Draymond Green with a deep, personal reflection on Kobe, parenting and what it must’ve been like in those final moments for him trying to protect his daughter pic.twitter.com/ertIPvo0gK
— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 29, 2020
No, Draymond Green said, he was nowhere near the crash. He doesn’t have insider information. But yes, he knows how Kobe Bryant died: Holding on to his daughter Gianna, assuring her that everything would be OK even if it’s a lie, because that’s what fathers do.
Green, in opening up about the superstar’s death Sunday in a helicopter crash, did not focus on the basketball player or world icon. Green, a father of two, could only imagine what Bryant’s last moments looked like from the prism of being a good dad.
Green began by telling the story of his daughter coming to him in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because her stomach hurt. Green played dad and doctor, eventually rubbing her stomach until she nodded off.
“You become this doctor,” he told reporters Tuesday. “Anything that your daughter runs into, you become whatever it is that tackles that problem.
“For me as a father, I think of Kobe in that situation. Especially the man that Kobe was. Kobe would try to move a mountain, and there’s no one in the world that can tell him he can’t lift that mountain up and move it out of the way.”
“You think about him in that situation, which is extremely graphic to think about, he’s right there with his daughter. He’s probably telling her that everything is OK. In his mind he knows it’s not. But as a father, you can’t even show it.”
Green paused several times throughout his stirring speech, ensuring he found the right words. Because as far off as the Warriors were, he understands Bryant’s final moments.
“Probably squeezing his daughter tight and telling her everything was going to be OK,” Green said. “That crushes me because I understand it just being just a father.
“Then you think about his three girls and his wife. There’s now no one there to tell them that it’s OK. And that’s where it kind of crushes me.”