by Kobe Bryant
But for now, how can I be anything but grateful?
Maybe a little heartbroken, too.
My chest tightens as my name’s called over the loudspeaker and I walk to my lane on trembling legs. To tamp down my nerves, I focus on the little things. I adjust my goggles. I take deep breaths.
This is it.
The ref whistles, signaling swimmers up, and I step onto the block. Only I don’t stare down at the water, at what lies below. Instead I lift my head and gaze out at the thousands of eager faces all staring back at me. For the briefest of moments, just a quick heartbeat of life, I inhale their passion, their thrill, their sound and their fury—all that they’re willing to give.
This is what I’ll carry with me.
This is what will bring me home.
“Take your mark,” the ref calls, and it’s time. I bend into my starting stance and work to steady myself, ensuring that every muscle is coiled and ready. A hush falls over the crowd—that cover of pure stillness or as close to it as I’ve ever heard—and this is what true anticipation looks like. The conviction that all that comes next will matter.
You want to know what I really and truly love about this moment?
Whether goose or swan, I have wings.
And I’ll fly.
Below is a list of organizations and resources available to support the mental well-being of student athletes:
The Hidden Opponent
Raising awareness for student-athlete mental health, the Hidden Opponent empowers athletes to face the hidden opponent together as a community.
instagram.com/thehiddenopponent/
Michael Phelps Foundation
Focused on promoting water safety, healthy living (mental and physical), and the pursuit of dreams, especially for children.
michaelphelpsfoundation.org
The original art presented in this book was curated by TaskForce, a creative agency that collaborates with the most influential nonprofits, brands, and people taking on the most pressing challenges facing our state, our nation, and our world. TaskForce builds capacity and community for those shaping a more empathetic society through public opinion and policy.
For more information, please visit taskforce.pr.
Artist Biographies
Artists are listed in the order in which their work appears in the book.
Bedelgeuse (Travis Bedel)
Bedelgeuse is the anatomical collage work and alias for artist Travis Bedel. Travis’s wild amalgamation of botanical, zoological, and anatomical imagery produces synergistic visuals that represent humanity’s inherent relationship to nature and the universe.
I sought to manifest an image that represented the crushing darkness of depression. Predatory sea creatures and kelp wrap around the figure, as if to keep them drowned in the grips of their suffering. From above, they are being pulled toward sparkling light from the surface, out from the darkness below.
Deedee Cheriel
Deedee Cheriel is an Indian American artist living and working in Los Angeles. With influences derived from such opposites as East Indian temple imagery, punk rock, and her Pacific Northwest natural environment, her images are indications of how we try to connect ourselves to others and how these satirical and heroic efforts are episodes of compassion and discomfort.
In searching for an image to create for this book, I wanted to use bold loose strokes to convey flow and movement. I used white to create negative spaces to convey beauty and tension, overlapping them with bold images of anthropomorphic beings connecting and disconnecting with others.
Adam Enrique Rodriguez
Born and raised in Indio, California, Adam Enrique Rodriguez is known for his signature style of deconstructed faces and human figures. He incorporates abstraction with classical aspects, in an ongoing conversation around psychology and the human condition.
Rodriguez has made art for charitable and community organizations, as well as more than twenty large-scale murals in commercial spaces, private residences, and music festivals throughout California.
For my work in Geese Are Never Swans, I highlight the intensity of the story’s vibrant character; the passion and the confusion in the life of a young athlete navigating through personal traumas, mental health, and triumphs; and the raw emotion of the human experience that connects us all.
Augustine Kofie
Born and based in Los Angeles and active in the Southern California graffiti scene since the midnineties, Augustine Kofie works in painting, collage, and mural interventions. Kofie’s fine art practice draws together the languages of graffiti’s deconstructive lettering, street culture, mechanical drafting, modern architecture, contemporary music, and 1960s–80s iconography.
My painting is inspired by the novel’s aquatic theme in its palette of blues, greens, and aquamarines, as well as its compositional elements of ripple and reflection. Like much of my work, the painting harmonizes opposing and contradictory dynamics in a quest for balance. In this, it reflects Gus’s quest to find a path through the struggles and challenges of his life. Sport, like art, becomes a way to organize one’s feelings, to take control of the breakage, and to create order out of chaos.
Najeebah Al-Ghadban (front cover collage)
Najeebah Al-Ghadban is a designer and collage artist from Kuwait. Her collage work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the California Sunday Magazine, and Anxy magazine. She is currently a designer for the NYT Mag Labs in New York.
KOBE BRYANT was an Academy Award winner, a New York Times best-selling author, and the CEO of Granity Studios, a multimedia content creation company. He was also a five-time NBA champion, two-time NBA Finals MVP, NBA MVP, and two-time Olympic gold medalist. In everything he built, Kobe was driven to teach the next generation how to reach their full potential. He believed in the beauty of the process, in the strength that comes from inner magic, and in achieving the impossible. His legacy continues today.
EVA CLARK is a psychologist and an award-winning young adult novelist. As a psychologist, she focuses on mental health, social justice, and sports. As an author, her focus is on creating stories that help young people discover their best selves. She lives in California with her family.
GRANITY STUDIOS, LLC
GRANITYSTUDIOS.COM
Copyright © 2020 by Granity Studios, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Granity Studios, LLC.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954481
ISBN (hardcover): 9781949520057
ISBN (eBook): 9781949520064
Type design by November
Art direction by Sharanya Durvasula
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s and creator’s imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.