‘Death Haunted Him Since He Was a Child’: How Lamar Odom Survived to Become the Villain of His Own Story
There is a version of the story of Lamar Odom ending up in a Nevada brothel. It’s not hard to imagine the grand finale: the TMZ bulletin chronicling his fatal drug overdose, followed by emotional tributes to what was lost: a radical basketball prodigy of New York lore, a two-time NBA champion with the Kobe Bryant Lakers, a glittering career that spanned coasts and eras before collapsing under the weight of addiction. A cautionary tale of incandescent fame, with Odom’s famous wife, Khloé Kardashian, cast as the man-eater to eclipse her more infamous older sister, it would have been the denouement cemented into a thousand pieces of reflection.
But living to tell the tale, Odom instead became the latest fallen star to demonstrate a fundamental truth of Western mythmaking: Heroes who don’t die young are doomed to live long enough to become the villain of their own story.
Announcement
“There’s a way of understanding Lamar where everything in his life is kind of a reaction to the death that has haunted him since he was a child,” says Ryan Duffy, executive producer of Netflix’s sports docuseries Untold. “Then he grabs it, somehow manages to free himself and he’s still here. Shit, I’d be kind of sideways if that were the case for me too.”
Related: NBA Expansion Explained: Teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, LeBron’s Role, and Hungry Billionaires
For Untold’s latest installment, The Death & Life of Lamar Odom, Ryan Duffy (who previously chronicled the Manti Te’o and Johnny Manziel scandals) returns to the director’s chair to revisit the 2015 moment when Lamar Odom was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel—a breaking news story that marked the most spectacular sporting fall since Tiger Woods crashed into a fire hydrant. (You’d have to think the Untold team is seriously considering delving into the golfer in light of recent events.) That was the year Odom topped the Google Trends list for living people, a precise measure of how much his saga consumed the public.
Due to a cocaine binge in the days before the brothel incident, Odom reportedly suffered kidney failure, multiple heart attacks and 12 strokes. He was placed in a medically induced coma for several days, with doctors initially giving him little chance of survival without significant and lasting brain damage. Meanwhile, his extraordinary accident was framed by the tabloid press as the culmination of a growing substance abuse problem. Odom had nearly finished a three-year probation sentence following a drunken driving arrest in 2013, and Kardashian was waiting for a judge to approve his divorce request. That delay would prove to be a stroke of extraordinary luck for Odom.
Announcement
Over the course of the documentary’s 90 minutes, Odom leads the conversation with charm and vulnerability. But before you dismiss this sports biography as yet another exercise in self-guided legacy education, viewers should know that Odom bucks the trend of the athlete’s co-producer. Not only does it keep things firmly real, but it lets inconvenient truths lie without a positive twist. Accept that he was a bad father, a worse partner.
“I know cocaine isn’t the way to go,” he explains in a wistful digression about his past drug use, “but it’s a high that makes you feel so good, you wish you could capture it and put it in a bottle so you can have it the next day.”
As his daughter Destiny points out in the documentary, Odom would rather move on with his life than spend too much time considering his misfortunes and missteps before charting a new course. It quickly becomes clear that this is not just a defense mechanism; it’s the survival instinct of a man who can’t afford to dwell on losses. His father, a heroin addict, was largely a background character in Odom’s life, and his mother died of colon cancer when he was 10. His relationship with his high school sweetheart, Liza Morales, another prominent voice in the documentary, fell apart when their six-month-old son died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2006 while Odom was partying with friends.
Odom, now 46, processes these tragedies with deadpan candor, much as Rick James reflects on his rock ‘n’ roll past in those old Chappelle Show skits – indomitable and unapologetic. He makes no excuses for throwing away what could have been an all-time great NBA career, a career that surely would have earned him more credit for helping usher in the current era of positionless basketball. That lack of pretense is a quality that hardcore fans have always respected about Odom, who agreed to step down after LA acquired him in a blockbuster trade and he became the NBA’s top reserve.
Announcement
In the documentary, Phil Jackson fondly remembers Odom as a selfless player who saw his teams as family, but then winces at the pull of his former player’s fame, as if Jackson wasn’t dating team owner Jeanie Buss when Odom’s whirlwind romance with Kardashian was in full bloom.
“Getting on that plane and going to Montana to see him was personally exciting,” Duffy says of meeting Jackson, the 13-time NBA champion whom sportswriters have nicknamed the Zen Master. “For example, going to see the oracle on the street and having his wisdom bestowed upon me.”
Jackson, who quit basketball after his disappointing tenure as president of the New York Knicks, would have been the biggest hit for this project if Kardashian hadn’t agreed to sit in at the last minute.
“It happened quite late in the paper that I was telling my editor [Freddie DeLaVega]: ‘We can probably plug it in here or there,’ says Duffy. “But after he gave us two hours of his time, I thought, ‘Freddie, I have bad news: We’re starting over.’”
Announcement
The Kardashian interview is what separates Odom’s treatment of Untold from other docs he’s worked on over the years. She pulls back the curtain on their paparazzi romance: how she met Odom while working a $5,000 gig for a party celebrating Ron Artest’s signing to the Lakers in 2009, how they married a month later, how he immediately took an interest in her family’s budding reality TV empire and pushed for a spinoff with just the two of them. She recalls that Odom’s drug use and serial harassment quickly escalated into a monstrous situation that led her to search for him in alleys, pay off hotel maids to keep stories out of the press, and even frantically pump his stomach when he overdosed.
“I felt such a responsibility to hide all of this and hold it together and protect it,” she says, seeing herself more as an enabler of Odom’s addiction in hindsight.
When an intervention in 2013 didn’t work, she filed for divorce, with both parties signing off in July 2015. Three months later, Odom was found unconscious at the Love Ranch, a legal brothel roughly equidistant between Las Vegas and the Mexican border.
“The trip itself was eye-opening,” says Duffy, recalling how early reports of Odom’s medical emergency placed him In Las Vegas. “It was all double-wide trailers and fucking meth labs. Like, you’re in dire straits if you find yourself out here. It made me better appreciate the depths he had fallen to.”
Announcement
Kardashian claims Odom’s estranged father would have pulled the plug on his son if she hadn’t stepped in at the hospital – which still recognized her as his next of kin with the divorce unfinalized – and bought him from Odom Sr with $100, a pair of Nikes and a night’s hotel stay. She also suggests their marriage might have survived if Odom hadn’t continued using drugs behind her back – the final straw came when she caught him smoking crack months after he was discharged.
Odom neither objects to Kardashian’s version of events nor shows much appreciation for the considerable efforts she made to save his life and reputation, sealing a turning point in history. She goes from reality show to hero, while he transforms from likable protagonist to unmistakable villain. Or at least that’s before we consider the grip of addiction and its role in this story. Odom jokes about partying in Vegas and “marrying someone” as the documentary concludes. Earlier this year, he voluntarily entered a 30-day rehabilitation program for marijuana use after pleading not guilty to drunken driving. (His case will go to trial in July.) Odom still seems to think like a user. But that doesn’t mean it’s irredeemable.
Untold shows him attempting to repair his relationship with his adult children. His son Lamar Jr shares a heartbreaking story of Odom abandoning them for the Lakers’ 2009 championship parade, while Destiny recalls a post-emergency tour that took Odom everywhere – notably Bryant’s farewell game – but never to therapy. Odom often recalls a recurring dream in which he sees Bryant again and is told that “the afterlife is not what people think it is.” What’s worrying is that Odom seems curious enough to test his late teammate’s “message” again. “He acted as if the coma never actually happened,” Destiny says.
In an alternative narrative, Odom’s story of survival would be one of courage and clarity. The version he offers through Untold – raw, rough and extraordinarily real – offers a much more authentic lesson. “When you do these docs, especially with athletes who have a good media background and have been in the spotlight, they understand documentaries,” Duffy says. “We’ve been in the sports documentary boom for almost a decade now, so they understand it and usually work very hard – whether it’s true or not – to tie things up in a neat bow: ‘Yes, look, I had these difficulties, but they’re gone. I’ve overcome them. Here I am, the fully realized version of me you’ve always wanted.’ Lamar, to his credit, didn’t. As much as I’m sure he’s a tax on the people around him, I appreciated his raw honesty and vulnerability.
Announcement
“The boy’s perspective is, ‘I survived this night in Nevada, where, by all accounts, I should be dead. There was divine intervention involved in my survival. And that means I have to do something. I have to find meaning.’ But he doesn’t know what the fuck it is. Where it is now is in an easy to find location. And he is comfortable with this uncertainty.