Driving home from Lakers shootaround last Friday, I turned up the air conditioning in my car before glancing at the dashboard thermometer. It read 81 degrees. Unseasonably warm for the last day in January. But … 81.
Hours later, the Lakers played their first game since Kobe Bryant’s death. And there, staring back at me, was one of the numbers most inextricably linked to the late Lakers legend.
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There are a finite number of integers between zero and 99. They are bound to appear. Randomly, without reason. On the clock, on street signs. A table assigned at a restaurant. But over the past week, I keep seeing the same ones: 8, 24, 81. Sometimes 62. Always 2.
And I’m not alone. On Instagram, Utah Jazz radio play-by-play announcer David Locke posted a photo of the number on his hotel room door in Portland. Room 824. And Chris McGee, the studio host for Spectrum SportsNet’s Lakers programming posted photos from his daughter’s volleyball tournament. With both teams wearing black armbands in memory of Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and the seven others killed in a helicopter crash one week earlier, McGee’s daughter pointed up at the scoreboard. Her team led 24-8.
Michael Eaves, an anchor on ESPN’s SportsCenter, tweeted that the program’s two-hour block of breaking news coverage after the helicopter crash had posted a .81 rating.
“I know in times of death we often go out of our way to find symmetry,” Eaves wrote, “but sometimes it’s just unavoidable.”
Is the universe trying to tell us something? Or are we just seeing reminders of Kobe because our minds and hearts are already focused on him?
“It may be that as we search for meaning in the sudden unexpected loss of a sports icon like Kobe Bryant, we are more likely to notice such coincidences — rather than there being more common in reality,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science, medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine, where all on-campus landlines include the prefix “824.”
Sherry Cormier, a psychologist and the author of “Sweet Sorrow: Finding Enduring Wellness after Loss and Grief,” said people who are grieving often subconsciously look for ways to preserve a bond when someone important to them dies. And yes, a sports hero can count.
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“Everyone on that helicopter was so young, so vibrant, taken before their time,” Cormier said. “So we’re in shock and we keep looking for ways to stay connected. We look for things, we see things that might have been in our scope all along.”
After the Lakers poured in a season-high 81 first-half points on Saturday — a half being 24 minutes — Anthony Davis said, “I guess he’s with us.”
By Saturday night, word had trickled into the Lakers’ locker room that they and the Sacramento Kings had combined to score 242 points. The night before, the Lakers had draped Bryant’s Lakers jersey over a courtside seat next to Gigi’s Mamba Academy No. 2. Left to right, those jerseys read: 242.
“Obviously we all talked about it after the game,” LeBron James said. “The fact that we scored 81 points in the first 24 minutes, how eerie that was, and then both teams’ combined points was 242. There was like some weird stuff going on.”
That night, I tweeted that not only had the Lakers’ scoring output in that half matched Bryant’s legendary 81-point performance in 2006 but also that, a night earlier, they had gone into halftime with 62 points — Kobe’s scoring mark in late 2005 when he single-handedly outscored the Dallas Mavericks through three quarters.
A follower replied to note the timestamp on my tweet.
The time you posted this 8:24
— saro (@sbabaiandmd) February 2, 2020
The internet was overwhelmed with examples like this. Add Kobe’s years of birth and death (1978-2020) and Gigi’s (2006-2020) and the total is 8,024. One follower pointed out that Bryant scored 60 of the Lakers’ 101 points in his final game. The difference between those two numbers is 41. Bryant was 41 when he died. Oh, and he checked out of that game with 4.1 seconds on the clock.
Mathematically, this is not remarkable. It is not spooky or eerie.
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“There are so many coincidences that can happen, the chances are very high that one or more will happen,” said Kenneth Alexander, a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California. “If you have 10 million things as a million-to-one shot, then the odds are pretty good that 10 of them will happen.
“The way you can combine various numbers in a course of a game or players’ uniform numbers that might have a coincidence in some way is vast. Hard to even quantify.”
Todd Brun, a USC professor whose research focuses on quantum theory and quantum information science, teaches a course on probability theory.
“I tell my students that the difference between an unlikely event and a coincidence is that the coincidence has some pattern that we notice,” Brun wrote in an email. “Humans are good at noticing patterns. We see faces and animals in clouds and rock formations. To our ancestors, it was much more dangerous to miss a pattern than to see patterns that aren’t there, so we are biased into perceiving connections even in randomness. With lots of data to draw on, it’s easy to find such connections just by chance. We think unlikely events are rare, but in fact they happen constantly.”
The fact is, we have been trained to associate certain numbers with Bryant. If not during his remarkable life, when you were likely to see people wearing No. 8 and No. 24 jerseys on a daily basis, certainly in death. The Lakers emblazoned the two numbers on the court at Staples Center and added the decals to their practice court in El Segundo over the weekend. His retired numbers have been the only banners displayed at Staples over the past week, and teams across the league honored Bryant by taking 24-second shot clock and eight-second backcourt violations at the beginnings of games. At the All-Star Game next week, Team LeBron will wear No. 2 jerseys in honor of Gigi, while Team Giannis will wear No. 24.
If we are already looking for those numbers, we are bound to spot them even out of context.
“I think it’s human to look at those numbers that way,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said.
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Josh Siegel understood his role in this story. He knew I needed someone to indulge the question of the metaphysical and that’s why I called, in his words, “the woowoo guy.”
If anyone is going to find a mystical meaning in the temperature of my car, in the Lakers’ first-half scoring numbers, in the timing of a tweet or the score of a club volleyball game or a behemoth network’s ratings, it is Siegel, an L.A.-based numerologist to the stars.
He took me through some of the teachings of Carl Jung. We talked synchronicity and archetypes, the human unconscious and links between the physical and psychic world. But he called himself “somewhat of a skeptic” and a “weird guy in my field.”
“It’s not uncommon for people to notice or experience certain important numbers that have a relevance to their life at a certain timeframe more than other timeframes,” he said.
In the immediate aftermath of Kobe’s death, we are more attuned to the numbers we associate with him.
Planned tributes to Kobe Bryant have been frequent, but his numbers also have been noticed in random situations. (Robert Hanashiro / USA TODAY Sports)
“There’s nothing essentially supernatural about that,” Siegel said. “I think that’s normal, to tell you the truth.”
So that seems like it’s going to be it.
But then, Siegel said something interesting. He studied Bryant’s numerology chart and found what he believes might help explain why people keep seeing significance in little reminders of Kobe.
He doesn’t see a traditional sports makeup.
“If you look deeper into his numbers, it’s actually the number more of an inspirational person,” Siegel said, “and somebody that’s here to inspire, to awaken people, to illuminate things, to shift people’s conscience. This could have been the chart of someone who led a movement, or who was a charismatic speaker, motivational speaker.”
I know nothing about numerology. Psychologists would dismiss it, and I’m a firm believer in real science. But I do know that it’s something many people trust. And whether he is going off of a numerological chart or scanned a Wikipedia page before calling me, Siegel just described Kobe.
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Bryant was all of those things. He did speak with grandeur and tied to shape lives. He was not a perfect figure, Siegel conceded, but “overall, his life was an inspiration.”
So whether the numbers have been appearing for a reason or not, Siegel believes, the fact we are recognizing them represents something significant in us.
“It’s a wake-up call to pay attention to what he meant,” Siegel said. “People are having these experiences. Is it just weird coincidences? Or, maybe the reason people are experiencing these numerical connections is because of the message behind them.”
And that message? To follow Bryant’s example. To push beyond what is expected. To think bigger.
Or, as Siegel put it: “Where in your life can you ‘Kobe Bryant’ yourself?”
I have not been sold on numerology. Rationally, I’m with the psychologists and the mathematicians. I have never thought enough about the cosmos or kismet or fate to believe in them.
But I still like this answer the best.
(Top photo from Staples Center: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)
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