By Payton Turkeltaub, Kennedy French
Courtesy of Netflix Few stories in NBA history are as dramatic, painful or as improbable as that of Lamar Odom. He was a two-time NBA champion, sixth man of the year, and one of the most naturally gifted players of his generation. He was also, for much of his adult life, fighting a battle with addiction that most people around him either didn’t know about or were working hard to conceal. It cost him his career, nearly cost him his life and played out, in many ways, in front of the entire world.
Netflix’s latest installment of its “Untold” docuseries digs deep into the full arc of Odom’s life — from his whirlwind marriage to Khloé Kardashian and the reality TV empire that came with it, to the trade that sent his drug use into a tailspin and his near-fatal overdose at a Nevada brothel in October 2015. Odom, Kardashian and those closest to them speak with a candor that is, at times, startling — about the drugs, the lies, the enabling, the media circus that descended on a Las Vegas hospital, and the unlikely moments of grace that somehow brought him back.
It is, above all else, a story about survival. Below is everything we learned from “Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom.”
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Lamar and Khloé Kardashian fell hard – and fast – for one another
Image Credit: Courtesy of Hulu In 2009, Odom met Kardashian, his future (though now ex) wife, at a “Welcome to LA” party thrown by fellow NBA player Ron Artest (formerly known as Metta World Peace). She’d been hired to host the party alongside Artest, who paid her just $5,000 for the appearance (he jokes that her rate is much higher now, while she says she only agreed to take the gig because her brother, Rob Kardashian, loved the Lakers). Both Odom and Kardashian maintain they had no idea who the other was at the time. “You know, the first night, I’ll be honest, I was trying to fuck her,” said Odom in an NSFW confession. “[I] got with her the next day, and then the next day turned into the next day.”
Thirty days later, the couple was engaged. As Kardashian explains, a tabloid wanted to run the exclusive on the wedding — but only if they could also get the exclusive on the divorce, she recounted. “Falling in love the way we fell in love, as quickly as we did, is so not my personality,” she says. “But he’s so charismatic. He’s fun and silly. And then he also is a very vulnerable person. He’s very honest about his life.” The reality star admitted that Odom was her first love — and that this was one of the reasons she rationalized so much of his behavior throughout their relationship. “I was fighting every single day to either project him or not let him get caught.”
