Kobe Bryant died at the age of 41 on Sunday, January 26, alongside his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven other passengers in a deadly helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.
The late basketball legend who also shared Natalia, 17, Bianka, 3, and Capri, 7 months, with his wife, Vanessa Bryant, was on his way to a basketball game with Gianna. The former Los Angeles Lakers player coached the teenager’s Athletic Amateur Union team.
“Gianna’s pretty easy to coach,” the Philadelphia native told Entertainment Tonight in 2018. “We haven’t had any issues of a dad-daughter sort of thing. She’s very competitive and she’s a hard worker, so there haven’t been any issues with that.”
The Wizenard Series: Training Camp creator’s second child was not only “hellbent” on playing for the University of Connecticut, but she “for sure” wanted to make it to the WNBA, Kobe told Jimmy Kimmel during an October 2018 appearance.
“The best thing that happens is we’ll go out, and fans will come up to me and she’ll be standing next to me,” the athlete told the host, 52, at the time. “And they’ll be like, ‘Hey, you gotta have a boy. You and Vanessa gotta have a boy to carry on the tradition, the legacy. And she is like, ‘Oy, I got this. You don’t need a boy for that, I got this.’ I’m like, ‘That’s right, you got this.’”
Kobe went on to say that he “absolutely” planned to break down game film with his daughter in the future. He explained, “We try to teach the kids what excellence looks like. We try to give them a foundation of the amount of work that it takes to be excellent. Playing basketball, we’re going to focus on the details. We’re going to learn the basics, learn the fundamentals and do those things over and over.”
Keep scrolling for more details about the father-daughter pair’s tragic accident, from the location of the crash to the helicopter’s safety history.