Basketball: Lamar Odom reveals he used a fake penis to pass Team USA drug test

Lamar Odom of the Los Angeles Clippers. Photo / Getty

By now we all know that former NBA star Lamar Odom had a pretty significant drug problem and was also addicted to sex but the lengths he went to, to avoid being caught out are both amazing and shocking.

Writing in his book Darkness To Light, Odom told the tale of the time he was selected for the 2004 Dream Team but was petrified he would never get to join the team in Athens due to being unable to pass the drug screening, with a heap of drugs in his system.

"There was absolutely no way I was going to pass. I'd been smoking weed every day that summer. Panic set in," Odom wrote.

But then he had an epiphany of how to skirt around the issue and jumped online to google "fake penises".

Lamar Odom drives to the basket against the Denver Nuggets in 2013. Photo / Getty

"After an exhaustive search we ordered a giant, rubber, black ***k to arrive the next day."

Odom then had his trainer — who was drug-free — "urinate in the reservoir of the phallus, which was hidden in the balls."

His trainer then passed him the urine-filled prosthetic in the bathroom and Odom strapped it to his leg — he then squeezed the urine out of the tip of fake penis, while the NBA security official looked on.

"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 passed the test after the official "stuck a thermometer in the cup to gauge the temperature" and officially welcomed him to Team USA.

Lamar Odom at Fashion Nova Presents party in 2019. Photo / Getty

Not that it mattered, in Greece they failed to bring home the gold as Argentina took out the tournament, beating Italy in the final, on the back of star performances from fellow NBA stars Manu Ginobili and Luis Scola.

Team USA, would finish third, beating Lithuania to the bronze and while Odom would go on playing in the NBA until 2013 his drug and sex issues really only came to light after that time.

He suffered a near-fatal overdose in 2015 while overindulging in both women and drugs at infamous Nevada brothel The Love Ranch.

"Sex was a trigger for me to do drugs," he told PEOPLE in a separate interview for the book. "Because you double up on [that] good feeling."