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

Lamar Odom became a celebrity as much for his celebrity lifestyle as his NBA achievements. Photograph: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images 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 relating his fatal drug overdose, followed by emotional tributes to what was lost: a radical basketball prodigy of the New York tradition, a two-time NBA champion with the Kobe Bryant Lakers, a glittering career that spanned coasts and eras before caving under the weight of addiction.

A cautionary tale of incandescent fame, with Odom’s celebrity wife Khloé Kardashian cast as a man-eater to eclipse her more notorious older sister, would have been the epilogue cemented in a thousand think pieces. But by living to tell the tale, Odom has instead become the latest fallen star to prove a core truism of Western mythmaking: heroes who don’t die young are doomed to live long enough to become the villain in their own tale “There is a way of understanding Lamar where everything in his life is kind of in reaction to death hunting him since he was a kid,” says Ryan Duffy, executive producer of Netflix’s Untold sports docuseries. “Then it catches him, he somehow wiggles out of it and is still here.

Shit, I’d be pretty sideways if that was the case for me, too. ” Related: NBA expansion explained: teams in Vegas and Seattle, LeBron’s role and hungry billionaires For the latest installment of Untold, The Death & Life of Lamar Odom, Ryan Duffy (who previously chronicled the scandals of Manti Te’o and Johnny Manziel ) returns to the director’s chair to revisit the moment in 2015 when Lamar Odom was found unresponsive at a Nevada brothel – a breaking-news jolt that marked the most spectacular sports downfall since Tiger Woods slammed into a fire hydrant. (You’d have to think the Untold team is strongly considering their own deep dive on the golfer in light of recent events .

) That was the year Odom topped the Google Trends list for living people , a tidy measure of how fully his saga consumed the public. Reportedly on a cocaine binge in the days before 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.