A Word on Lamar Odom

This space is normally reserved for conversations about online branding, marketing and web site development, but I feel compelled to take a moment to acknowledge the accomplishments of one of our clients, Lamar Odom of the Los Angeles Lakers.

In the months before beginning Athlete Interactive, when I was still primarily a sportswriter, I wrote a long feature about Lamar, and that was the first chance I really had to speak with him for an extended period of time. Over the course of three separate interviews, all conducted after practice at the Lakers facility in El Segundo, Lamar answered every question I had with a shocking degree of honesty. Nothing seemed off limits, and he answered the most delicate questions — like those about his infant son Jayden, who had passed away only weeks earlier — with unhesitating vulnerability. As a journalist, particularly one covering professional athletes, it was an uncommon, if not unheard of, experience.

Not long after, Lamar became one of our first clients, and as time passed, through admittedly limited glimpses, I began to get a sense of who he was. I quickly discovered that Lamar was impossible to dislike. He was utterly without pretensions. He managed to talk seriously about basketball without seeming to take himself too seriously, and whether he was speaking from the heart or laughing his goofy, halting laugh, you knew you were getting, as he likes to say, Lamar Joseph. 

I also started to understand that he loved basketball in ways that went beyond just playing the game. His father had been absent from his life and his mother had died when he was 12; the game had given him a second family to supplement the grandmother, relatives and friends who raised him, a circle of intimates ranging from coaches to trainers, from teammates to his agent. As a result — and I think that this is something lost on fans until recently, perhaps — Lamar played with his heart and soul bared because when he stepped onto the court, in a very real sense, he wasn’t just playing for himself. He was there for the extended family who supported him, and to whom he felt he owed his best effort.

As a player, he could do things that could keep your jaw permanently dropped in amazement, and though he never seemed to be comfortable forcing the action as a scorer — more naturally falling into the facilitating role that matched his team-oriented personality — his desire to win, particularly over the past few seasons, was palpable in his actions. He played through a torn labrum and an injured knee in a previous postseason when either could have sidelined him. He did the same thing during last year’s NBA Finals, when his knees were plagued by severe tendinitis that, for the most part, went unreported.

For everything that made him who he was, I couldn’t help but root for Lamar. If Kobe was a phenomenon who left you in awe, Lamar was human, endearing, fallible and authentic. You could relate to him because he was preternaturally gifted yet imperfect, a lot like one of us might be with all the basketball talent in the world. More than anything, you wanted Lamar to succeed, and when he came up short, it killed you. It was like watching a younger brother fail.

So when Lamar became an NBA champion, I truly could not have been happier for him. From the fall, when he set the tone for the season — agreeing in a contract year, to come off the Lakers’ bench — to Sunday night, when he corralled Rashard Lewis, dominated the glass and buried all three of his three-point attempts, he showed that he was a true professional on the court. Through the wins and losses, the nights of dominance and the nights of doubt, he remained undeterred and true to himself.

LO, I hope you’re enjoying the triumph, and that you revel in the respect and adulation that’s coming your way. No one deserves it more.