Ty Watches "The Death and Life of Lamar Odom"

I have found that I enjoy watching the "Untold" docu series on Netflix. I'm a sports fan and I have always found it interesting to get some backstory from people who were there, or even better, from people who lived the experience. It is so much better when the person or people in the story happened to talk about it. You know that they are going to tell you just a little more than someone retelling it from their perspective. And now that Netflix has a whole category dedicated to the "Untold" series, it is so much easier for me to turn one on during the day.

Yesterday I watched "The Death and Life of Lamar Odom". When I was younger I used to watch Odom play basketball and was kind of amazed at how easy he made the game look on my tv screen. He was such a fluid and exceptional athlete on the basketball court. I even remember following him during his two years playing college basketball at Rhode Island. He was great then, parlayed that into being the fourth overall pick in his draft class and had a memorable NBA career.

But he is probably more remembered for what this doc focused on.

He married Khloe Kardashian, won a few titles with the Lakers, had a reality show and then had a very bad week at a brothel in Las Vegas. Everyone, including me, thought he wasn't going to make it out of that coma. For people who may not know, Odom went to a brothel one day, stayed there for a week, and the final day he was there he overdosed on drugs and had to be rushed to the hospital. He would eventually come out of the coma and he is still alive today. But when he was overdosing I guess he said he had twelve strokes and six heart attacks. That is wild. This doc focused on that night and his relationship with Khloe Karhdashian. Sure, they talked about his first fiance, the kids they had, his NBA career, but the crux of everything was the brothel and his and Khloe's relationship. This was where the doc got a little tedious to me. The last 50 or so minutes were all about this stuff. And I get why. This is the salacious details that documentaries like this crave. You want to see the downfall and where they may be today. But I prefer the stuff that leads up to all of that. I loved the first 40 minutes of the doc. This was where they focused on his basketball career. This was where we learned about his childhood. This was where we got to see him play on the fun Clippers teams with Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson. We also got to see his short time on the Heat. But when he was traded to the Lakers, and especially when he met Khloe Kardashian, this was when his life took a massive turn and this was when the documentary became a bit too much for me.

I didn't really know how to feel when I was watching. I'm a Lamar Odom fan, but he did this to himself. I get it, addiction is a disease. It's a problem and it can take over your entire life. People with addiction need real help. But when someone gets this involved, I put the majority of the blame on them. And Odom is a true, true addict. And it's not just drugs with him, he is also a sex addict. But, while watching, I never felt for him. I never wanted to reach out and help him get help. I was just watching him self-destruct, and that felt gross to me. As for Khloe Kardashian, I have never been a fan of the whole Kardashian thing. They're just not my vibe. They're reality tv people with no real skill or use to me. I'm not knocking what they do, they have found their niche and they're capitalizing on it. Good for them. They just aren't my cup of tea. And in watching Khloe retell her side of the story, I felt nothing for her either. It felt hollow. Some of it felt fake to me. I just didn't buy everything. And when the movie ended, I just kind of let it go and moved on with my day. After a lot of documentaries I find myself thinking more and more about them. That didn't happen with this doc. It came and went. I felt nothing. The news, for the most part, wasn't all that new to me and wasn't the news that I like to read or hear about. It was a wild ride, that's for sure, but it just didn't do much for me.

It felt like a bit of a letdown from "Untold", which for the most part, tells interesting and riveting stories. This one just didn't work for me.

Also, Happy Birthday RD. 

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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