Fans have been leaving their tributes to the late Kobe Bryant at the STAPLES Center since his passing on Sunday, and now they will all go to his widow. According to a report by The Los Angeles Times, Vanessa Laine Bryant will be given all the mementos, notes and other tributes to Bryant as a testament to his legacy.
The L.A. Times spoke with the STAPLES Center president Lee Zeidman, who said that Vanessa has asked to keep most of the items left for her late husband. He said that the staff at the venue plans to begin dismantling the tributes on Sunday evening, after the Super Bowl is over.
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“It will have been a week. We have contractually obligated events that are moving in,” Zeidman explained. “Vanessa had reached out to us and said, ‘Our family would like the items out there.’ So we’re going to catalog every one of them. By that I mean, T-shirts, letters, basketballs, stuffed animals, toys. We’re going to put those in specially made containers and we’re going to ship them to the family.”
Photos from the scene show extravagant displays for Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, who perished in the helicopter crash with him on Sunday. Many include perishable items like flowers, which will reportedly be composted around the site. Zeidman said this idea came from the Manchester Arena in England, where flowers were left aft the 2017 terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert.
“So we’re going to compost all those flowers out there and spread them around the plants in and around L.A. Live and in and around Staples Center,” he said. “So that means that all those fans that took the time to buy the flowers and plants and brought them down there, some of that will still be around the site.”
Zeidman added that fans are still welcome to mourn at the STAPLES Center, but in the coming weeks he hopes they will stop leaving physical tributes on the site. Instead, he encourages them to honor Bryant by contributing to his legacy — the Mamba Foundations.
“Our goal is to somehow have it cleaned up as we relate to the middle of next week and we’re asking people — we’re going to put signage all around LA Live and Staples Center — if you still feel the need to do something, you can certainly come down here. But we hope that you wouldn’t bring any gift and flowers, but that you donate to the Mamba Foundations that they’ve already set up. Then we try to get back to whatever normalcy is around the campus,” he said.
