Kobe, it's time to man up and own the photo shoot

From the LA Times:

Kobe, Kobe, Kobe. It must seem like the Week of Judgment that followed your "White Hot" fashion statement should be disappearing, at long last, over the horizon.

You've absorbed incredulity, mockery and multiple questions about the way you wrapped yourself all in white for a photo spread in Sunday's Los Angeles Times Magazine. The enormous blow back and the multiple online parodies must be getting a little old.

But I'm here to tell you, No. 24, you could have turned the spotlight's glare into a warm glow instead of a punishing laser if you had lived only by the one rule you never seem to forget on the basketball court: Own the moment.

You should have embraced every one of those magazine pictures — Oh White-Scrubbed Spa Victim, Oh Doe-Eyed Bedouin Chief, Oh Baby-Faced Capone in Headband & Fedora. That would have made you the master (or at least not the victim) of the moment. Instead, you fell back on a tiresome locker-room cliché.

Sports reporters asked you how you liked the pictures (which you spent 45 minutes primping and posing for) and you labeled them "too artsy." You said the pictures had been "doctored up." You suggested they jumped out at people because of some "Photoshop" sorcery.

Kobe, my man, when you wear the hijab, wear it with pride! Tread down the runway like you storm down the court! Give us a little femme, but spare us the fatale.