https://www.latimes.com/fashion/la-ig-nike-kobe-ad-20161101-story.html

It’s a concept that kind of came to me years ago,” Bryant told Hernandez. “With the end of my career almost feeling like a death because I’d been playing basketball so long, and it was my life for a while. To walk away from that death[-like] experience and ask: ‘Can we move on from that? What comes after that? How do you progress from that?’ And that’s when the idea kind of hit me. [I] need to transition; the basketball player is now done, retired. So now we have to move on to the next phase.” (The short answer is: the “Mamba mentality” a.k.a. the ghost of Kobe future.)