‘Death hunted him since he was a kid’: how Lamar Odom survived to become a villain in his own tale | NBA

There’s a version of the Lamar Odom story that ends in a Nevada brothel. It’s not hard to imagine the grand finale – the TMZ bulletin chronicling his fatal drug overdose, followed by moving 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 buckling under the weight of addiction. A cautionary tale of incandescent fame, with Odom’s famous wife Khloé Kardashian cast as a man-eater to outshine her more notorious older sister, would have been the epilogue cemented in a thousand food for thought.

But in living to tell the tale, Odom became the latest fallen star to prove a fundamental truism of Western mythmaking: Heroes who don’t die young are doomed to live long enough to become the villain of their own story.

“There’s a way of understanding Lamar where everything in his life is sort of a reaction to the death that’s been chasing him since he was a kid,” says Ryan Duffy, executive producer of Netflix’s sports docuseries Untold. “Then it catches him, he somehow gets out and is still there. Shit, I’d be pretty out of it if that was the case for me too.”

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 look back at the moment in 2015 when Lamar Odom was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel – a news shocker that marked the most spectacular sports fall since Tiger Woods ran into a fire hydrant. (You’d have to think the Untold team is seriously considering taking an in-depth look at the golfer in light of recent events.) That was the year Odom topped the Google Trends list for living people, a good measure of how his saga has consumed the public.

Apparently suffering from excessive cocaine use in the days leading up to the brothel incident, Odom 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 stunning fall was being touted in the tabloid press as the culmination of a growing drug problem. Odom had almost finished his three-year probation sentence following a drunk driving arrest in 2013, and Kardashian was waiting for a judge to approve her divorce request. This delay would prove to be extraordinary luck for Odom.

Over the course of the documentary’s 90 minutes, Odom leads the conversation with charm and vulnerability. But before dismissing this sports biography as yet another exercise in self-guided legacy training, viewers should know that Odom is bucking the trend of athlete co-producers. Not only does he keep things unflinchingly real, but he lets uncomfortable truths lie without a positive spin. He admits he was a bad father, a worse partner.

“I know cocaine isn’t the way to go,” he explains in a wistful aside about his past drug use, “but it’s such a good high that 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 reflecting on his misfortunes and missteps before charting a new path. It quickly becomes clear that this is not just a defense mechanism; it is the survival instinct of a man who could not afford to dwell on losses. His heroin addict father is largely a supporting character in Odom’s life, and his mother died of colon cancer when he was 10. His relationship with his high school friend, Liza Morales, another important voice in the documentary, collapsed when their six-month-old son died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2006 while Odom was partying with friends.

Odom, now 46, treats these tragedies with deadpan frankness, much like Rick James reflecting on his rock ‘n’ roll past in those old Chappelle Show sketches – carefree and unrepentant. He makes no excuses for wasting what could have been an all-time great NBA career, one that surely would have earned him more credit for helping usher in the current era of positionless basketball. That lack of pretension is a quality that die-hard fans have always respected in Odom, who agreed to come off the bench after Los Angeles acquired him in a blockbuster trade and became the NBA’s top reserve.

In the documentary, Phil Jackson fondly remembers Odom as a selfless player who treated his teams like family — but then winces at his former player’s drive for 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 dubbed the Zen Master. “For example, going to the oracle on the road and being granted his wisdom.”

Jackson, who has been out of basketball since his disappointing tenure as president of the New York Knicks, would have been the biggest draw on this project if Kardashian hadn’t agreed to sit out at the last minute.

“It happened late enough in the documentary that I told my editor [Freddie DeLaVega]: ‘We can probably plug her in here or there,'” Duffy says. “But after she gave us two hours of her time, I was like, ‘Freddie, I have some bad news: We’re doing this again.'”

The Kardashian interview is the thing that separates Odom’s treatment of Untold from the other documentaries 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 hosting gig for a party celebrating the Lakers signing of Ron Artest in 2009, how they married a month later, how he immediately took an interest in her family’s burgeoning reality TV empire and pushed for a spinoff starring just the two of them. She remembers Odom’s drug use and serial flirtations that quickly snowballed into a monstrous situation that had her searching alleys for him, paying off hotel maids to keep the stories out of the press, and even frantically pumping his stomach when he overdosed.

“I felt such a responsibility to cover this up and stay the course and protect him,” she says, seeing herself more as a catalyst for Odom’s addiction in hindsight.

When an intervention in 2013 didn’t work, she filed for divorce, and the two parties signed in July 2015. Three months later, Odom was discovered unconscious at Love Ranch, a legal brothel roughly equidistant between Las Vegas and the Mexican border.

“The ride itself was enlightening,” Duffy says, recalling how the initial report of Odom’s medical emergency placed him In Las Vegas. “It was just double-wide trailers and fucking meth labs. Like, you’re in dire straits if you end up here. It made me better appreciate the depths he’d fallen to.”

Kardashian claims Odom’s estranged father would have pulled the plug on her son if she hadn’t intervened at the hospital — which still recognized her as his next of kin even though their divorce wasn’t finalized — and bought him off Odom Sr. with $100, a pair of Nikes and a night’s hotel stay. She also suggests that their marriage might have survived if Odom hadn’t continued to use drugs behind her back — the final straw when she caught him smoking crack months after he was released.

Odom doesn’t object to Kardashian’s version of events, nor does he show much appreciation for the great lengths she went to to save her life and reputation, thus sealing a twist in the story. She goes from reality TV movie status to hero status, while he goes from sympathetic protagonist to unmistakable villain. Or at least it is before considering the influence of addiction and its role in this story. Odom jokes about partying in Vegas and “marrying someone” at the end of the documentary. Earlier this year, he voluntarily entered a 30-day rehabilitation program for marijuana use after pleading not guilty to drunk driving. (His case is scheduled to go to trial in July.) Odom still seems to think like a user. But that doesn’t mean it’s irremediable.

Untold shows him trying to repair his relationship with his adult children. His son Lamar Jr shares a heartbreaking story about Odom abandoning them for the 2009 Lakers championship parade while Destiny recalls a post-ER tour that took Odom everywhere – including Bryant’s farewell game – but never to therapy. Odom often returns to a recurring dream in which he sees Bryant again and is told that “the afterlife is not what people make it out to be.” What’s worrying is that Odom seems curious enough to test his late teammate’s “message” again. “He just acted like the coma never really happened,” Destiny says.

In an alternative narrative, Odom’s story of survival would be a profile of courage and clarity. The version he offers through Untold – raw, raw and invigorating – delivers a much more authentic lesson. “When you make these documentaries, especially with athletes who are pretty well trained in media and have been in the spotlight, they understand documentaries,” Duffy says. “We’ve been in this boom of sports documentaries for almost a decade now, so they understand them and generally work really hard – whether it’s true or not – to tie things up in a tidy bow: ‘Yeah, look, I had these struggles, but they went away. I overcame them. Here I am, the fully realized version of me that you always wanted.’ Lamar, to his credit, did not do that. While I’m sure it’s a tax on the people around him, I appreciated the pure honesty and vulnerability of it.

“The guy’s point of view is: ‘I survived that night in Nevada – where, obviously, I should have died. Divine intervention was involved in my survival. And that means I have to do something. I have to find meaning.’ But he doesn’t know what it is. Where it is now is simply a research location. And he’s comfortable with that uncertainty.