When Rudy Tomjanovich stepped down as the Lakers’ head coach in the middle of the 2004–2005 season, the organization was prepared to go on an exhaustive coaching search to find the ideal candidate. But that never materialized because Kobe Bryant only had one coach in mind: Phil Jackson. Kobe worked extremely well with Jackson and wanted someone he trusted. So, on June 15, 2005, the Lakers hired Phil Jackson after just one season away from the team.
When Phil returned to El Segundo, he brought his intricate yet highly successful triangle offense, which was masterminded by his longtime assistant Tex Winter. The Bulls had won six championships with its triple-post offense, and the Lakers won three more in the span of twelve years, so everyone knew it worked. It was based on both player and ball movement that was designed to encourage team play while not detracting from individual talent—all in the interest of getting the best possible shot.
To be honest, the triangle offense confused me at first, and it took me a while to pick it up. I would sometimes be out of place, make the wrong pass, or force a shot when it wasn’t necessary. I could see Kobe getting frustrated with me, and he’d do his own coaching. There was something that just resonated more clearly when someone like Kobe, who could run any offense, pointed out things on the floor to help the learning process.
“We’re going to use you in a lot of areas,” Kobe explained to me one day in practice. “The elbow, mid-post, short corner to break apart defenses. I’m going to see a lot of overload defenses, so with you flashing to the high post, you’ve got the talent to be able to catch the ball and look opposite to make those reads and make the right pass. When I get doubled and make that pass, most teams don’t have anybody with your length and size to make the right pass. We’ll win championships with that hockey-assist play because when I kick it to you, you’ll be the one making decisions.”
Kobe trusted me.
That was really the cornerstone of how well we worked together. He understood the value of what I brought to the table and how to bring it out of me. Honestly, it took a couple seasons to get the kind of patience and understanding of spacing to make it work for us, but obviously the end results were worth it.
In Phil’s first year back, we ended up making the 2005–2006 playoffs despite dealing with injuries to Kobe and me. We even went up 3–1 against the second seed, the Phoenix Suns, in the first round. Ultimately, however, their depth, pace, and the floor generalship of eventual MVP Steve Nash was too much to overcome, and we lost in seven games. But we were headed in the right direction.
In the fall of 2005, Liza was pregnant with our third child, and the baby was due on Christmas Day. We made all of the necessary arrangements for a family that’s expecting. Liza and the kids moved back to Los Angeles so we could be together for the birth.
I bought a Range Rover, which I got off Jason Kidd for cheap—like $9,000—so Liza could have more freedom getting around with the children.
I was so excited for the baby’s arrival, but the only problem was that the Lakers would be playing in Miami on Christmas, and I would miss the birth. But during a home stand in mid-December, Liza began having contractions and was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, the same hospital where LJ was born nearly four years earlier.
I was convinced we were going to have a second girl. I just thought that’s what the universe was going to give us. Since we didn’t know the sex before the baby was born, we hadn’t picked out a name. It didn’t help that Liza and I couldn’t come close to agreeing.
For boy names, my first choice was Luke, after my close teammate Luke Walton. I was going for basketball names. I thought Dominique would be great, too. But Liza wasn’t feeling it. She wanted the name Jayden. Ever since Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith named their son Jaden, Liza couldn’t get it out of her mind. Plus, it would work for a boy or a girl.
On December 15, we welcomed Jayden Joseph Odom into this world. I held him in my arms and stared directly into his huge brown eyes. The next night the Lakers had a game against the Wizards. As I chipped in fourteen points and eleven rebounds, my feet didn’t touch the ground. I thought of my beautiful boy the entire time.
After Jayden was born, Liza wanted to have her tubes tied. She was twenty-four with three children, and we decided that our family was complete. However, when she met with her doctor, he told her about a patient in a similar situation whose infant died at three months from a heart defect. The patient regretted tying her tubes. The doctor stressed that Liza shouldn’t do it. And she didn’t.
For much of the early part of 2006, life felt right and we were as close a family as we’d ever been. Because Liza was a young mother, she had hired a nanny to help her out with the children. Liza put the kids in a private school in Marina Del Rey, driving them back and forth every day. Destiny went to classes with the son of Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G. His widow, Faith Evans, would drop off and pick up Biggie’s son every day. When Destiny got her yearbook, we all gathered around to see the legendary Christopher Wallace’s son. He looked like a light-skinned Biggie.
In June 2006, my aunt Sandy passed away. She was the third of Grandma Mildred’s daughters. Liza, the kids, and I returned to New York in the middle of the year to pay our respects.
We had bought a home the previous summer in the hidden waterfront town of Atlantic Beach between Queens and Long Island. The plan was for Liza to raise the kids there in the off-season.
She would say that I always got lost in the summer. I would disappear and go my separate way to either Miami or some far corner of New York. We would bicker about it constantly. She thought I was hanging out with my friends in the city too often. And I was. Sure, I would always check in with her when I was out, but because I wasn’t present, it was a problem. She wanted me home. I wanted to be in the city.
After the funeral, we stayed at the Atlantic Beach house for the summer. Liza’s mother moved in to help take care of our three young children. Liza set up Jayden’s room right next to our master bedroom, which was complete with a baby monitor so she could keep tabs on him.
On the morning of June 29, Liza woke up and checked on Jayden as she had done every day since he had been born. She got his bottle ready and walked into his room. He was still, and his blankets were undisturbed from the night before. Liza felt happy. She noticed that he was on his stomach, which was a bit unusual. But he was still sleeping and looked content so she didn’t disturb him.
She went downstairs and joined her mother in the kitchen. There was a pot of coffee on the counter. The smell of decaf wafted on the air. The sunlight shone through the bay window, filling the kitchen with natural light.
“Good morning,” Liza said cheerily.
“How’s Jayden?” her mom asked. “Is he okay?”
Liza stopped in her tracks. Her blood went cold. Why wouldn’t he be okay?
She dropped her coffee mug and raced back upstairs, taking two steps at a time. She burst into Jayden’s room. He was lying there in the exact same position. His blankets were undisturbed, wrapped around him. She picked him up and turned him over.
His face was a dark blue. He wasn’t breathing.
Liza screamed hysterically. Liza’s mother, a registered nurse, immediately took Jayden.
“Call 911!” Liza’s mother screamed. Liza frantically dialed the number.
The operator who answered the phone was distant and emotionless. Liza would recall for years how cold he was. But an ambulance and fire trucks were dispatched in minutes. Emergency crews rushed into the house and dashed upstairs, immediately taking Jayden away in the ambulance. Liza and her mother were screaming uncontrollably. They were still in their pajamas.
“We can’t wait for you,” said an EMT as the ambulance sped off. A police officer told them to get in his cruiser, and he drove them to the hospital.
I had spent the night partying in Manhattan, and Liza called me from the back of the cruiser.
“Something happened to Jayden,” she shouted into the phone.
“What?” I said, waking up in a haze. “What happened to LJ?”
“No! Jayden!”
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong with LJ?”
For some reason, it just didn’t register with me that the problem was with my newborn son. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I got dressed and took the long journey to South Nassau Communities Hospital, where our entire family was gathering. Liza and her mother called aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins.
My cousin Sherrod drove me, and it seemed like there was traffic and construction everywhere we turned. I took forever to get to the hospital, and all I could think was that when Liza needed me the most, I wasn’t there.
I was the last to arrive at the hospital. I was quickly ushered into a private room where Liza was waiting. The room was freezing, and Liza was wrapped in a hospital blanket. All we knew was that the hospital was running tests. That was the only information they gave us. Fifteen minutes after I got there, a doctor entered the room and grasped Liza’s hand. There were tears in the doctor’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “As a mother I’ve experienced crib death, too.”
Crib death.
That was the first time I had ever heard that term. I didn’t know what it was. Jayden had died from sudden infant death syndrome. SIDS is when a healthy baby less than a year old dies from unknown causes, usually in his or her crib. Doctors think that babies sleeping on their backs are less likely to die from SIDS. Liza put him to sleep on his back. When she found him in the morning, he was on his stomach.
It just didn’t make sense to us. How could our baby just die in his crib? This couldn’t be a real thing. I was stunned, numb, almost emotionless. I couldn’t move.
I did not cry then. Or the next day. I did not cry for Jayden for three years. I thought if I cried it would make it real. I did not cry so that he might live.
The doctor brought Jayden into the room where Liza and I could hold him one last time. She handed him to Liza. She gripped him tightly as she sobbed.
“Do you want to hold him?” she asked through tears.
I took him in my arms and was immediately struck by how heavy he felt. His body was cold. He looked peaceful but didn’t move. I pulled him close to me, pressed his small body to my chest, and leaned forward. I rocked back and forth with my son’s body in my arms. I couldn’t form a thought, much less keep one in my head.
I was lost. I handed Jayden back to Liza and held her as if for the first time.
Later that night, after Liza had gone to bed, I sat on the front porch of our home with Greg and a few friends. In a daze, I talked a mile a minute. I spoke about things I had never talked about before and haven’t since. Opening a restaurant. Starting a car dealership. Learning how to play an instrument. Going to India. I couldn’t control my thoughts. My son was dead.
The next several days were a blur. I couldn’t escape what was happening to our family. As a man, I had to step up. There were duties I felt only I could do. I returned to the hospital the next day and arranged for the autopsy. I organized family gatherings at the house and finalized funeral arrangements.
Everyone grieves differently. Liza spent a lot of time in her room. She didn’t want to see those who came to pay their respects. She just wanted to be alone. People would occasionally go upstairs and talk to her for a few minutes. I tried to accommodate everyone. I greeted people and showed them around the house. I even took several people upstairs to show them Jayden’s room. Liza came out of the master bedroom and shot me an angry look.
“It’s not a museum,” she snapped before slamming the door behind her. She didn’t want anyone in Jayden’s room. She felt violated. I quickly apologized to her from behind the closed door and went back downstairs.
When Jayden died, Liza had a lot of nervous anxiety and sorrow. She would often go into the exercise room on the second floor of our house and walk for hours on the treadmill. There was a wall-mounted TV in the room. One time, a commercial for a religious artifacts store came on. At the end of the commercial, in purple ink (her favorite color), were the words “Jesus Loves You.” To Liza it was a message. She was overcome with emotion and collapsed to the floor.
In the following weeks she just wasn’t herself. We both struggled to communicate with one another, and I felt us drifting apart. But I couldn’t let that happen. Not now. I had to be strong. I had to be the rock. Liza would, in her grief, try her best to open up.
“Why did this happen to me?” she would cry out. “Why? This is not supposed to happen. Am I really that woman who has lost a child?”
She replayed the previous months in her head. When Jayden was two months old and breastfeeding, Liza had been exhausted all the time in a way she wasn’t with either Destiny or LJ.
Enjoy it, she had told herself. This will probably be your last child. Stay in the moment no matter how tired you are.
We buried our son on July 5, at Knolls Cemetery in Port Washington, Long Island. The funeral procession was dozens of cars long, and more than a hundred people came out to say goodbye to my son. He is laid to rest directly next to my mother, Cathy.
Jayden Joseph Odom was six months old.
In August, I returned to Los Angeles. Liza wasn’t ready to leave New York, but she no longer wanted to stay in our home in Atlantic Beach. We sold the house and moved the family into an apartment in Manhattan. The first thing I did upon returning to LA was to sell our home in Marina Del Rey. I couldn’t live there anymore. That’s the house where Jayden was born. We kept his crib in our bedroom. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in that room anymore. His crib was still there.
I dragged the king-size mattress down the stairs and put it on the floor in the living room. I slept there for the two weeks the house was on the market. Shortly after, I moved into a house with Greg in Manhattan Beach near the Lakers practice facility.
For much of our time together as a couple Liza and I were poor communicators. When Jayden died, she shut down and what was left of our relationship began to dissolve. While she leaned on her spirituality, I turned to drugs. We never talked about my drug use. The only time I used drugs in her presence was the previous year when I took ecstasy in front of her. But now my cocaine use was beginning to spiral out of control. I was taking more than I ever had before.
I didn’t want to stop. I knew I couldn’t. I was three thousand miles away from my family. I sent Liza a text. It was the only time we ever talked about drugs. It read: “Cocaine will never leave me.”
As you know, it was nothing for me to spend hours alone in my room. Even living in a house full of people, it didn’t seem that unusual to my close friends because they knew that I needed my alone time to balance myself out. With the constant swirling drama, having a little bit of space was important to me. However, this soon became a convenient way for me to mask my drug habit. I knew no one would bother me when I locked my bedroom door.
My ability to use right under my friends’ noses was significant for one huge reason—they rarely suspected or confronted me about it. I could get high in peace. I had already been suspended twice for marijuana use. The NBA’s three-strike policy clearly prohibits “drugs of abuse” such as cocaine, heroin, LSD, and amphetamines, among others. Get caught with three positive tests, and one of those tests detects a hard drug, you’re banned for life from playing in the NBA. You can potentially be reinstated after two years, but it’s not a good look at all.
Over the years, eleven players have been banned for a prohibited substance, usually cocaine, with five eventually getting reinstated. Those who were reinstated often found little to no success upon their return.
Since my last positive drug test with the Clippers, I had used marijuana many times—daily during the summers when I knew I wouldn’t be tested. I started doing coke before practices and after games when I was with the Lakers. If the league found out, my career was over at twenty-five.
One night early in the 2006–07 NBA season, my third with the Lakers, I got a call from Lakers head trainer Gary Vitti around nine.
“We got a random tomorrow,” said Vitti. “Need you here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Oh shit.
My heart nearly stopped.
They test you three times a year, and you never know when they’re coming. I’d gamble during the season that they wouldn’t test me twenty-four hours after I used cocaine, because that’s how long it takes it to leave your system. I used coke about three times a week by that time. I gambled a lot. In fact, I was high at the exact moment Vitti called. That meant I had gambled one too many times. So, stop and just imagine the scenario: you’re high while on the phone with the man whose job it is to tell you there’s a drug test in the morning. It sounds simple, and it is if you don’t use drugs, but for a drug addict it could spell the end of the world. Or at least make that potential $100 million in future earnings evaporate in ten seconds.
I hung up and told Greg that we had a problem.
“I have a random tomorrow morning, and I just took ecstasy,” I told him.
“Are you sure?” he replied suspiciously. “Lamar, this is something we can’t play with.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t know a thing about my cocaine habit so it’s not like he could start pulling some allegations out of left field. I was scared. I thought lying could make it go away. I didn’t want him or anyone to know what I was doing. Our crew had smoked weed since high school, but that was it. No one approved of hard shit. We were athletes. We didn’t do that.
“Just ecstasy and weed,” I lied.
There wasn’t a moment to lose. We called Robbie Davis. We huddled around the computer, researching how long ecstasy stayed in your system. It lasts at least twenty-four to forty-eight hours. That was bad news.
If a player failed to show for a test, the league counted it as a positive. Three strikes and I’d be done for at least two years. I needed more help with this, so I called my agent, and we came up with a plan. We decided that there had been yet another family emergency in New York, and I had to fly there immediately. With my son’s recent death, it wasn’t a stretch to think we were having problems, but we had to get our story straight. Every fact had to check out down to the last detail. I called Liza and told her to keep the kids home from school. It had to look like a tragedy had occurred.
Someone called Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak to let him know that yet another great tragedy had befallen my family.
By midnight, three hours after Vitti’s phone call, Greg, Robbie, and I boarded a private jet for New York. For the entire flight I drank a mix of cranberry juice and water in an effort to flush my system and get rid of all trace of the coke. We arrived in New York around five in the morning and headed for Liza’s house, where I would tend to my imaginary family problem, lay low for a day or so, and be back in time for our next game.
But the NBA didn’t take this lying down. A league official met me at Liza’s to collect the sample.
I was nervous so it took me two hours to provide a sample. Thanks to my efforts to flush my system, my urine was as clear as water. He ran a quick test but it was inconclusive, so he needed another sample. We didn’t want him waiting in the apartment, so we sent him downstairs until I was ready to pee again.
I kept drinking the cranberry concoction. Four hours later I’m ready to piss. The guy came back upstairs because of course he had to watch the sample come out of my body. At this time, the rep had been there nearly nine hours. It was a chess match, but he didn’t have any moves. He hadn’t eaten or even had a seat the entire time. The second time I peed it was once again as clear as water. He headed back to the league office and told them I took the test. It came back inconclusive, which at that point cleared me.
I dodged yet another bullet. One of many that would come my way.
Each of the first few years I was with the Lakers, my game and the team’s success grew. And 2008 would be one of the biggest years for me personally and professionally. On February 1, 2008, one of the most significant moves in Lakers history took place. The Grizzlies traded their All-Star center, Pau Gasol, for Kwame Brown, Javaris Crittenden, Aaron Mackie, and the rights to Pau’s brother, Marc. The move made the Lakers instant title contenders.
Pau was twenty-seven years old at the time, was considered the greatest member of the Memphis Grizzlies in history, and held twelve franchise records, including games played, points, rebounds, and blocked shots. The addition of Pau, alongside twenty-year-old blossoming center Andrew Bynum and myself, made the Lakers one of the longest and most versatile teams in NBA history.
We stormed to a fifty-seven-win season and finished first in the Western Conference for the first time in nearly a decade. We rampaged our way to the NBA Finals, where we played the Boston Celtics, and in the process, renewed one of the NBA’s greatest rivalries. At the time, the two storied franchises had a combined thirty NBA championships. The series was one of the most competitive in years, with four of the first five games being decided by six points or less. But then Game 6 happened.
Trailing the Celtics 3–2, the bottom fell out. The Celtics’ vaunted Big Three of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen dominated us. They were quicker to every loose ball and dominated on the boards. Allen hit a then record seven three-pointers, and point guard Rajon Rondo had a phenomenal all-around game with twenty-one points, eight rebounds, seven assists, and six blocks. The Garden crowd went berserk as the Celtics celebrated on their own floor, winning their first title in twenty-two years. We lost by thirty-nine points, the greatest deficit in NBA Finals history.
I was thrilled to finally play in the NBA Finals but also dejected by the loss. I tried to give it some perspective and realize how thankful I was to have reached the highest level of basketball. I was excited for what was to come.
It was a crashing end to a great season. The plane ride back to Los Angeles was one of the longest ever. I shut my eyes and went to sleep.