BOMBSHELL ANNOUNCEMENT:“Larry bird makes shocking revelation on former Sixer Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant death” NBA world has been shaken by a shocking announcement, full details below

Former Sixer Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant, father of Kobe, dies at age 69
Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who died at the age of 69 Tuesday, had a well-traveled basketball career and complicated relationship with his late son, Kobe.

Twelve years ago, a gifted Sports Illustrated writer named Chris Ballard traveled to Thailand to profile Joe Bryant, who was then coaching a ragtag team in Bangkok. It was one of 11 stops in Bryant’s itinerant coaching career, which began at Lower Merion’s Akira Hebrew Academy in 1992 (where he served as the girls’ varsity coach) and ended in 2015 in Japan.

There was also time as an assistant at LaSalle, which just happened to be recruiting his son Kobe at the time, and a brief stint as a WNBA head coach. But nothing in the NBA. Nothing permanent. Nothing Joe could ever really hang his hat on.

It was much the same with his playing career. After starring at Bartram High and LaSalle, he spent four dissatisfying years with the Sixers beginning in 1975, followed by three with the Clippers and one with Houston. Out of the NBA at age 28, he found his footing while playing nearly a decade overseas — notably in Italy, which is also where Kobe’s unquenchable love of the game bloomed.

But the question now, after Joe Bryant’s death Tuesday at the age of 69, is whether he ever found fulfillment, whether he ever found peace. Because certainly his was a life that left questions unanswered, blanks unfilled.

We can only imagine the agony he and his wife Pam felt when Kobe and their granddaughter Gigi died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles in 2020. They never commented publicly, but really, what do you even say at a time like that? How do you even plumb the depths of that despair?