Kobe Bryant is an exceptional professional basketball player. His father was a "journeyman". Similarly, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. both surpassed their fathers as baseball players. Both of Archie Manning's sons are superior quarterbacks in relation to their father. This is not entirely surprising. Though there is a correlation between parent and offspring in their traits, that correlation is imperfect.
Note though that I put journeyman in quotes above because any success at the professional level in major league athletics indicates an extremely high level of talent and focus. Kobe Bryant's father was among the top 500 best basketball players of his age. His son is among the top 10. This is a large realized difference in professional athletics, but across the whole distribution of people playing basketball at any given time it is not so great of a difference.
What is more curious is how this related to the reality of regression toward the mean. This is a very general statistical concept, but for our purposes we're curious about its application in quantitative genetics. People often misunderstand the idea from what I can tell, and treat it as if there is an orthogenetic-like tendency of generations to regress back toward some idealized value.
