few blocks downtown there are billboards with Bryant’s smiling face, there are buses flashing their route number alternately with “RIP KOBE” messages, there are vigils popping up everywhere, small and large, planned and spontaneous.
Fifteen minutes south of the Sports Academy, in Calabasas, citizens parked their cars and craned their necks, trying to see if they could get a distant look of the crash site. Police pleaded Tuesday with folks with good local knowledge to not crowd the site itself so the National Transportation Safety Board investigators could work in peace.
But this is a town framed by breathtaking hillscapes. It is normally one of the most appealing parts of this scenic place.
“It’s hard to look at all these hills the same way now,” a man wearing a No. 24 Bryant jersey said, asking he not be identified because he’d taken a second straight sick day from work to cope with his feelings about the death of a 41-year-old man he’d never met. “Because the helicopter ran into one of them.”
In Los Angeles, Tuesday was one last unofficial day of mourning, the Lakers-Clippers game scheduled for Tuesday night officially postponed. The Lakers will host the Blazers Friday night at Staples Center and the crowd expected to fill the neighboring L.A. Live Plaza is already expected to be the largest this corner of Figueroa Street has seen in its 20 years.
Figueroa Street is this city’s answer to the Canyon of Heroes. Five times Bryant took a triumphant tour down this bustling boulevard to celebrate a championship. The gatherings this week have been far more melancholy.
“The people just keep assembling,” Michael Roth, Staples Center’s vice president of communications, told KLAC radio’s Fred Roggin. “Peacefully. Quietly. To grieve and to mourn. And they just keep coming.”
The news continues to subsume much of the NBA’s daily activity. More than 2 million signatures have crowded a petition seeking to change the NBA’s logo from its present one — which features a silhouette of Jerry West, the man who made Bryant a Laker — to Kobe, and while that isn’t likely to happen, there is a very good chance the league will name an award after him — maybe as recently as next month’s All-Star Game, in Chicago.
Inspired, perhaps, by Dallas owner Mark Cuban’s decision to retire No. 24, hanging it in the rafters at American Airlines Center rather than allowing another Mavericks player to ever wear it, some NBA players opted to do likewise Tuesday. The Nets’ Spencer Dinwiddie asked to switch from No. 8 — Kobe’s original Lakers number — to 26.
Across town Knicks rookie RJ Barrett, who was dubbed “Maple Mamba” during his yearlong stay at Duke, quietly asked that he no longer be referred to by that nickname, out of respect for Bryant, forever “Black Mamba.” Slowly, the league is getting back to its business.
Slowly, it seems, so is LA. The baseball team at Orange Coast College voted to keep its opening-day date with Southwestern Community College as a way to honor its coach, John Altobelli, who died along with his wife and daughter. The Lakers will resume practice Wednesday. The Clippers host the Kings Thursday night.
At Mamba Sports Academy, the flowers and the balloons and the hand-crafted notes spoke of a city still unsure how to proceed. It’s a tricky little dance.