Jeanne Mastriano was on leave from her teaching job, caring for her new daughter, when she walked out of her home in the Philadelphia suburbs one day to find a mysterious package sitting on her porch.
The label said it had come from California. She guessed that it was a maternity gift from a relative out west.
But when she opened it, she found a red Radio Flyer wagon filled with baby-related gifts and a simple message: “Love, Kobe.”
The moment was one of many that anchored an enduring connection between Ms. Mastriano, an English teacher at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pa., and Kobe Bryant, the N.B.A. star she had taught years before. Their remarkable friendship, developed with impromptu visits and email exchanges over more than two decades, came to an abrupt fracture this week when Mr. Bryant, 41, was killed in a helicopter crash, along with his 13-year-old daughter and seven other people.
“That trust developed, and it never faltered,” Ms. Mastriano said in a telephone interview. “We managed to get through lots of years, and really were there for each other.”
“He has left such a void behind,” she added, emphasizing his role as a father to four daughters. “It’s going to be rough.”
Ms. Mastriano, 67, has been teaching at Lower Merion for more than 30 years. She had Mr. Bryant in her sophomore English class, and again in an elective class he took in 12th grade. She admits to being a bit of a “bandwagon” fan when it came to basketball early on, showing up to cheer on the varsity team when the young Mr. Bryant helped guide the Aces to a state championship in 1996. He then leapt from high school straight to the N.B.A., and a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers.
His jersey number in high school was 33, so Lower Merion High School held 33 seconds of silence on Monday. An impromptu memorial appeared outside the gymnasium that bears his name, as stunned fans brought basketballs, bouquets and Bryant jerseys.
But Mr. Bryant remembered his high school experience for more than just basketball. He stayed in touch with the community, including Ms. Mastriano, whom he once called his “muse.”
In high school, she taught him the work of Joseph Campbell and the mythology of the hero’s journey, a concept that Mr. Bryant would return to in media interviews over the years.
After his basketball career began to take off, Ms. Mastriano recalled, he returned to the school to visit at times, slipping quietly onto campus and knocking on her classroom door.
No matter how much time had passed, Mr. Bryant, who lived in Italy for part of his childhood while his father played professional basketball there, greeted his teacher the same way. “He always called me Mrs. Mastriano,” she said, and not by her first name. “He actually put a really nice Italian spin on it.”
In one of his last interviews, Mr. Bryant credited Ms. Mastriano for planting a seed for his post-N.B.A. interest in the written word. In 2015, he announced his impending retirement in a poem titled “Dear Basketball,” and later won an Academy Award for an animated short film created around his reading of the poem. He was also getting ready to introduce a new book.
“She was so good and so passionate about what she was teaching about writing and storytelling,” Mr. Bryant told USA Today in an interview published last week. “She firmly believed that storytelling could change the world. And she opened my eyes to this passion I didn’t know existed.”
Ms. Mastriano said that Mr. Bryant had emailed her a copy of the poem after it was published, asking what she thought. She told him, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” She even shared it with her students. “I said, ‘See? This is what happens when you free write.’”
The two did not always see eye to eye. Near the end of Mr. Bryant’s playing career, Ms. Mastriano said, she got a message asking her to meet him in New York City. She drove up from Philadelphia and joined him at a coffee shop.
He told her he was planning to retire from the N.B.A. but did not want to announce it publicly. He wasn’t sure he wanted a retirement tour, with its standing ovations and joke gifts of rocking chairs.
She said she suggested that he at least consider going public — which he ultimately did.
“It was important for him to give people a chance to celebrate him,” she said. “It was also important for people to have an opportunity to say goodbye.”
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