Kobe Bryant and a business associate have a running bet on the staying power of the pop stars Katy Perry and Justin Bieber. Bryant, who wears self-discipline like a badge, has long favored the more predictable Perry’s odds, and found in Bieber’s recent tabloid episodes hints of a looming implosion: talent spurned. As he and the associate walked into the dining room at the Four Seasons, in downtown Miami, in late January, the associate, a Belieber, mentioned that Bryant had been giving him a hard time about it for years. He seemed almost ready to concede. That morning, elsewhere in Miami, Bieber had been caught drag racing and booked for driving under the influence.

Bryant was a child star, too. In 1996, fourteen years before LeBron James earned infamy by announcing, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach,” young Kobe stroked his chin theatrically for the cameras in the gymnasium at Lower Merion High School, outside Philadelphia. “I’ve decided to skip college and take my talent to the N.B.A.,” he said, with a pair of shades perched above his brow and a thin mustache sprouting above his upper lip. He had reason to be cocky: Lower Merion’s games attracted ticket scalpers. A few weeks later, he took the singer Brandy to his senior prom. He needed his parents to co-sign his first contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, that summer, and he was still living with them when, the following February, he won the slam-dunk contest at the N.B.A. All-Star weekend.

Bryant is now thirty-five, and staying power is seldom far from his mind. The Lakers, a fading dynasty, were in town to play James’s Miami Heat, ascendant royalty. The night before, Bryant had attended a college game between Duke, a school he once considered attending, and the University of Miami, and had the “very humbling experience,” as he put it, of hearing his name chanted by the student crowd. Bryant has logged more N.B.A. minutes, including the post-season, than all active players, and ranks fifth in the all-time clock punchers’ leaderboard. Very few of those minutes have come lately. Last April, in the fourth quarter of a game against the Golden State Warriors, Bryant ruptured his left Achilles tendon. He told me that the pain was so immediately intense that it was as if someone were holding a blowtorch to the back of his head, but his first instinct was to try yanking the recoiling tendon back down with his fingers. He then insisted on taking his foul shots—both of which he made, in spite of precarious balance, tying the game—before limping to the locker room, acquiescing to surgery, and vowing to rehab more quickly than anyone believed possible. The same Achilles injury ended the career of Isiah Thomas. Only Dominique Wilkins recovered from it well enough to remain an All-Star. Wilkins was two years younger than Bryant at the time of his hobbling, and had pestled the joints in his knees, elbows, and ankles for about half as many minutes.

Bryant committed to a restorative diet of bone soup and tweeted his recovery process amply. By early June, he was walking without crutches. In July, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was “far, far ahead” of schedule. He sat on a stage in August, with Jimmy Kimmel, in front of five thousand paying guests, and dangled the possibility that he’d be ready for opening night, at the end of October. Not quite. He made his triumphant return to the Staples Center, where the Lakers play, on December 8th, against the Toronto Raptors, whom he once lit up for eighty-one points—a modern record. This time, he scored nine points and committed eight turnovers in a losing effort, for which he gave himself an F.

“Seven months, he came back from the Achilles,” Gary Vitti, the Lakers’ head trainer, said. “But, theoretically, twelve months is better than seven months.”

“I was kind of hoping that he would take that year—take a whole year before he tried to come back,” Jeanie Buss, the team’s president and co-owner, said.

Those remarks were made with the benefit of hindsight, after Bryant had broken his left knee. That second injury—a fracture in the lateral tibial plateau—occurred on December 17th, during a victory over the Memphis Grizzlies. The heroic comeback had lasted six games.

Now, in Miami, Bryant confessed that what had been diagnosed initially as a six-week setback was likely to take longer—a rare instance of his underperforming expectations. “It’s been slow,” he said, after easing his six feet six inches into a booth at the restaurant. “It’s a weird injury, because I can walk around completely normal, but the fracture is still there.” He was dressed in a gray warmup suit that featured a Y-shaped logo—his own, meant to evoke the sheath of a samurai sword—and had on his feet a pair of his new signature sneakers, Kobe 9s, high-tops that resemble boxing shoes. A hood over his shaved head partially obscured a “haircut” for which Nike, his chief sponsor, had reportedly paid more than eight hundred dollars, and there was a hint of nasal in his usual baritone. He had woken up with a stomach ache, he said, and politely declined a waiter’s attention. “I’m good with the liquid crack,” he said, clutching a Starbucks cup.

It was the eighth anniversary of Bryant’s eighty-one-point night against the Raptors, and in a few hours he’d be down at court level, speculating, with the kind of graciousness that often eluded his younger self, about the possibility of someone like Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant eclipsing his mark. (“He’s a phenomenal scorer,” Bryant said of Durant, who had recently tallied fifty-four. “He can do virtually everything.”) But here he dwelled a little longer on the battle scars as a source of motivation. He pointed to a lump of scar tissue that remains on his right index finger and recalled, of 2009, “The finger fracture, that was a bear, man, because I had to play essentially the whole year with a splint on.” He’d been forced to abandon his lifelong habit of using both index and middle fingers to follow through on his shots—at no apparent cost to his accuracy. “About 2000, 2001, I started getting really bad tendinitis in my knees, just having jumper’s knee, and then I tore cartilage in my knee in 2003,” he went on, referring to his right knee—the intact one, sometimes called his “cyborg knee”—for which he began travelling to Germany several years ago, to seek experimental stem-cell therapy. “Shoulders as well. I’ve had shoulder surgeries before.”

Magic Johnson had recently joined the chorus of Lakers fans calling for Bryant to give up on the idea of returning before next fall, but Bryant was still indulging the possibility that he might be ready to suit up for the All-Star Game—it would be his seventeenth—in February. “There’s a contingent of people that say, ‘Father Time is undefeated,’ ” Bryant said. “ ‘You won’t be able to do it. Blah blah blah.’ So part of me is saying, ‘Well, I know where your threshold is. So if this had happened to you, you’d probably quit, right?’ ” He added, “That’s the thing that I think people don’t understand when they talk about Father Time, and they look at my injuries. They’re equating that to others who have come before me.”