Bright Light In A Tiny City

Sporting News, The, Dec 28, 1998 by Don Markus

Once considered the perfect example of all that is wrong with recruiting and elite basketball, Queens native LAMAR ODOM survived a tumultuous two-year odyssey and is thriving at Rhode Island--at least for this season

Chamique Holdsclaw remembers the kid from her Queens neighborhood well. One summer he was just another gangly 14-year-old, tall and talented for his age but not anything special. By the time she returned from her freshman year at the University of Tennessee, the kid had added more than seven inches to his 6-2 frame.

In less than a year, Lamar Odom had become the biggest star in New York City high school basketball. And, by scoring 36 points as a sophomore and leading Holdsclaw's old school, Christ the King, to the city championship, Odom had become something else: a big target.

"Once you become that big in New York," Holdsclaw says, "everyone wants a piece of you." Holdsclaw remembers something Odom had said so many times it had become something of his mantra. "He always said he wanted to go to college," she recalled recently.

Few believed Odom would fulfill that dream, given the potholed road he took after leaving Christ the King before his senior year. Nobody would have believed Odom's destination might turn out to be the University of Rhode Island after he was recruited by traditional powers such as Kentucky, UCLA and Connecticut, and then signed with UNLV.

Odom would have had a difficult time believing it himself.

"I knew a guy who played her, Abdul Fox, who played here until about '95 (actually 1992-94)," Odom says, sitting in an assistant coach's office one afternoon in late October. "Until I got here, I never thought I'd be here. It was kind of a blessing both for me and Coach (Jim) Harrick. I guess we're in the same boat. He had his mishap, and I had mine.

It is difficult to tell whose mishap was bigger. Odom's came when he arrived at but didn't enroll at UNLV after his score on his college entrance exam was questioned. He also had been picked up for soliciting a prostitute within a weeks of arriving in Las Vegas. Talk about freshman orientation.

Harrick's troubles were well-documented, too. Eighteen months after coaching UCLA to its first national championship in 20 years, Harrick was fired right before the start of the 1996-97 season over an improperly filled-out expense report. He, too, never thought he would wind up in bucolic Kingston, R.I.

How long they're together is anybody's guess, but most believe what TCU coach Billy Tubbs surmised after Odom finished with 19 points, 14 rebounds and nine assists in his first college game, an 87-85 victory over the Horned Frogs on November 9 at Providence Civic Center, a game in which he also scored the winning basket with 5.4 seconds to play.

"I hope Jimmy enjoys coaching him now," Tubbs said, "because it will be the only year he'll get to coach him."

It isn't because Harrick plans to leave his suddenly simpler life and return to the world of pain-in-the-butt booster and no-life radio talk show callers he endured at UCLA. But few of the pro scouts who have been following Odom this season expect him to remain at Rhode Island beyond this season.

"I think what impressed a lot of us was how hard he worked in practice," one NBA personnel director said before the TCU game. "He's an old-time player. He doesn't give you a lot of extra frills that some of these kids do. No big crossover moves. The year in college will be good for him, but let's face it, he's not there for the academics."

Odom and Harrick would be quick to disagree, along with the school's administration. The academic types are hoping that a player who arrived on campus 15 months ago and was given the somewhat cryptic status of a "non-matriculating student" doesn't turn out to be one of those one-year mercenaries, such as Tim Thomas was at Villanova two seasons ago.

After sitting out last season to reach good academic standing, Odom decided last spring to remain in school rather than make himself available for the NBA or take one of the three reported offers on the table--a $1 million deal from a team in Switzerland, a $500,000 contract from a team in Greece or $100,000 from the CBA to play for a team of his choice. He surprised those who figured the 6-10 forward didn't belong on campus.

"Being a 19-year-old college student is a great time in my life," says Odom, a communications major.

It is certainly better than sitting around all fall, and possibly all winter, waiting for the NBA lockout to end. Odom says his decision to pass up an NBA draft in which he was told he would have been a "middle-to-late first-round pick" was based on his desire to go to school and, of course, work on his game.

Evidence that he made the right choice came shortly after his sparkling debut.

"It was," he says, "a humbling experience." Odom was talking about his performance against Providence, a team picked to finish near the bottom of the woebegone Big East. On the same Providence Civic Center court on which he had played so well against TCU and Vanderbilt, Odom finished with five points (none in the second half) and eight turnovers in a 24-point defeat.