Shortlisted for the 2017 Cross Sports Book Awards Best Biography of the Year
Bryant is one of basketball’s greatest-ever players, a fascinating and complicated character who says he knew when he was a boy that he would be better than Michael Jordan.
Aloof and uncompromising, Bryant is the grand enigma of American professional basketball, easily the most driven player in the history of the sport, the absolute master of study and preparation. But his career has also been one of almost constant conflict: with his teammate Shaquille O’Neal; with Phil Jackson, coach of the championship-winning Lakers team that Kobe led; with the law; with his wife Vanessa; and with so many of his contemporaries, opponents and teammates.
Comprehensive and unflinching, Showboat unravels the conundrum that is Kobe Bryant.
Bryant is one of basketball’s greatest-ever players, a fascinating and complicated character who says he knew when he was a boy that he would be better than Michael Jordan.
Aloof and uncompromising, Bryant is the grand enigma of American professional basketball, easily the most driven player in the history of the sport, the absolute master of study and preparation. But his career has also been one of almost constant conflict: with his teammate Shaquille O’Neal; with Phil Jackson, coach of the championship-winning Lakers team that Kobe led; with the law; with his wife Vanessa; and with so many of his contemporaries, opponents and teammates.
Comprehensive and unflinching, Showboat unravels the conundrum that is Kobe Bryant.
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Reviews
'An utterly definitive biography ... The most comprehensive attempt yet made to explain the factors that have gone into producing the most famous basketball player and marketing phenom in the history of world sports ... I don't know how it would be possible to write a more complete biography of him'
'In his thoughtful, extraordinarily well-researched biography Michael Jordan: The Life, Roland Lazenby ... gives us the life and much more ... The exhaustive narrative of Jordan's basketball career is written with appropriate awe. But what makes this portrayal especially worthwhile is everything else'