BOMBSHELL ANNOUNCEMENT: 😢😢: “Larry bird makes shocking revelation on former Sixer Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant death” NBA world has been shaken by a shocking announcement, full details below 👇

Former Sixer Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant, father of Kobe, dies at age 69
Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who died at the age of 69 Tuesday, had a well-traveled basketball career and complicated relationship with his late son, Kobe.

Twelve years ago, a gifted Sports Illustrated writer named Chris Ballard traveled to Thailand to profile Joe Bryant, who was then coaching a ragtag team in Bangkok. It was one of 11 stops in Bryant’s itinerant coaching career, which began at Lower Merion’s Akira Hebrew Academy in 1992 (where he served as the girls’ varsity coach) and ended in 2015 in Japan.

There was also time as an assistant at LaSalle, which just happened to be recruiting his son Kobe at the time, and a brief stint as a WNBA head coach. But nothing in the NBA. Nothing permanent. Nothing Joe could ever really hang his hat on.

It was much the same with his playing career. After starring at Bartram High and LaSalle, he spent four dissatisfying years with the Sixers beginning in 1975, followed by three with the Clippers and one with Houston. Out of the NBA at age 28, he found his footing while playing nearly a decade overseas — notably in Italy, which is also where Kobe’s unquenchable love of the game bloomed.

But the question now, after Joe Bryant’s death Tuesday at the age of 69, is whether he ever found fulfillment, whether he ever found peace. Because certainly his was a life that left questions unanswered, blanks unfilled.

We can only imagine the agony he and his wife Pam felt when Kobe and their granddaughter Gigi died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles in 2020. They never commented publicly, but really, what do you even say at a time like that? How do you even plumb the depths of that despair?

A friend of theirs told the Daily Mail at the time, “Can you imagine a black hole? It’s empty, how do you fill it?”

And we can only imagine the tangle of emotions they felt when Kobe, the youngest of their three children and the only male, was charged with sexual assault in 2003. That case was dismissed in time, and a civil suit was settled out of court. Neither Joe nor Pam commented then, either, as it occurred amid an extended stretch when they were not on speaking terms with their son. It’s unclear whether that was because (as Ballard reports) Joe in particular did not approve of Kobe’s wife, Vanessa, or because Joe and Pam put some of their son’s memorabilia up for auction, compelling their son to sue them.

Ballard writes that they mended fences, at least to a degree, and in his piece examines how a father nicknamed “Jellybean” gave rise to a son nicknamed “The Black Mamba.”

It wasn’t the first time the author went there. In his 2009 book, The Art of the Beautiful Game, he wrote that Kobe would engage in fullcourt games of one-on-one against a Lower Merion High School reserve named Rob Schwartz every day after practice. The games were to 100, by one, and Schwartz told Ballard he never scored more than five points.

When informed of this, Kobe, ever the competitor, disputed whether Schwartz even managed that many.

Contrast that with Joe, who is depicted in Ballard’s 2012 SI piece as being well on his way to beating one of his players in a game of billiards. Left with only the 8-ball to sink, Joe instead lays his cue aside and says, “I can’t do that to one of my players.”

Pam comes off as the tougher one, as the one who stoked Kobe’s fire. Part of an athletic family growing up — her brother, Chubby Cox, played at the University of San Francisco, and in a handful of NBA games — she was the one, according to Ballard, who leveled her son with a forearm when he attempted to dunk in a family pickup game at the age of 14.

Wasn’t like Joe was Mr. Softee, though. Kobe, in a 1998 SI piece by Ian Thomsen, said this of his dad: “I didn’t beat him one-on-one until I was 16. He was real physical with me. When I was 14 or 15, he started cheating. He’d elbow me in the mouth, rip my lip open. Then my mother would walk out on the court, and the elbows would stop.”

Certainly there was little question about Joe’s ability – least of all in Joe’s mind. Even though he stood 6-9, he could shoot and handle, and do things that only perimeter mites usually do (especially in that era). Doug Collins, a Sixers teammate of Bryant’s in the ‘70s, once recalled him saying the following: “I did things before Magic Johnson did them. But they called him ‘Magic’ and they called me ‘Tragic.’”

The Sixers nonetheless tried to make him into a post player, and he mostly languished on the bench during his time with his hometown team — notably while part of the 1976-77 club, which was as disjointed as it was talent