Loyal cadre of coaches and fellow NBA stars stuck Lamar Odom

Lamar Odom’s life contained an inordinate amount of tragedy, heartbreak and addiction—but through it all, a loyal cadre of coaches and fellow NBA stars stuck by him.

Loyal cadre of coaches and fellow NBA stars stuck Lamar Odom

Odom’s high-school basketball coach told The Baltimore Sun, “In 1998, when Lamar Odom was forced to leave the University of Nevada-Las Vegas basketball program over a testing scandal before he ever played a game,” that his move out of Nevada was a blessing in disguise. On Tuesday, almost two decades later, Odom was found unresponsive in a brothel an hour outside of UNLV’s campus. Gossip websites like E! Online cite a source who said he had virtually every doing imaginable in his system. Odom is currently on life support.

Instead of UNLV, Odom wound up back under the guidance of DeGregorio, who had taken a job as an assistant coach at the University of Rhode Island a year before.He was one of several high-profile people—from coaches to fellow basketball players to celebrities—whom Odom viewed as “father figures” or “family” or “brothers,” in his words or theirs.They all tried to save the NBA star from the inordinate amount of tragedy, heartbreak, discord and addiction that has plagued his life.

When Odom was a senior in high school, DeGregorio took the teenager into his home. He wanted Odom to finish school where he coached at St. Thomas Aquinas in Connecticut.

Odom had already moved homes once before. After his mother, Cathy, died of colon cancer when Odom was 12, the boy was left to live with his father, a heroin addict—until his grandmother, Mildred Mercer, then in her 80s, took Odom in.Despite the tragedy of losing his mother and his unstable living situation, Odom, a long and skilled point-forward, thrived at Christ the King High School in Queens, N.Y. alongside two future NBA point guards, Erick Barkley and Speedy Claxton.