Greg Oden Outed as Norse God

PORTLAND, OR – One of the jokes when Greg Oden was selected number one in the 2007 NBA draft was that the Portland Trailblazer rookie looked old enough to have been Phil Jackson’s spiritual adviser when Phil was himself just a rookie player with a penchant for Chinese philosophy and riding the coattails of more talented people and then taking all the credit – and that was before Oden grew a beard modeled on Jeremiah Johnson. Now it turns out that the joke was on the jokester, as intrepid USA Today reporter, Sam Adams, has unearthed the truth about the gentle seven-foot center – that he is no other than the 2200-year-old Norse god, Odin.

“That explains the constant trips to the bathroom,” said Blazer teammate, LaMarcus Aldridge.
Adams said he stumbled upon the story when visiting his good friend, Evald Kristensen, in Oslo, Norway, who still prays to the ancient Norse gods of Valhalla. Evald had been having a problem with the motor to his outside hot tub and invoked Odin, the leader of the Pantheon, to come to his aid.

“And whaddaya know?” said Adams, “Suddenly Greg Oden appears, smiles, and does something with his beard, and presto-chango, the hot tub is running like a champ. Yeah, I know, Oden is black and the Norse people are whiter than the robe of a Klan member with OCD, and so you would think that Odin, the god, would have been a red-bearded Viking type. Well, Greg explained all this when he decided to stay for a while to test the sauna and enjoy his old home just a hop, skip and an immortal jump to the North Sea.”

Oden regaled Adams and Evald Kristensen with crazy tales of morphing into different gods and saints, be they white, brown, yellow and black. The two mortals blew beer from their noses when Oden told of his days as John the Baptist when, after his decapitation on orders from Herod, he picked up his own head and carried it like a football out of the Royal Palace, all the while whistling an old Norse ditty about a pretty lady named Svana.

Adams asked, then, if he had recuperative powers of an immortal, why did he miss his entire rookie season after having had microfracture knee surgery?

“Hey, little man,” said Oden/Odin, “we all break down eventually. The fact is that this knee has never been right since I was Peter the Great and banged it while learning ship-building in Manchester, England in sixteen-ninety-eight. I’d been favoring it for the last three hundred and nine years. Feels great now, and this hot tub is making it feel even better.”

Odin’s name was changed to Oden when he moved to the states and the lady at immigration spelled it wrong on his naturalization papers.

He also said that he does not begrudge fellow NBA players when they invoke Jesus and Yahweh instead of him and his fellow Norse gods of Valhalla to assist them on the court. “I’ve known Jesus for a long time. I still, to this day, invite him and his best pal, Satan over to my crib in Asgard where we shoot the shit and listen to Satan make fun of the Messiah’s new goatee. So Tim Duncan and Grant Hill can pray to my boy, Jesus, any time. I have enough to do anyway what with my team, the Blazers, trying to catch Denver for the lead in the Northwest Division. All right, guys, I better get back to practice. I told the coach I was going to get a drink at the vending machine in the hallway outside the gym, and here I’ve been the whole time in Oslo performing a small miracle for one of my main supplicants here, Evald.”

In an instant, he vanished from the hot tub leaving Evald more entrenched than ever in his pagan belief system and Adams reaching for his laptop to write down the NBA scoop of the season.