Lamar Odom’s life on or off the basketball court fueled a countless number of unfortunate headlines. From his troubled upbringing in Queens, New York to the loss of his six-month-old son, and his close friend Jamie Sangouthai, the former pro athlete’s feelings and emotions became suppressed by hard drugs.
Now, Odom is sharing his story — unabashedly — on life then and now. Within Player’s Tribune‘s latest feature, the 37-year-old shared personal stories of that time he fell into a coma in a Nevada brothel to his heavy usage of cocaine.
“At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day,” he said. “Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it.”
He then questioned his own actions and the time he began to go down a dark hole.
“You think I wasn’t feeling shame? You think I was blind to what I was doing?” he said. “Nah, I wasn’t blind to it. Shame … pain. It’s part of the whole cycle. My brain was broken. As the years went on, and I got into my 30s, my career was winding down, and things just got out of control.”
Listen to his full story above.