No way in hell.

That was my first response to the news, recently, that Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant had been arrested for sexual assault. After I’d had a chance to reflect, it was also my second, third and fourth response.

Kobe? Sexual assault? My instinct is to doubt.

Yes, I recognize I’m perched on a shaky limb. If 27 years as a critic and observer of pop culture have taught me nothing else, they’ve taught me that it’s foolish to mistake public image for private reality. A fallacy to think you “know” somebody because you saw them interviewed on television.

So yeah, I may end up eating my words. But I’ll have company at the table. Many other observers also have leapt to Bryant’s defense. Former NBA player Gary Grant probably summed up the prevailing sentiment when he said, “I don’t believe it. If it comes out to be true, I still won’t believe it.”

There is a lesson here. After all, Bryant has always had this problem with so-called “street credibility.” Namely the fact that he doesn’t have any.

The boys in the ‘hood, the argument goes, may respect his dazzling skills, but they don’t identify with him because he and they are too unalike. They have grown up fatherless and hopeless, been educated at the University of the Streets, learned to wear attitude like Kevlar.

Bryant, by contrast, is the son of a middle-class, two-parent family. He is well-spoken and polite, chose to get married and have a child in that order. Worse, he’s a reputed homebody who eschews the temptations of the road, preferring to hang out in his hotel room or dine with his bodyguards.

Those flaws were said to be instrumental in Nike’s recent decision to pay Bryant – a perennial All-Star and three-time NBA champion – only $45 million to endorse its product. I say “only” because the company is reportedly paying twice as much – $45 million more – to LeBron James, a high school phenom who has yet to play a minute of regular-season NBA ball.

But James grew up fatherless on crime-infested streets.

In the strange world of sports marketing, that makes him a more effective pitchman than a nice guy who plays basketball and then goes home to be with his wife and daughter. As Matt Powell of Princeton Retail Analysis told the shoe industry publication Footwear News last year, “(Kobe) doesn’t have much resonance with the young, urban customer. … He’s more appropriate for suburban kids.”

It is a profoundly disturbing statement. I wish it were also profoundly untrue.

Fact is, that which is squeaky and clean doesn’t play too well down in the heart of the city, where being “hard” is a virtue and true virtue a liability. It’s a perversion of values that leads all-too-reliably to tragedy. How many times has being hard, “keeping it real,” striving to maintain credibility on the corners and curbs of urban America, left a mother mourning, a father weeping, a young man needlessly, stupidly, dead?

So if Bryant lacks street credibility, let the record show that there is credibility beyond the street, credibility that speaks to integrity, the ability to say a thing is so and be believed.

Note that, nearly simultaneous with his arrest, two other NBA stars – Damon Stoudamire of the Portland Trailblazers and Darrell Armstrong of the Orlando Magic – were arrested on charges of, respectively, drug possession and battery on a law enforcement officer. If the sports world has rushed to their defense, I must have missed it. Heck, had perennial bad boy Allen Iverson’s name been the one on the arrest report, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

I hope the point is not lost on those young people for whom the credibility of the streets is the end-all of existence. Bryant may not have that, but he has conducted himself in such a way as to earn the benefit of the doubt at a time when he needs it most. You may not feel that’s worth $45 million.

I think Kobe might disagree.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is: [email protected].