Kobe Bryant rarely shared his interests beyond the game of basketball. His post-NBA career was ‘remarkable’ and unexpected

Retirement is a daunting prospect for every professional athlete, but Kobe Bryant went on to be a successful filmmaker and author beyond basketball.

Retirement is a daunting prospect for every professional athlete. It’s even more panic-inducing if you’ve devoted 20-plus years of your life to little else but perfecting your craft, ruthlessly pursuing titles and accolades. That seemed to be the case for Kobe Bryant in the final years of his trophy-laden NBA career, his body ravaged by a series of injuries. For a player who, by his own admission, had given full-blooded, heart-and-soul commitment to the game of basketball, a future beyond the hardwood seemed unthinkable but inevitable. “For a lot of writers at the time, Kobe was the one individual athlete that we worried about the most, about what was going to happen to his career after basketball was over,” sports journalist Scoop Jackson tells CNN Sport. “He had made this game his entire life, and he was very open about that: nothing else means more to me than this.” But five years on from his untimely death at the age of 41, Bryant’s post-basketball career seems almost as remarkable as everything he achieved during his 20 seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers – five championship rings, 18 All-Star appearances, the 2007-08 Most Valuable Player (MVP) award and two Finals MVP awards. Impossible to foresee was what Bryant did next, building a successful multimedia company and winning an Oscar for his animated short film, “Dear Basketball,” in 2018. The career change was stark. “He reversed the villain,” former NBA star Tracy McGrady says in the third installment of CNN Original Films and Series’ “Kobe: The Making of a Legend” documentary. “To reinvent himself the way he did is one of the most remarkable stories in sports history.”