Kobe Bryant, the retired Los Angeles Lakers basketball star who was one of the greatest to play the game, and his 13-year-old daughter were among nine people killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday outside Los Angeles, rocking the sports world and generating an outpouring of grief and shock across the country.
The helicopter went down near Calabasas, Calif., about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, in foggy conditions, though the authorities were investigating the cause. The helicopter was on its way from Orange County, Calif., where the Bryant family lives, to Mr. Bryant’s youth basketball academy northwest of Los Angeles, where he coaches his daughter Gianna, who died in the crash.
It was a moment of national mourning, coast to coast. Thousands of people converged at Staples Center, the Lakers’ home arena in downtown Los Angeles; condolences poured in from presidents, celebrities and sports luminaries; and several entertainers paid tribute to Mr. Bryant at the Grammy Awards, which took place at the arena hours later. A shrine emerged at Mr. Bryant’s high school alma mater in suburban Philadelphia.
Mr. Bryant, 41, a force of nature on the court who gave himself the nickname Black Mamba, retired in 2016 with five N.B.A. championship rings and a long list of N.B.A. records — he was surpassed by LeBron James on Saturday night for third on the N.B.A. career scoring list. Signing with the league right out of high school in 1996, he changed the way the N.B.A. identified, groomed and developed its youngest stars.
Yet he was far more than a basketball giant. He was among the world’s best-known athletes, a star on the order of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, swarmed by fans whether he was in Beijing or Beverly Hills. It is not uncommon to hear people in some quarters shout, “Kobe!’’ when they hit a jump shot.
He won an Oscar in 2018 for an animated short film on his life, and was a largely beloved figure, though sexual assault charges in 2003 cast a shadow over his image. Mr. Bryant publicly admitted to having consensual extramarital sex with his 19-year-old accuser, but insisted he had not committed a crime. The charges were ultimately dropped as the woman declined to testify, and she and Mr. Bryant reached a civil settlement, allowing him to resume his storied career.
There were more championships, and Mr. Bryant evolved into a father and a man with business interests that stretched far beyond his sport.
News of Mr. Bryant’s death was immediately described in tragic terms, the premature end to the life of a worldwide superstar who touched the lives of, and was so familiar to, basketball fans and also those who had little interest in the sport.
There was a video of Mr. James, who now plays for the Lakers, in tears. President Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, expressed sadness; Mr. Obama, who had developed a friendship with Mr. Bryant borne out of visits to the White House and their mutual love of basketball, took note of Mr. Bryant’s daughter’s death on Twitter.
“To lose Gianna is even more heartbreaking to us as parents,’’ he wrote.
Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, hailed Mr. Bryant as “one of the most extraordinary players in the history of our game.”
“For 20 seasons, Kobe showed us what is possible when remarkable talent blends with an absolute devotion to winning,” Mr. Silver said, adding that Mr. Bryant would “be remembered most for inspiring people around the world to pick up a basketball and compete to the very best of their ability.”
John Altobelli, the baseball coach at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., a community college 35 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, was also among the victims, the college announced. Mr. Altobelli’s wife, Keri, and daughter Alyssa also died.
The authorities declined to identify who else was on board, pending identification by the coroner and notification of their family members.
Daryl Osby, the Los Angeles County fire chief, said that the crash site was difficult to access and that firefighters had to hike to the scene, where debris was scattered over an area the size of a football field. Television images showed a burning mass on a hill.
“Right now it’s a logistical nightmare because the crash site itself is not easily accessible,’’ Alex Villanueva, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said at a news conference Sunday night. “Well wishers have also descended on the area including the crash site itself. We have personnel deployed to get people away from there. It’s dangerous terrain even in daylight.”
Based on publicly available flight tracking data, the helicopter, a Sikorsky S-76, was in the air for about a half-hour. It took off from Irvine, Calif., and flew up to the Glendale area, circled around there slowly for a little while, then swung in a wide arc around the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley and down to Calabasas, where it apparently was rapidly trying to gain altitude right before the crash.
Sheriff Villanueva said “we do know that there were issues of visibility and a ceiling,” and that the Los Angeles Police Department had grounded its helicopters because of the weather.
Jonathan Luca, the chief medical examiner for Los Angeles County, said it could take days to recover the remains given the rough terrain.
Mr. Bryant was on his way to the academy to coach his daughter, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge details of the continuing investigations.
The academy was hosting the Mamba Cup Tournament Series, tournaments for boys’ and girls’ basketball teams from the third through eighth grades. All the games were canceled after the news of Mr. Bryant’s death became public.
Grief spread across Los Angeles, with thousands of fans congregating at or near Staples Center. Fans erected a shrine with Mr. Bryant’s jersey as well as flowers, caps and signs. So many people arrived that most could not even catch a glimpse of the memorial.
They passed cellphones several rows ahead so that strangers could shoot pictures of the shrine for them.
“Kobe unites everybody,” said Maika McNairy, 17, a fan who was there with his mother.
Current and former Lakers players wrote emotional tributes on social media.
“IM SICK RIGHT NOW,” Shaquille O’Neal, Mr. Bryant’s retired teammate, wrote on Twitter. “I would hug his children like they were my own and he would embrace my kids like they were his.”
Mourners gathered outside Lower Merion High School in suburban Philadelphia, Mr. Bryant’s alma mater, as well.
“I was heartbroken,” said Jasmine Strong, 29, who was visiting from Brooklyn and decided to stop by the school, where fans brought flowers and other tributes. “I’m lost for words.”
In retirement, Mr. Bryant was busy becoming a modern Renaissance man who wrote and produced films and cultivated friends in the technology and venture capital sectors to help him with his investments.
Mr. Bryant first became a national figure when he was in high school, a preternatural talent whose speed, shooting prowess and seeming ability to jump out of the gymnasium made him destined for superstardom.
In the spring of his senior year, he announced that he would forgo college and enter the N.B.A., helping to usher in a new era in which the best high school basketball players, regardless of their size, started leaping from high school to the professional ranks.
Within a few years, Mr. Bryant had become the N.B.A.’s next superstar and the top player of his generation, taking his rightful place in a line of modern stars that included Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Mr. Jordan and eventually, Mr. James and Stephen Curry.
On Saturday night, when Mr. James, playing for the Lakers in a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, passed Mr. Bryant on the career scoring list, he was wearing sneakers on which he had inscribed “Mamba 4 Life,” a reference to Mr. Bryant’s nickname. Mr. Bryant later tweeted his congratulations, the last message on his handle’s timeline.
In many ways, Mr. Bryant was the bridge between Mr. Jordan and Mr. James, the two most glamorous stars of their eras.
The son of a former N.B.A. player, Mr. Bryant spent part of his childhood in Italy, where his father, Joe Bryant, known as Jellybean, spent the bulk of his pro career. Kobe Bryant became fluent in Italian and in addition to playing basketball took up soccer.
He credited soccer with helping hone his vision of the basketball court. He returned to the Philadelphia area as a teenager and emerged as a prodigy at Lower Merion, where his feats on the court drew enormous crowds and widespread attention: from fans, college recruiters and the news media, which breathlessly reported that Mr. Bryant was taking the pop star Brandy Norwood to his high school prom.
Mr. Bryant considered playing college basketball, but decided to jump straight to the N.B.A. in 1996. The previous year, Kevin Garnett had become the first high school player since 1975 to bypass college for the N.B.A. and was a first-round pick.
Mr. Bryant became one of the first players of his generation to exert control over his career from the very start, heralding a movement of player power that now has the top players functioning nearly as de facto general managers, arranging partnerships and orchestrating movement from team to team with their fellow stars. The Nets, then in New Jersey, expressed interest in drafting Mr. Bryant with the eighth overall pick in the 1996 draft, but he and his representatives told team officials that the Nets were not his preferred destination — and even suggested that he would play in Europe if they were to select him.
Instead, the Lakers, long the destination of the league’s matinee idol stars, worked out a deal with the Charlotte Hornets. The Hornets selected Mr. Bryant with the 13th pick and then traded his rights to the Lakers. He wound up spending his entire career in Los Angeles, where he became one of the most revered figures in the franchise’s rich, championship-laden history and a star of Tinseltown, an internationally cultivated citizen of the world, also fluent in Spanish, perfectly positioned for the moment when the N.B.A. and Nike, his chief sponsor, were investing heavily in overseas markets, especially China.
Handsome, gifted and a fierce competitor, Mr. Bryant was a charismatic star when the N.B.A. needed one. Mr. Jordan was on his way out — he retired for the third and final time in 2003 after an unsuccessful comeback with the Washington Wizards — and Mr. Bryant helped fill the void. Before he turned 23, he was a part of three championship teams alongside Mr. O’Neal.
Like Mr. Jordan, Mr. Bryant was a multidimensional scorer. He could shoot from the outside and drive to the rim with flair. He won the N.B.A.’s slam dunk contest as a rookie in 1997, and eventually bulked up so he could keep up with bigger and stronger competition.
Off the court and away from Hollywood’s bright lights, Mr. Bryant’s legacy was far more complicated. He was arrested in 2003 after a sexual assault complaint was filed against him in Colorado. A 19-year-old hotel employee claimed that Mr. Bryant, who was working to rehabilitate his knee after surgery, had raped her. The legal case dragged on for months, and details of the aggressive encounter with the employee and Mr. Bryant’s interview with the police became national headlines.
Prosecutors eventually dropped the case when the victim declined to testify. A civil suit was settled privately out of court for an undisclosed sum, and Mr. Bryant publicly apologized for the incident.
“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did,” he said in his statement. “After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”
After the incident, Mr. Bryant reconciled with his wife, Vanessa. In 2011, Vanessa Bryant filed for divorce, but two years later the couple announced another reconciliation. In addition to Gianna, their second-born, the couple had three other daughters.
After losing in the N.B.A. finals in 2008, Mr. Bryant won his final two championships in 2009 and 2010 before injuries derailed his career. After he announced in November 2015 that he would retire at the end of that season, opponents paid tribute to him everywhere he played, one of the grandest farewell tours in league history.
Contributing reporting were Jennifer Medina and Miriam Jordan in Los Angeles; Louis Keene in Newbury Park, Calif.; and Jon Hurdle in Ardmore, Pa.
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