Kobe-Shaq and Bitterness

I'm the kind of person for whom it has been said, "to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail." What I mean is that sometimes my mind, body and heart get really tangled up into knots, at which point, if I'm lucky, something will come along serendipitously to fix it. One time, a long time ago, I came across a really helpful, pastoral letter on bitterness that really, honestly changed my life. I make the mistake, though, sometimes of thinking the substance of the essay is the appropriate solution to anyone else suffering from similar problems to what I once felt.

So, with that caveat in mind, I wonder if Kobe and Shaq aren't bitter towards one another. Bitterness is an interesting state of mind, because unlike hatred or mere anger, bitterness is proportional to the amount of strong, positive feelings that were once there, or maybe still are there. When a friend betrays us, we grow bitter. When a stranger attacks us, we become angry. The difference is that with bitterness (going to that pastoral letter), I think there is a tendency to rehearse the violation over and over in one's mind. Since memory is flawed, maybe it's not perfect, but it's nonetheless reviewed so much that it feels like the violation is on some kind of mental loop. In the pastoral letter, it's suggested that the reason this happens has something to do with the very real love that was once there. The love, in other words, is what makes the loop, and ultimately the entanglement. As it's a Christian article by a Christian pastor, it has a uniquely Christian solution to the problem of bitterness - but it's that the person who is bitter has to see the bitterness (and not, importantly, the violation done to oneself) as the worse of the two problems. In other words, the person has to see their bitterness as the problem, and then go to God seeking the restitution that is found in God's son. Only after a person is reconciled with God because of their own bitterness can they then go to their friend who violated them and speak to them about it. If they don't, they'll only go to them and attack them - on some level, they'll that they can't forgive the person until they've sought forgiveness themselves for their bitterness. I guess, for me, that was really a radical idea - that I could only forgive after being made able to forgive by being forgiven.

Well, I wondered if Kobe-Shaq had something similar, to be honest, because it mentions that when Kobe arrived at the NBA out of high school, Shaq more or less took him under his wing and served as mentor to him. The NBA is a mystery to me, so I don't know if there's literally a mechanism by which new players are mentored by older players or what, but at the least it was suggested that they had a genuine relationship. I wonder if this feud of theirs isn't rooted, though, in what was once a genuine friendship. Of course, one data point and I'm telling myself that they're bitter and need to experience forgiveness for their own bitterness, but like I said, since reading that article, I rush to that conclusion all the time.