Kobe Bryant seemed capable of summoning greatness at any moment. He could be a streaky player, but when he was hot, he was unstoppable. There was the outing in 2003 when he set an NBA record with 12 threes in a single game, nine of them consecutive. Or the nine-game tear he went on that same year, scoring at least 40 points a game.

But his masterpiece was at the Staples Center in 2006. On Jan. 22, Bryant amassed a mind-boggling 81 points in one of the most impressive individual performances in basketball history. Only Wilt Chamberlain had ever scored more, with a 100-point performance in 1962.

Asked later what possessed him, Bryant was stumped. “To sit here and say I grasp what happened,” he said, “that would be lying.”

But there was something unusual about that day: It was the first and only game that his grandma had ever attended. In town from Philadelphia, she had avoided Bryant’s professional games because they made her so nervous. When he got off to a slow start, she worried that she was jinxing him.

But then Bryant seemed to become possessed. By the end of three quarters he had 53 points. In the fourth quarter, as he added another 28, he waved to his grandmother in the stands. She hugged a stranger sitting next to her, a Lakers superfan named Cathy Johnson. “It was absolutely electric,” Johnson recalled later in an interview with Vocativ.

When the final buzzer rang, Bryant had given his grandmother the greatest show of his career, and one that no other player has come close to matching since.

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