Gianna Bryant’s LA Mural Has a Cool Kobe Tribute Hidden in It

A new mural of Gianna Bryant has a cool image of her father. Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant is seen through the hair of Gianna in the mural, which was done by artist Tehrell Porter in L.A. The mural pays tribe to Gianna and Kobe, who died in a helicopter crash along with seven other people in January 2020.

Kobe was a legend in Los Angeles, but Gianna was on her way to making a name for herself. She had dreams of playing college basketball at the University of Connecticut, and the team paid tribute to her when she died. Gianna and Kobe attended Connecticut games as games, and in an October 2018 exchange with Reggie Miller, Kobe told him that Gianna is all about playing for the Huskies.

UConn remembered Gianna and Kobe during an exhibition game shortly after their deaths. “You’ve just got to put on a happy face and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” UConn head coach Geno Auriemma said. “It wasn’t easy.” Auriemma also talked about Gianna’s reaction to seeing the Huskies play for the first time.

“You could just see the look in her eyes, like she was so excited,” Auriemma stated. “Imagine the absurdity of that: that your father’s Kobe Bryant and the most excited you’ve been in a long time is being around college women’s basketball players, but that’s what it meant to her. That’s what she wanted to be.”

Gianna and Kobe were close as Kobe would coach Gianna and her basketball team. In 2018, Kobe spoke to Jimmy Kimmel about Gianna. “This kid, man… I’m telling you,” he said, as reported by CBS News. “The best thing that happens is when we go out, and fans will come up to me, and she’ll be standing next to me, and they will be like, ‘You gotta have a boy, you and V [wife Vanessa] gotta have a boy, man, to have somebody carry on the tradition, the legacy.’ And [Gigi] is like, ‘I got this!’” Bryant said. “That’s right. Yes, you do. You got this.”

In another interview with All the Smoke podcast, Kobe talked about how he began watching more NBA games because of Gianna. He said: “Before Gigi got into basketball, I hardly watched it, but now that she’s into basketball, it’s on every night. She watches everything.”