KOBE OFF THE COURT

摘要

It was saturday night in suburban philadelphia, spring of 1995, and 17-year-old Kobe Bryant had invited his high-school sweetheart, Jocelyn Ebron, on a date. Most other teenagers in the upper-middle-class enclave of Lower Merion had gone to the multiplex to sneak into the R-rated "Bad Boys" and get busy in the dark. But Kobe didn't have a lot of experience with the rituals of American puppy love. Raised under the watchful eye of a doting mother who fixed him the same breakfast every morning ("eggs, bacon and Cream of Wheat on the side," remembers -Ebron), and a basketball-coach father who achieved moderate NBA success, Kobe had one goal in life: scoring on the basketball court. Which is probably why 16-year-old Jocelyn found herself spending the evening in the Bryant family den, watching videotapes of Kobe's hoop exploits as a kid in Italy. "He wanted to watch them all the time," says Ebron. "I didn't mind, because I wanted to do what he wanted to do." In four years of dating Kobe Bryant, Jocelyn Ebron spent many a chaste night as he sat glued to the TV, watching the same videos and highlight reels of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson over and over. "Looking back," says Ebron, now a 24-year-old social worker, "it was sort of selfish of him."