Lamar Odom had been training to try to get back into professional basketball weeks before he suffered a drug overdose that landed him in the hospital, E! News has learned.
The 35-year-old former NBA player and 6'10" forward, who had played for the Los Angeles Lakers for the majority of this career, was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel and hospitalized on Tuesday. He woke up from a coma on Friday. While his recovery has been deemed "miraculous," he is suffering from kidney failure and doctors are also currently evaluating him for possible brain damage.
In the weeks leading up to his overdose, Odom had been running through intense drills on the basketball court at Life Time Athletic in suburban Henderson, Nevada.
"He seemed pretty serious about training to get a pro tryout," a gym source told E! News. "He had trainers with him and was working on his shot. He also was working on his cardio on the Stairmaster. He looked good."
The source added that Odom began going to the gym more and more in late September as dates of NBA teams' training camps neared.
"He moved here because of [pro boxer] Zab Judah, and Zab Judah told him to come here and train with me if he wanted to like, you know, like make his way back to the NBA, "Odom's trainer, Fareed Samad, told TMZ on-camera at the Nevada hospital this week. "Physically, he was doing OK. He was down 35 pounds. He would take, you know, like hiatuses once in a while. It's more mental than physical with him."
TMZ also posted video of the two training. Samad said the two watched the NBA training camp of the New York Knicks, the last team Odom played with, which "motivated him to get into better shape."
At the hospital, Odom has been joined by Khloe Kardashian, who has been by his bedside and making his medical decisions, his father, his son—a high school basketball player, his daughter, their mother and several of his friends, including Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant.
Odom had played for the Lakers between 2004 and 2011. He helped the team win two NBA championships.
He was first drafted by the Los Angeles Clippers, in 1999, and played for the team until 2003, after which he joined the Miami Heat. He remained with them for a year before he and two other players were traded to the Lakers in exchange for NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal.
In December 2011, Odom was traded to the Dallas Mavericks following a vetoed trade deal that would have sent him to New Orleans. He was traded back to the Clippers a year later.
He became a free agent in 2013 and suffered personal turmoil that year. He was arrested on a DUI charge during the offseason, for which he received three years of probation as part of a plea deal. Odom, who had battled substance abuse in the past, checked into a rehab center after his arrest but spent less than a day there.
Odom later joined Spanish basketball club Laboral Kutxa Vitoria. But his comeback was short-lived; he played in two games and suffered a back injury, prompting him to return to the United States. In 2014, he joined the New York Knicks in his home state for part of a season. Later that year, the team waived him.
"Unfortunately, Lamar was unable to uphold the standards to return as an NBA player," New York Knicks president Phil Jackson said in a statement carried by ESPN.
"When basketball abandoned Lamar Odom, it's as if life, long his jailor, had finally taken his Bible," Sports Illustrated writer Jim Cavan wrote on Wednesday. "As if there was little for which to live, save the fleeting fix of friends, or money, or maybe the fixes themselves. As if he'd aged in war years and wanted only to remember his antebellum self. Without basketball—professional basketball; the game at its most enveloping, its most comforting—life had to be hard again. There was no other way."
Gary Charles, Odom's former basketball coach and mentor, talked to E! News earlier this week.
"It's tough because this kid is like a son to me all of those years, and honestly, I've always been worried I would get a phone call like this," he said. "I can't say I'm surprised. I have worried about this day for as long as I've known him. Everyone close to him has worried, and we are all praying he makes it."
For the latest updates on Lamar Odom's condition, tune into E! News tonight at 7 p.m. & 11 p.m.