The Savannah Bananas Bring Back a Negro Leagues Team

Photographs by Kevin Wurm

“My dad was a big Lakers fan,” Kobe Shaquille Robinson told me, indulging an admittedly obvious question. Robinson was born in 2001, in the middle of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s three-NBA-championship run. But he discovered early on that his name couldn’t help him shoot a basketball. As an athlete, he stood out on the pitcher’s mound.

Robinson is 6 foot 2 and lanky; when we met, he was wearing his hair in two-strand twists. We were talking on a Saturday afternoon in Memphis...