NBA journo Lowe cites Kobe Bryant's and Roger Federer's "liquid grace"

Tributes of Kobe Bryant, the five-time NBA champion who, along with eight others—including his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna—tragically lost their lives Sunday, have been pouring in. They are beautiful and touching, yet difficult to grasp and accept. Bryant's shocking death is unquestionably one of the most significant, and saddest, events in sports history.

Here are two remembrances that particularly struck me:

Another, written tribute caught my eye for a different reason—it included a comparison of Bryant to Roger Federer. From Zach Lowe, the estimable basketball writer at ESPN.com:

Man, Kobe was a beautiful player. Everyone compared his movements and tics to Michael Jordan's, and there is some of that. But as I watched prime Kobe again, I was reminded of Roger Federer. They both glide and change direction with liquid grace. They never seem to hit the ground with force. They float.

Bryant and Federer met each other at last year's US Open—whether it was their first encounter, I'm not sure—right before the Swiss' third-round match against Daniel Evans. (Federer rolled, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1.) Bryant wasn't in Flushing Meadows for a perfunctory appearance; he was there to talk with tennis players he'd built relationships with, including Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic, and to discuss a children's sports-fantasy book he had just written about tennis.

“It was incredibly dramatic news," Federer told Swiss publication Tages Anzeiger, about Bryant's death. “The morning I woke up, I thought it couldn't be when I saw the first news.”

“I immediately woke Mirka. Then you want to know more about it, and you're just sorry. His death affects the whole sports world, he was also seen on the tennis tour.

Getty Images

“He was a big tennis fan. I was thrilled to see him in New York last year when he flipped a coin during a game of mine.

“I’ve always been a big basketball fan, and as such you love Kobe anyway. And if you have a family like me and as many children, you think: Oh God, that's hell. I am very sorry.”

Bryant was 37 when he played his last NBA game—a 60-point performance that included a series of dramatic, game-clinching shots. The most memorable shot is this one, taken from space earned with liquid grace, well past his prime. His transition from gliding to shooting is instantaneous:

Federer is 38, and he'll need to find more liquid grace than he showed against Tennys Sandgren if he's to beat Djokovic on Thursday. But it's still there, even at his age—we saw it in the very last stages of Federer's third-round win over John Millman.

"If I can get through a match like this, through a match like Millman, yeah, you do believe," Federer said, "I only believe it once it's over, I shake the hand of the opponent, that it's over, that it's fine.

"So, yeah, I do always believe till it's actually over, never before."

The courts of basketball and tennis are different in so many ways, but movement is paramount to success on each. To float—a word often associated with boxing—is to change what we think of movement: a series of specific moves that take a player from point A to point B. Federer and Bryant, Lowe posits, each used motion in the most subtle and effective ways.

"I'm heartbroken, honestly, with what has happened," Djokovic said after his win over Milos Raonic that set up a match with Federer. A little bit of Bryant will be on the other side of the net, too.