Michael Jordan’s Kobe eulogy was perfect

Michael Jordan eulogy at Kobe Bryant’s memorial was more than a viral moment about a meme — it was perfect.

Leave it to Michael Jordan to give us all a moment on the basketball court.

This moment, however, was deeply unlike the others we’ve come to associate him with. Rather than soaring through the air in some iconic Game 7-level moment of victory, he stood somberly at a podium talking in the past tense about Kobe Bryant.

Jordan spoke at Kobe’s memorial service in Los Angeles on Monday, and was as un-Jordan as we’ve ever seen him; Broken, introspective — human.

In honoring Kobe, Jordan was uncharacteristically heartfelt. He tearily told the world of 2 a.m. texts  and how his angst towards Kobe organically turned familial. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in the history of the game, called Kobe Bryant his little brother. He spoke about how Kobe solicited basketball tips not for him but for his daughters, and how Jordan learned something from someone else on something he wanted to be better at — being a father.

Jordan’s eulogy of Kobe was a perfect encapsulation of how the legend would have wanted to be honored — with love, respect, gratitude, and humor.

In the middle of his powerful eulogy, Jordan cracked a ‘Crying Jordan’ meme joke that filled a heartbroken room with some sort of energy. Was it laughing, or crying, or possibly both at the same time?

All of the above is probably the right answer because whatever it was, everyone was together in that moment.

“Now, he’s got me — I’ll have to look at another crying meme for the next — I told my wife I wasn’t gonna do this because I didn’t wanna see that for the next three or four years. That is what Kobe Bryant does to me.”

Light in the dark, something Kobe himself said is the balance that makes life what it is.

It was a powerful moment not in that it was some viral clip to share or something to put on a website to get clicks (which, it inherently is both of those things). Rather, it reminded us that the entire memorial was a humanization of Gods. Legends of the game like Jordan, Shaq, Magic, and even Phil Jackson– idyllic figures who are more myth than men — were reduced to quivering heaps of raw emotion.

Gods, weeping.

At its most reductive level, a meme meant as a trollish way to twist the knife evolved into something meant to show heartfelt sincerity and respect.

Which, of course, is a perfect tribute in of itself. Whether it’s mimicking Jordan’s stepback, playing a cover version of Jordan crashing the lane, or posthumously leveling up the Crying Jordan meme,  leave it to Kobe to take something Jordan-esque and make us see it in an entirely new way.

Kobe was spoken about not as a slayer of your basketball hopes and dreams but as a father who liked watching Survivor with his family and being obscenely early to pick his kids up from school. He was someone who planned romantic anniversary dinners, got authentically overly excited to see people he cared about succeed, and missed his family when he was away from them.

We have the memes, the viral moments, the clicks, and the tribute tweets — but what more? We will all move on from Kobe’s death but as Jimmy Kimmel said during the memorial, what is there to make sense of something so senseless?

Kobe’s death was a violent reminder of our mortality. His memorial, however, was a message that all we have is each other and to be missed by the ones who love us is the most valuable legacy we can hope to leave behind.