Lamar Odom, reacting after scoring against the Spurs in the West finals, at one time was “as lost as lost could be.”

AP / Eric Gay

Ten years ago I went looking for Lamar Odom’s roots.

He was about to play his first game for the University of Rhode Island, the most celebrated recruit in this state’s basketball history, and already he had spent the previous year living in the middle of a media firestorm.

His destiny was to one day play in the biggest arenas in this country, to have the basketball world and all of its gold in the palm of his hand.

It was a destiny that had begun in the spring of his sophomore year at Christ the King High School in Middle Village, Queens. He had scored 36 points in the city championship of New York and a grainy black-and-white photograph captured all of it forever, Lamar cutting down the net, a swarm of teammates and fans underneath him, Lamar at the top of his world, the next basketball wunderkind.

But was he ever going to get to his destiny?

That was the question in the fall of 1998.

He had all but become a poster child for everything that was wrong with the sport, a basketball vagabond who had been to three high schools in his senior year and was rumored to be jumping to the NBA after high school. Then he had gone to summer school at UNLV, until his test score was questioned in a Sports Illustrated story.

So he had arrived at URI in the fall of 1997 because Jerry DeGregorio, with whom he had spent some time living the year before, was the new assistant coach to Jim Harrick. At the time Odom was perceived as another inner-city athlete complete with all the stereotypes, another victim of no grades, a fractured home life and a basketball subculture that had spun out of control. Another kid who seemed to be up for bid, grist for the mill.

His first year at URI, he had not been a fully enrolled student, thus was ineligible to play and had spent the year in a personal limbo.

“I was as lost as lost could be,” he would later say.

On that November day I was sitting in his grandmother’s small, gray house is South Ozone Park, Queens, about a jump shot away from the Aqueduct racetrack. Just down the street and around the corner was a small playground. That’s where he had gone when he was 12 years old and had just found out that his mother had died, and he went and shot baskets by himself, trying to use the game to ward off the pain, basketball as a balm.

Seven people lived in the small row house: his grandmother, his uncle, two of his cousins and their children. When he went home, he slept on the couch.

On this day his grandmother sat in the darkened living room. Behind her, in the small dining room, were innumerable trophies. Yet, she said that it wasn’t Lamar’s basketball success that interested her, as much as it was his academic progress. She wanted him to be in school.

“His academics are the main thing,” she said that day. “You can always have a job if you have knowledge.”

There was a grace to her, the grace of an old woman who had worked as a nurse and then, when her three children were grown, went back and got her college degree.

You could see that, too, with Odom back then. He never came across as some street kid with all sorts of attitude. He was polite, extremely likable.

“Lamar never had an attitude,” said Bob Oliva, the longtime coach at Christ the King, later that day. “Never. Lamar knows the difference between doing things the right way and not doing things the right way. He was just lazy. Like a lot of kids, he didn’t like to go to school. He was always looking for the easy way, and outside of here he wasn’t pushed.”

Christ the King, a tan brick school from which you can see the glistening buildings of Manhattan in the distance, is a no-nonsense place, one in which boys wear ties.

“Everyone loved Lamar,” Oliva said. “His teammates. Teachers. Everyone. He was never a discipline problem.”

So how did it all get so crazy?

Maybe it was the lack of direction, a kid whose mother was dead and whose father had never been around. Maybe it was the fact that it was all too much too soon, being talked about as a junior in high school as one of the best kids to ever come out of New York City, instant immortality. Maybe it was the lure of the NBA and all of its riches, the fact that you could now go right from high school to the league and not to have to worry about Western Civ and teachers with their dirty looks, ready or not.

Who knows?

Maybe it all went back to that night he had scored 36 points in the city championship as a sophomore in high school.

“After that, everything changed,” he once said.

There was a fragility about Odom in the two years he was at URI, as if there were two sides of him. There was the public side, the size and skill and talent, the sky-is-the-limit potential, the siren song of the NBA constantly buzzing in his head. And there was the private side, a kid who wanted to be a kid, even if the realities of his life kept getting in the way of it. Could Lamar Odom be a normal college kid? He never had that luxury. He always was in the middle of a soap opera, the price tag he paid for all of the potential.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he vacillated about whether to leave URI after his one year as a player. Should he go? Should he stay? Hamlet as a basketball prodigy.

But wasn’t this his destiny?

Hadn’t it been determined that night as a high school sophomore when he scored 36 points in the city championship and everything changed?

Wasn’t it only inevitable that he was going to go off to where the big money and the big games were?

So he did.

He was the fourth pick in the 1999 NBA Draft, taken by the Clippers. Five years later, he landed back in L.A., this time with the Lakers, after a stint with the Heat. And if he was suspended for a while in 2001 after violating the league’s anti-drug policy — rumored to be marijuana — and two years ago went through the tragedy of a young son dying in a crib death, Odom has found himself with the Lakers. This year, he averaged 14 points and 10 rebounds, the perfect complementary player to megastar Kobe Bryant.

Not that any of us who ever saw him play at URI should be surprised.

It was never a question of talent with Lamar Odom.

And as I’ve watched him compete during these playoffs, I keep remembering that day 10 years ago when I went looking for his roots, back when everything was so uncertain for him, and how very far he’s come from that little gray row house in Queens.

He is now 28, in the prime of his NBA life, a key player on a team in the NBA Finals, so very far from where he was when he first came to URI, “as lost as lost could be.”

Here he is, right in the middle of his destiny.

Finally.

breynold@projo.com