Everything in threes: Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady retire, Lamar Odom is probably not missing but very possibly struggling with drug addiction. Crack has been mentioned.
That’s two emblematic All-Stars of a gloriously damaged era, retiring. And Odom, one of its most beguiling what-ifs, warping his already fucked-up career arc in ways previously unimaginable. AI and T-Mac were big names. For some of us, Odom was nearly their equal.
Retirement for Iverson and T-Mac was a formality. If anything, it’s hastened the process that turns legacy from idle discussion to burnished consensus. Iverson was once the one-man embodiment of basketball’s culture wars. He’s now an icon whose place in history is indisputable, no matter how one feels about its effects. It’s also difficult to tell whether he laid the groundwork for present-day ballers or was the moment they found a way to move past. As a player, the high-scoring guard was neither as brilliant nor as mortifying as the two sides held him to be. Iverson was always somewhere in between.
McGrady is a far simpler case: Maligned for a lack of toughness and an inability to make it past the first round of the playoffs, T-Mac was an incandescent talent ground down by back problems. His Orlando years were sublime; although the dunk on Shawn Bradley and the 13 points in 35 seconds came in Houston, T-Mac’s game with the Magic was why, briefly, he was seen as a legit pre-LeBron threat to Kobe Bryant’s supremacy at the shooting guard position. That’s the Tracy McGrady most attractive to memory.
There’s obviously a world of difference between retirement and confounding public scandal. Yet the parallel is oddly appropriate, given their respective roles in basketball at the turn of the millennium. AI and T-Mac were major figures; they may have been divisive, but at least everybody knew what the fight was over. Odom, the insider’s choice, was an impenetrable code. He came out of Queens as one of NYC’s last great basketball hopes, a Frankenstein-like mélange of skill who could keep you from scoffing at the Magic Johnson comparisons. As part of a stacked young Clippers squad, Odom was often the best player on the floor, even if it took a trained eye to notice. To the casual viewer, he was little more than a wraith.
Part of what made Odom so intriguing was that he was never a disappointment, always a tease. He helped his team without ever emerging as the kind of star we felt he could be. Odom was enigmatic in LA; in one year with Miami, Odom was emboldened enough to come into focus; then came that fuzzy Lakers period, where he failed to mesh with Kobe as a pseudo-Pippen, and yet still managed to win two titles as a secret weapon called on to fill in all kinds of blanks at all kinds of times. More importantly, during this period he partnered up with Khloe Kardashian, which lead to a reality show, television commercials, and visibility for the former cult favorite that came as a bit of regularly scheduled cognitive dissonance.
It’s here that we should probably stop and link to yesterday’s Daily Beast piece detailing Odom’s anxieties about fortune and fame. For longtime Odom fans, learning that LO had spent all those years aspiring to maximum notoriety was even more jarring than finding out that he was marrying into America’s most reprehensible family. His game had been defined by reluctance, or at least an outright refusal to be The Man. It wasn’t quite selfless but it was certainly a rejection of basketball egoism. The very thing that kept him from making the All-Star Game—a Major Plot Point on one season of his show—was practically an existential qualm for Odom.
Odom the player has never been fully realized. Odom the idea had gotten nearly impossible to keep a handle on. And now it’s been turned inside out. The only consistency in his story, something that seems especially relevant now, has been an undercurrent of tragedy. Odom lost his mother to cancer; he lost an infant son in the crib. Even as his life played out on national television, there were messy interactions with his junkie dad. Those inclined to crack wise or theorize drug use will point to Odom’s early trips to league-ordered programs after positive tests for marijuana.
Lamar Odom is most likely done in the NBA. There won’t be any debates about his Hall of Fame-worthiness whenever he officially calls it quits. The smart money has him going overseas at some point, possibly to brighten his financial future after things fall apart with Khloe and her family’s media empire. This isn’t the endpoint to his career—that might never really come, in the sense of Odom’s story being settled or readily digestible—and it doesn’t even feel right to call it the end. In some ways, it never really started. And what we did get has less to do with an athlete’s heroic narrative. It’s more like a fiction that renders Odom’s considerable gifts almost irrelevant. To all but a few true believers, they might as well be at this point.