No Kobe Beef

In November 2007, Billy Thorington of Davenport, Iowa, buried his 15-year-old son, Cody, who had died of a rare form of cancer. Prior to the burial, Thornton placed a Kobe Bryant jersey in Cody’s casket. He did this not only because Cody had been a huge Bryant fan but also because Kobe had personally given him the jersey after a Laker’s game attended by Cody and his entire family, which had been arranged by the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The foundation has also confirmed that Kobe Bryant had granted similar wishes to more than 200 children like Cody over the course of his career.

He had also done much to promote women’s athletics. LeBron James once asked him if he was disappointed to not have a son to follow in his athletic footsteps. Bryant responded by telling James that he didn’t need a son because he had a daughter who was following in his footsteps. Speaking as a father, that’s what real fathers do. I think the world would be a more compassionate place if we had more men like Bryant who choose to act rather than to just criticize other fathers by writing uniformed letters to the editor.

Shame on Eugene Weekly for printing un-iformed and inaccurate non-sense (Letters, 2/6) and then attaching a reac-tionary headline to it (which I won’t repeat here). So much for journalistic integrity. Your time would be better served in the future by fact checking before you insult someone who, like us all, had flaws but who consistently showed up for terminally ill children and women’s athletics, as much as Bryant did in his short life. That’s what real journalists do.

Gary Rutledge

Eugene