He was already disgusted, but about halfway through the spot, Walker did a double take: Wait! Wasn't that Kobe Bryant?
Seriously, is that really Kobe Bryant carrying an assault weapon with the word "MAMBA" on the barrel? Did Kobe Bryant, the highest-paid player in the NBA, take money not only to advertise a shooting game but actually shoot -- or simulate shooting -- an automatic weapon while doing it? None of his people, not his wife or his agent or someone in the NBA offices, advised him against this?
"I couldn't believe it was him," Walker says. "What's wrong with him?"
Walker gives funeral-home tours to every team he coaches. He tries to hammer home the reality of death by putting kids in cardboard cremation boxes. He shows them the tools he uses to drain bodily fluids and the chemicals he uses to prepare bodies. It probably wouldn't play in the suburbs, but Walker's trying to fight a culture that glamorizes death with tattoos, airbrushed T-shirts and roadside memorials. He's fighting a culture that has desensitized death to the point where fantasy has overtaken reality. In the process, the permanence of death -- "That person is gone," Walker tells the kids when he closes someone inside the box -- is often lost.
Those responses might be coping mechanisms or a natural defense against the reality of a situation that some deem hopeless, but Walker fights anyway. The glamorization troubles him. The lack of shock troubles him. He thinks people who don't value death are less likely to value life.
And then he sees Kobe shooting an assault weapon on TV, along with Jimmy Kimmel and those other "ordinary" people, including an overweight girl wearing glasses and a revenge-is-mine smile as she fires into a building. (She's apparently in the throes of a self-esteem bump, but it doesn't take much of a leap to see her as a geek settling things with a gun.) At the end of the spot, the tag line -- "There's a soldier in all of us" -- manages to diminish and trivialize the work of real soldiers while sending one of the most irresponsible messages in the history of advertising. (The ad campaign is everywhere, including on ESPN's family of networks and this website.)
"This is exactly what we're trying to fight," Walker says. "I'm looking at a 14-year-old boy right now who got shot in the head, and then I see Kobe get on TV looking like a damned fool, holding an assault weapon and wearing the same stuff the kids are wearing when they kill somebody. The look on his face -- all smiling and happy. This is the at ude we're trying to get away from. It's OK for him, though, because he's never had to worry about going home to the ghetto. That ain't his world."
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