Kobe Bryant: Bullish on Facebook - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Ben Cohen

Only one member of the U.S. men’s basketball team doesn’t use Twitter or Instagram. Kobe Bryant doesn’t need Twitter or Instagram. He already has 13.6 million fans on Facebook, by far the most of any Olympian.

Courtesy of Kobe Bryant

The photographer’s pregame dinner.

And he has spent his time in London sharing details of everyday life in the Olympic Village. Among his Facebook scoops: Kobe has eaten a bowl of strawberries and kiwis for a pre-game dessert, asked Australian swimmers to watch them train (and received “some Speedos” in return) and took in Michael Phelps’s last Olympic race with his kids. “It’s one thing to hear it from ‘Dad,’” he wrote, “but another to see others enjoy the success of hard work.” He has documented meetings with American swimmer Rebecca Soni, retired Ukrainian pole-vaulter Sergey Bubka (twice) and U.S. pole-vaulter Jenn Suhr, plus her husband. He also hung an American flag in his hotel room.

But wait! The public diary of one of history’s most ferocious and fascinating basketball players raises the question: Who is actually the author of Kobe’s Facebook? Surely there’s a deft ghostwriter making all this magic happen.

As it turns out, it’s not much of a mystery. Kobe himself is responsible for updating the enormously popular page, representatives for Bryant confirmed. And he’s only lightly edited: Kobe sends photos and messages to someone in the U.S. who fact checks, spell checks and then posts away.

Not that there was reason to doubt that the missives are any less authentic than LeBron James’s tweets or Kevin Durant’s no-filter photos. When Bryant, who embraces the nickname Black Mamba, published a note Friday at 12:08 a.m., he signed off with two words: “Mamba out.” Even the Kobe Bryant of ghostwriting couldn’t pull that off.