Lamar Odom was in a bit of a pickle in 2004. He had accomplished a lifelong dream in getting named to the Team USA Olympic basketball roster set to go to Athens that summer. All he had to do to officially join the team was pass a drug test a few days after he got the call. The problem was that he’d “been smoking weed every day that summer.” He immediately started to panic.
In a memoir set to release later this month called Darkness to Light, Odom recounts how he did what any rational person in his predicament would do: ask Google for an solution. His search eventually found him a prosthetic penis—a “giant, rubber, black cock,” as he describes it—that matched his complexion and was ordered to arrive the next day.
Per People magazine:
And when the official tester arrived at Odom’s home to administer the test, the NBA champion was prepared, recruiting his drug-free trainer “to urinate into the reservoir of the phallus, which was hidden in the balls,” he writes.
“He handed me the rubber penis and left the bathroom as I strapped it on,” Odom writes about his trainer.
The NBA security official then entered the bathroom and watched from two feet away as Odom squeezed out his trainer’s pee from the prosthetic.
“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,” Odom writes.
Odom was still afraid that his plan wouldn’t work once he handed the cup of pee to the tester, but his fears were assuaged once the guy measured the temperature of the player’s fake urine (to check how recently it was excreted, I guess) and happily told him, “Welcome to Team USA.”
Odom getting to live of his lifelong dream did not have the happiest of endings, unfortunately. The 2004 Olympic team—which featured the likes of Tim Duncan, Stephon Marbury, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony—disappointed mightily and only took home a bronze medal after they lost in the semifinals to Argentina.