The Rise Summary and key ideas

The Rise, by Mike Sielski.

The Rise begins with a fragment of a high school game, not a complete account of a career. That choice places Kobe Bryant’s story in the Philadelphia area, where people who watched him play could remember him as a freshman. The recording is a local point from which the author looks back. Its modest scale becomes part of its use: a famous life enters through a moment that a few people could identify from their own school years.

The author received the footage from Ben Relles, an Upper Dublin high-school classmate and friend, the day after Bryant died. Relles had preserved and digitized the recording. The game was between Lower Merion and Upper Dublin. Relles and the author were seniors; Bryant was a freshman playing his second game of high school.

The surviving short clip lasts thirty-six seconds. Bobby McIlvaine passes to Ari Greis, who drives past Bryant and scores a floater. The play is an ordinary defensive failure made memorable by who is in the frame and by the fact that the recording survived. Years later, Bryant watches it, laughs, and critiques his defense.

The short clip captures one mistake, not Bryant’s whole game. Bryant scored nineteen points in the game. A five-minute excerpt shows him driving and scoring, with the author describing him as commanding attention. That fuller glimpse makes the qualification concrete. The missed stop is real, but it is one small piece of a more varied performance.

Bryant’s amused response turns the old recording into a meeting with his younger self. The author reads the footage as a way to revisit the places, people, and experiences that shaped him. The scene offers a retrospective method for the book: a remembered detail can bring the past near, while the life that followed gives the detail new weight. The footage shows an early version of Bryant without making one possession explain everything he became.

The author places this local memory beside the scale of Bryant’s later career: five championships, fifteen All-Star appearances, 33,643 points, and a 2008 Most Valuable Player award. Those milestones show how far the story’s reach extended beyond one school gym. The footage keeps its beginning grounded in a Philadelphia-area community, while the career gives that beginning a much wider audience.

After Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020, the author recalls the news reaching into everyday life. At his son’s youth basketball game, a young opponent wore “KOBE” on his sleeve. That image joins the writer’s personal shock to a larger public attachment to Bryant. The account reports the crash but gives no explanation for its cause.

At Lower Merion, grief gathered at the school itself. Two days after the crash, candles, flowers, jerseys, sneakers, basketballs, and messages surrounded Kobe Bryant Gymnasium. Students stopped there, members of Lower Merion’s 2006 team left a photograph showing Bryant sitting with them, and people traveled to the school to feel close to him. The memorial made shared loss visible in a place already bound to Bryant’s youth.

The offerings grew until they blocked the school doors. Staff moved them to a nearby lawn so people could enter and leave safely. The detail places the work of maintaining the school inside the grief: its community had to care for the memorial while keeping daily access open.

Gregg Downer, Bryant’s high school coach, was initially unable to face the memorial and struggled to process the news. After two days, he returned to speak with players who had met Bryant. He urged them to manage their emotions, return to basketball, and appreciate their health and chance to play. His response links personal mourning to the responsibilities of a school community that continued around him.

The opening moves from one failed defensive possession to Bryant’s laughter, then to a community’s grief. That movement establishes the book’s locally grounded view of a life with much wider reach. Lower Merion’s memory gives the story a human scale; the small clip, and the people who gathered around it, cannot contain the breadth of Bryant’s life or career.