Joe Bryant’s death, like Kobe’s, brought heartbreak to their friend and confidant Sonny Vaccaro

Around 12:30 a.m. Monday inside Sonny Vaccaro’s home in Southern California, the phone rang — the kind of call at the kind of time that means nothing but awful news. His wife, Pam, answered. On the line was Pam Bryant. She was crying. Seconds later, still in bed, Sonny was, too.

“It’s absolutely horrible,” Vaccaro said in an interview Tuesday, “the whole thing.”

Vaccaro was by the side of the Bryant family — by Kobe, by Joe, by Pam and Sharia and Shaya — for all of it, for one of the most dynamic and tragic stories in American sports. A father with so much personality and talent and so many unfulfilled expectations as an athlete. A father who died Monday at 69. A son with so much ambition and drive and so blinkered and stubborn that he could shape himself into the best basketball player in the world and live with the relationships he destroyed — even among his own flesh and blood — along the way. A son who died more than four years ago at 41. And long before he hitched Nike’s future to Michael Jordan and became both a prince-maker in youth basketball and the NCAA’s worst nightmare, Vaccaro forged a connection with Joe that lasted more than a half-century. That helped this story unfold as it did.

“It’s a relationship you can’t explain,” Vaccaro said. “It happens once in a lifetime.”

» READ MORE: Shaya Bryant, Joe’s daughter and Kobe’s sister, shares her thoughts on her family’s tragedy

It began in 1972, in Pittsburgh at the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, the all-star camp that Vaccaro had founded and promoted and that pitted the top high school players in Pennsylvania against the best of the rest in the United States. Joe Bryant, just coming off a marvelous career at Bartram High School, was there. He met Vaccaro. He never forgot him, and more importantly for his and Kobe’s future, he banked that Vaccaro would never forget him.

Twenty-two years later, in the summer of 1994, Vaccaro was a power player in the sport and the sneaker industry. No longer with Nike, he was starting anew as Adidas’s point man for talent acquisition, looking for the next Jordan to endorse his new company’s shoes, and he was running his prestigious ABCD camp out of Fairleigh Dickinson University. ABCD was invitation-only, but Joe and Pam drove the two hours from Wynnewood to Hackensack, N.J., Kobe with them, on the hope that they could persuade Vaccaro to accept the kid to the camp.

“Joe comes over,” Vaccaro once said. “Now we’re reunited. It was the thing called sports, the thing called opportunity and happenstance. That’s the pattern of a life.”

Kobe attended the camp, and Vaccaro was now in the Bryants’ inner circle, thanks to his loyalty to them and his instinct that Kobe had the maturity, the charisma, and the game to be the face of Adidas. Soon enough, that circle would include superagent Arn Tellem, himself a Philadelphia native, and in 1996, the Bryants and their advisers would pull off maybe the greatest gambit in the history of the NBA draft, head-faking the new president and coach of the New Jersey Nets — John Calipari — out of taking Kobe with the draft’s seventh pick.

The Los Angeles Lakers wanted Kobe; Tellem and his dear friend Jerry West had made certain of that. The Bryants and Vaccaro wanted the Lakers: more championships to be won and sneakers to be sold there than in the swamps of Jersey. It took Kobe’s willingness to paint himself as a 17-year-old prima donna, took him turning down offers to work out with several teams with high picks, and it took Joe and Vaccaro threatening Calipari that, if the Nets drafted Kobe, he would simply refuse to report to them and instead go play professionally in Europe. Just like his dad had.

» READ MORE: Joe and Kobe Bryant were once inseparable. Their deaths bring their bittersweet story to a sad end.

“What we did on that specific thing,” Vaccaro said, “was convince John Calipari and the rest of the world: ‘I’m not lying. It might happen. I don’t think so, but things happen.’ And they were the right family to do it because of Joe’s time in Italy and Europe.”

This was nothing but the cutthroat game of professional sports, and Vaccaro and the Bryants played it well to get what they wanted. The Charlotte Hornets drafted Kobe at No. 13, then eventually traded him to the Lakers, and when the Bryants — Kobe, his parents, the whole family — moved into a house atop a hill in the Pacific Palisades, whose house happened to be at the bottom of the hill? Sonny and Pam Vaccaro’s. There were countless nights at Sonny’s favorite Italian restaurant in Santa Monica; there, Joe would speak the language to the servers and tell stories from his life in basketball, and for a while, they could revel in the success of The Child. That’s what Vaccaro used to call Kobe. The Child. As if he considered him divine.

“Our relationship was familial as opposed to professional,” Vaccaro said. “I knew these people, and I knew their son. Joe’s the easiest man to make a relationship with in five minutes. The smile was real. His smile was real under the greatest of pressures forever.”

From their home in Las Vegas, Joe and Pam would call Vaccaro to tell him how proud and pleased they were for his renaissance, his reemergence in the public eye after the film Air, about how he recruited Jordan to Nike, came out last year. Still, Joe’s smile was rarer in recent years — Kobe’s relationship with his family broken for years before his death, Joe living with the regret that he never got the chance to mend it. Vaccaro refused to go into any detail about Joe’s life since January 2020, since the helicopter crash that killed Kobe and Gianna Bryant, since the day that Joe lost his son and his granddaughter. But then, those details weren’t necessary. He’d gotten a text from Joe a week or two ago, and in the message, Joe said he wasn’t feeling well. It was the last time Sonny Vaccaro heard from his friend. Absolutely horrible, the whole damn thing.

Editor’s note: Mike Sielski is the author of the book “The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality,” published in 2022 by St. Martin’s Press.