The definitive biography of global superstar and basketball icon Kobe Bryant.

Bryant is one of basketball's greatest-ever players, a fascinating and complicated character who says he knew when he was a boy that he would be better than Michael Jordan.

Aloof and uncompromising, Bryant was the grand enigma of American professional basketball, easily the most driven player in the history of the sport, the absolute master of study and preparation. But his career was also one of almost constant conflict:with his teammate Shaquille O'Neal; with Phil Jackson, coach of Kobe's championship-winning Lakers team; with the law; with his wife Vanessa (whom he met when she was working as an extra on a Snoop Dogg video shoot); and with so many of his contemporaries, opponents and teammates.

Comprehensive and unflinching, Showboat unravels the conundrum that is Kobe Bryant.