Darkness to Light, page 7
Cuttino “Cat” Mobley was a below-the-radar, lefty senior shooting guard who was a fountain of constant energy and positivity. He had fashioned himself into an NBA prospect and was the captain of the team. No one at Rhode Island did more to keep my spirits buoyed than Cat. For that, I can never repay him.
Tavorris Bell was a freshman and former teammate of mine from the Long Island Panthers. At a slender six feet six with a forty-four-inch vertical leap, T-Bell was one of the most exciting guys I’d ever played with. He was always a threat to do something on the floor I’d never seen before. I’d known him since I was sixteen, and his hilariously perverse sense of humor was always a welcome respite from the drudgery of depression that hung over me. Whether it was some goofy accent or a character he’d play to get a laugh, there was nobody better to have around to pick me up.
We had some great open runs before the season started. Sometimes we’d head thirty miles north to battle the guys from Providence. Other times they would come to URI. I had some pretty epic battles with Jamel Thomas from Coney Island, who had a brief stint in the NBA. Those pickup games were as cathartic as they were intense. I needed them, and I needed the guys.
But whatever life those runs gave me, it was quickly sucked back out in October during Midnight Madness with the realization that I wasn’t going to play until the spring semester.
The guys were jelling as a unit on and off the floor, and even though they kept me involved as much as possible, I still felt left out. I’d regularly find myself in my room in our team apartment at the Graduate Houses, while the rest of the guys were getting ready for the season.
One night in October, I was feeling particularly vulnerable. T-Bell and I were in our suite around eight o’clock in the evening when everything came rushing back: UNLV, my fractured relationship with Sonny, being redshirted, and, as always, my mom. I couldn’t shake the feeling of failure. I wanted to get the hell out of Rhode Island. T-Bell was caught off guard by my revelations.
I jumped up and fumbled my way to the kitchen, where I found an unopened bottle of Bacardi Limón. I ripped off the cap, went back into the living room, and sat down on the floor in front of the couch. I took swig after swig. I was eighteen and had never really drunk hard alcohol before. I took the occasional sip of Henny, but that was about it. I had never been drunk. Because I had such a low tolerance, I got drunk really fast that night. My throat burned.
“Why the fuck did this shit happen to me?” I cried out. “All I want to do is play basketball and be happy.”
I had downed the entire bottle in less than an hour. I felt warm, delirious, and reckless. But at least I couldn’t feel the pain for a while.
“Man, why you still holding on to that bottle,” laughed T-Bell.
“I gotta finish it,” I drunkenly stammered. “It’s up to me.”
I clutched the bottle like a pacifier for thirty minutes after I drained its contents. I had to get out of the apartment.
“Take me to The Ghetto,” I demanded.
The Ghetto was an area of campus housing where they seemed to put all the students of color. It was actually a nice place, but the veiled segregation wasn’t lost on us. There was a sizeable Cape Verdean population, and many of the women were quite beautiful. T-Bell dropped me off at the apartment of a girl named Rose. But I had no idea where I was.
The next thing I knew, the sun was coming up and I was stumbling around behind Rose’s building. When T-Bell pulled up, he found me next to the dumpster wearing only a wife beater, boxers, and one sock. I was on my knees puking my guts out. He took me back to our apartment, and I crawled into bed. My head throbbed like a Richter-scale–shattering earthquake. There were aftershocks every ten minutes for hours. The room wouldn’t stop spinning, but at least I was in my bed. I stayed there for two days.
The next hiccup came in January 1998, when I was ruled academically ineligible for the spring semester after I failed to maintain a 2.4 GPA. President Carothers released a cold statement:
Lamar Odom is not a student at the University of Rhode Island. He is not an applicant for admission at the University of Rhode Island. I know from talking to him he has the intelligence and the capacity to be successful in college work, and I am very hopeful he will persist in doing the work that is required of him to gain admission to the University of Rhode Island.
Damn. That didn’t help. I needed more Prozac.
With me on the sidelines, the team had a great run through the 1998 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. The Rams shocked the nation, knocking off Paul Pierce and the number-one-seeded Kansas Jayhawks in the round of thirty-two, behind Cuttino Mobley’s twenty-seven points. Rhody made it to its first ever Elite Eight, where we lost to a loaded number-three-seeded Stanford team, which featured three future NBA players.
I was excited for the team’s success, but if I’d been eligible, we would have certainly been a Final Four team or possibly national champions. It would have been one of the best college basketball stories of the decade. I felt like I let the team down, but the guys would make sure never to spin it like that.
Once the season ended, I found out that I was again eligible to play because I had gotten the grades. But there was still something gnawing at me. There was still a demon that needed to be exorcised. So, in June I made a weekend trip back to Las Vegas, where I felt I had some unfinished business. When I arrived on campus, the heat rose up from the pavement and distorted the view. But I could see as clearly as ever. I made my way to the gym where UNLV teammates were playing pickup.
The guys were going hard, but one in particular caught my eye. He was a skinny pogo stick with a weird jump shot named Shawn Marion. I’d never heard of him, but he was expected to be a star after transferring from Vincennes University, a junior college in Indiana. He had recently signed his letter of intent with UNLV.
I laced my sneakers, took the court, and walked directly up to Marion. I was locked in. Zoned out. Whoever was in front of me that day, I gave them the business. I was talking more shit than I ever had in my life. Head coach Bill Bayno and assistant coach Shoes Vetrone came down to watch the games. I wanted them to see what they missed out on. I had to let them know.
I’d brought the ball up the court and told my opponents what I was going to do. I called out threes. Broke down my defenders with my crossover. Dunked with absolute power. Threw pinpoint full-court passes. Shawn looked confused at everything I threw at him. The coaches watched in awe. Afterward, I picked up my gym bag and threw a towel around my head. I crossed paths with the coaching staff, exchanged a few cordial words, wished them luck, and headed out into the afternoon sun.
A weight was lifted off my shoulders yet again. My step felt lighter. UNLV and everything that came with it no longer mattered. For the first time in years, I felt free.
13
When I left for UNLV in 1997, Liza was off to John Jay College of Criminal Justice to pursue her love of forensics and criminology. The first time she saw The Silence of the Lambs, she knew what her calling was going to be, but she ended up having to put her education on hold.
Late that fall Liza started to feel sick and couldn’t pinpoint why she was exhausted and nauseated all the time. Whatever it was, it couldn’t wait any longer, and she went to see the doctor, who confirmed her worst fears: She was pregnant. And terrified.
Her mind began to race. How would she tell me? Would she have to drop out of school? How could she afford to have a baby? Was her life over? She believed it was, but most of all, she feared telling her mother, who put nothing over her beloved Catholic faith. Her mom didn’t believe in sex before marriage, let alone an unplanned child out of wedlock.
For the first few months of her pregnancy, Liza was a wreck. She went out of her way to hide any sign that she was carrying a child. She cried herself to sleep nearly every night, stopped seeing most of her friends, and lost interest in the things she once loved. Worst of all, she knew that day was coming when she couldn’t hide her condition any longer, and she would have to tell her mother. She practiced by telling a childhood friend first but still held out as long as she could. When the day finally came, it did not go as planned. It went way worse. She sat her mom down at the kitchen table and quickly broke the news through tears.
Her mother burst out crying and launched into a screaming fit. She paced back and forth in their small kitchen and prayed.
“What have I done, Lord?” she cried. “Why my child?”
The revelation had a seismic impact on their relationship and their household. Once brimming with love and warmth, it turned cold right along with the seasons. Her mother didn’t speak to her for four weeks. They would pass each other in the hallway without so much as a glance. They ate breakfast without exchanging a single word. The news was not treated as a joyous occasion, and Liza worried about her future. I only called when I knew Liza’s mom wouldn’t be there. If her mother picked up, I hung up.
“I know it’s that boy,” her mother would say.
When Liza told me, I took the news differently. I was numb, confused at first, but after our initial conversation, my mind was made up.
“I don’t want to have an abortion,” Liza told me with a soft, determined voice I had never heard before. “I’m serious. I want my baby girl. If you don’t feel the same way, I will leave you. Do you?”
I could hear the truth in her quivering voice. It was a mother’s love. That was precious to me. I looked at her and imagined what my baby girl would look like. I touched Liza’s cheek gently with the back of my hand, and then I pulled her close.
“I want this baby,” I told her as my voice cracked. “We’re gonna have a baby girl!”
She began to cry. She pressed her face to my chest, leaving tear stains on my shirt. This was my Destiny.
As the summer of 1998 rolled around, and I was figuring out my situation at URI, the stalemate between Liza and her mother began to thaw. Liza was seven months pregnant and making regular visits to the doctor. Liza’s mother prayed on it. Soon after, she would devote all her free time to helping Liza raise her granddaughter with love and care—much as she had done with Liza.
I was going to be a father at eighteen years old, and I was about to have some real-life responsibilities that most teens didn’t have to worry about. The realities for Liza were much different. She had to pull out of school during the second semester of her freshman year.
I wanted to be a good dad. I wanted to be a better father than mine was to me. I wanted to be the man he wasn’t. I promised myself that I would love my kid in ways that Joe never loved me. My kids would look at me and smile, knowing that they had a good father. They would be proud to call me Dad.
On August 8, 1998, our daughter was born at St. John’s Hospital. She was an angel to me from the first time I held her in my arms. I couldn’t believe how big her brown eyes were. Liza had always loved the name Destiny and I felt that it was fitting. We gave her the middle name Catherine to honor my mother.
As Destiny came into the world, I was heading into my first official season of college basketball, and there was a lot of hype. Folks in Rhode Island weren’t used to it, but it followed me everywhere, so it felt normal. The media attention expanded exponentially. Rhode Island was ranked in the top twenty-five in the AP preseason poll. Sports Illustrated came to town and wrote a lengthy story. Everything was going well . . . until it wasn’t.
The first game of the season, I started out on fire, racking up twenty-five points, eleven rebounds, and ten assists. But that’s not what I remember about that game.
In our first matchup, and I’m not sure what possessed me, I wore a pair of Nike Air Jordans during a nationally televised game on ESPN. After a quick start, we were featured in a magazine spread with an action shot of me swooping to the hoop with the Jordan insignia on the bottom of the shoe displayed prominently for the camera.
Sonny nearly lost his mind. In the world of sneaker branding, there was no bigger offense. To Sonny, this was worse than getting caught with a prostitute. This was treason. Now Sonny had to go back and explain to his Adidas bosses. Sonny and Gary grilled me for days afterward.
“What were you thinking?” demanded Sonny. “Do you know how bad this looks?”
As usual, I wasn’t too worried about it. Plus, Sonny could never stay mad at me for long.
Shortly after that, we had a quick break from classes, and I decided to head down to New York. I jumped on the train and Liza surprised me by meeting me at Penn Station. I had been a swirl of emotions and wanted to talk to her. My mother was never far from my mind, and depending on the day, the sadness of her memory could hit me like a flash flood.
We got something to eat and then headed to Grandma Mildred’s house, where I opened up to Liza. Everything came rushing out. I cried and I told her how hard it was to struggle daily with the loss of my mom. Things were happening fast in my life, and I really wanted Mom to be there for me. And not only did I miss her, but there was almost no one to talk to about her. As an only child, I had no one else to shoulder the burden. I had to do it alone, and sometimes it got so heavy I couldn’t carry it. I found out that day that Liza could carry some of it for me, and that night we talked about it for the first time.
After an up-and-down season, we sat at 19–12 heading into what would be a surprise run through the Atlantic 10 Tournament. I had a terrific year with averages of 17.6 points, 9.4 rebounds, and 3.8 assists on 48 percent field-goal shooting. Although I was open to staying at Rhode Island for another season, my name was being bounced around as the possible number-one overall pick if I declared for the NBA draft.
Several hours before the Atlantic 10 title game, Gary called and wanted me to meet with Sonny at his suite. Once I arrived, Sonny and Gary introduced me to a man I’d never met before.
“Meet Dan Fegan,” said Sonny. “He’s your new agent.”
I thought to myself: That ain’t my agent.
I can’t say for sure what happened, but when universities and corporate interests are involved, deals will be made. Gary was a power broker. Once again, I was being bought and sold.
Gary vehemently denied it. I didn’t realize that a lot of relationships were about to go off the rails. This was where friendships forged over the years would be tested. I left the hotel suite without saying anything one way or the other, and once again, my head was filled with everything except what I was supposed to be concentrating on: the biggest game of my life in three hours. I took a quick nap to free my mind.
When we arrived at the old Spectrum arena in Philadelphia, my head was pretty clear. I was focused and had a great week of practice. The game was physically exhausting. In classic John Chaney fashion, Temple contested every basket with bruisers like future NBA player Mark Karcher and six-foot-ten DC native Kevin Lyde. Their zone was just as impregnable as it was frustrating. We hoisted one missed jumper after another because we just couldn’t get into the paint.
The score was 59–59 when I ripped down a rebound from a long three with ten seconds to go. I advanced the ball to half court, and we called time-out with 6.1 seconds remaining. Coach Harrick tried to calm us down on the sideline. But it just felt like chaos. The moment was so big.
“This play is going to Junior,” screamed Harrick.
That’s what he called me. Junior. He kept screaming that Junior was getting the ball. He didn’t have an actual play. Nothing was drawn up. I had missed my last four shots, but it didn’t matter.
“Just get it to Junior,” Harrick implored.
We inbounded the ball in front of Temple’s bench. I was highly aware that there were just six precious seconds on the clock. As soon as I got the inbounds pass beyond half court, I took off downcourt near the left sideline and tried to rock myself into a rhythm, realizing I had to get the shot up quickly.
It was just feeling where the sideline was. Anticipating where the three-point line was. My senses were on fire like never before. Then I looked up at the clock and just let the ball go. Not to be cocky, but under that type of immense pressure . . . I knew it was going in as soon as it left my hand.
I never heard the horn, but I saw the ball drop through the net. The place exploded. I turned and ran down to the other end of the floor. I think that was the fastest I’d ever run in my life. I fell to the floor in the corner of the opposite baseline. My teammates tackled me. I could hardly breathe. I started to cry. My teammate Antonio Reynolds-Dean wouldn’t let me get up, trying to stretch the moment forever.
After the game I was drained. I sat at my locker with tears running down my face. I cried like a baby. Ten minutes later the sports information director told me it was time to go to the press conference.
“Just let him sit for a bit,” Antonio said to the SID. “Let him get it all out.”
It was the single best moment of my basketball career.
Outside the locker room everyone was waiting. Gary had a huge smile on his face. At least I was back to wearing Adidas, I’m sure he was thinking. I found Greg and embraced him.
“Hey, man, we’re outta here,” I said, letting him know that save for the NCAA Tournament, my time at Rhode Island was over.
“I got two more years of school left,” Greg said. “My moms ain’t letting me leave New York until I got my degree in hand.”
“Nah, let’s go. Wherever I go you have to come, too.”
“We’ll figure it out, Lamar.”
That was good enough for me. Right then, life was good.
A week later Rhode Island lost to UNC Charlotte 80–71 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. And just like that, my amateur career was over. I had gone back and forth about whether or not I wanted to stay in school or declare for the draft—my typical indecisiveness—but deep down I knew it was time.
I was ready for the next level.
