Lamar Odom, a retired professional basketball player who famously married Khloe Kardashian on an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, has written for the Players Tribune on how he has diced with death.
In 1999 he was drafted in the first round of the NBA draft, number four pick by the Los Angeles Clippers but Odom's most successful spell as a professional came when he was at the Los Angeles Lakers from 2004 to 2011, where he won the NBA championships consecutively in 2009 and 2010.
Seemingly having everything that he ever wanted or needed in life, the American sports star got addicted to drugs which nearly took his life, and he outlined how he got hooked on the drug,
You might think that being a kid from New York City, with drugs around all the time, that my problems started a long time ago. Or that they started when I got drafted by Los Angeles. But that wasn’t the case. I never wanted to touch anything stronger than marijuana. I definitely never touched cocaine. I actually looked down on it.
I didn’t try it until I was 24 years old, when I was on summer vacation in Miami. And … I wish I could tell you there was a reason for it. There wasn’t. It was just an asinine decision I made. If I knew that it was going to affect my life the way it did, I would’ve never even thought about it. Never. But I did it. It turned out to be a life-altering decision.
The former Laker spoke candidly about his lowest point during the drug addiction,
One of the darkest places I’ve ever been was when I was in a motel room, getting high with this chick, and my wife (at the time) walked in. That probably was like rock bottom.
First of all I was in a motel.
A motel.
I’m a millionaire. I’d made it out of Jamaica, Queens, and won two NBA titles. And I’m in a motel, with some random person, doing coke. But I just wanted to get high with this girl, and I had no other place to go. I couldn’t take her home. You know, I was being a scumbag. Nothing else I got for that. No excuses. No bullshit. That’s just the truth.
My dick and my habit took me down all the roads that you don’t ever wanna go down. A lot of great men are fools to that. Fools to that. There are probably a lot of young dudes out there who hear my story and think that it could never happen to them. That they’re untouchable.
Man … Nobody is untouchable. Nobody in this life is immune to pain.
It's a brutally honest confession from the American and an important lesson for any future budding sports star who believes they are untouchable. Nobody is.
Read the fabulous article with Lamar Odom on the Players Tribune here.
