Lamar Odom‘s memoir is going to be wild. We already knew that the former NBA star would be getting candid about his struggles with drug addiction and sex addiction, but one anecdote, about joining the Olympics basketball team, is beyond what anyone would have expected. Lamar writes in his upcoming book, Darkness to Light, that he was ecstatic to find out in 2004 that he was offered a spot on the US Men’s Olympic basketball team, calling it “one of the biggest honors of my career.” One big problem: he had to pass a drug test first, and he was addicted to drugs.
“The joy of being named to the twelve-man roster quickly turned to anxiety when Olympic officials informed me that I would have to pass a drug test before officially joining the team,” Lamar, 39, wrote in an excerpt of his book obtained by PEOPLE. Lamar scrambled to figure out what to do; if he didn’t pass the test, he would be disqualified in competing in the Athens Olympics. He wrote that he then received a “call from USA Basketball that a drug tester would be coming to my house in a few days to administer the screening. There was absolutely no way I was going to pass. I’d been smoking weed every day that summer. Panic set in.”
But not for long. It was time to get creative. “We started googling ‘fake penises’ and studied different ways to beat a drug test,” he wrote, without identifying who “we” is. “After an exhaustive search we ordered a giant, rubber, black c**k to arrive the next day.” You read that right. When the official arrived at Lamar’s Los Angeles home to administer the drug test, the then-Lakers star got to work. He recruited his trainer to “to urinate into the reservoir of the phallus, which was hidden in the balls. “He handed me the rubber penis and left the bathroom as I strapped it on,” Lamar explained.
What next? The drug tester came into the bathroom with Lamar and watched from two feet away as he “peed” into a cup. “I unzipped my pants and carefully slid the fake penis through the zipper hole. To get the pee to come out of the tip, I had to squeeze the shaft repeatedly,” Lamar wrote. “He stuck a thermometer in the cup to gauge the temperature… satisfied that the pee was mine, said ‘Welcome to Team USA.'” And thus, Lamar Odom was an Olympian.
Ex-wife Khloe Kardashian, 34, knows about the memoir, and as a source close to the Good American designer told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY, she’s “happy for Lamar and wishes him all the success in the world with his new book.” However, it’s “hard for Khloe not to feel its somewhat bittersweet because of course, she would have loved to have not gone through some of the struggles,” the source added. “At the same time, Khloe isn’t sure if Lamar would have learned the same lessons and come out on top if those things wouldn’t have happened.”
Darkness to Light hits shelves on May 18.