OBJ must learn LT’s cure

The reaction this week to Odell Beckham Jr. was basically that he’d exhibited all of the qualities of a dog except loyalty, at least to his own team. The attendant reaction, with both predictable and perfectly justified outrage, was that he had disgraced everything sacred to the Giants by acting like this kind of talented chowderhead. Who does he think he is, Lawrence Taylor?

Beckham truly is a thrilling talent. Just not the greatest talent the Giants have ever had, because Lawrence was. And Lawrence Taylor got away with so much of what he got away with across his extraordinary career because he did something that Beckham hasn’t done and might not ever do, and that means help win it all for his team.

Winning has always provided the greatest cover in the world for sketchy and downright bad behavior, especially around here, in all the sports, all the way back to Babe Ruth. The Babe won, too, won big, and in a different world the Yankees didn’t particularly care about his off-the-field excesses. And, let’s face it, nobody ever cared much about those things with Mickey Mantle, either.

Joe Namath, in so many ways, has the thinnest resume of any quarterback in the Hall of Fame, someone who in another time in pro football retired with more interceptions than touchdown passes. Doesn’t matter. He was the quarterback of the Jets team that won one of the most famous Super Bowls ever played. After guaranteeing that he would do it. You know that part of his legend, a big part, was about late nights and liking his women blonde and his Johnny Walker red.

There are no perfect equivalencies between Ruth and Mantle and Broadway Joe and OBJ, except for this one: We are always more forgiving and more tolerant — and a lot less judgmental — when our biggest stars win.

There is no question that Beckham acted like a self-absorbed idiot by lifting a leg in the end zone in Philly. But what was just as thrilling was his continued lack of self-awareness about himself and his circumstances, no matter how many one-handed catches he makes. You get away with a lot if you win. Nobody cuts you any slack if you don’t. One of these days Beckham will stop admiring himself in the mirror and figure that out.

You can go boating in Florida before the biggest pro game of your life. But when you show up on Sunday against the Packers in Lambeau, you better catch the ball when Eli Manning throws it your way.

“The SOB would win the game,” Bill Parcells once said about Lawrence Taylor. It wasn’t meant as a justification for why everybody in the organization so often seemed to look the other way on what happened with No. 56 once the game was over. It just sounded that way. Somehow Lawrence understood better than everybody else that you could get away with an awful lot of no-class, low-rent behavior, even working for one of the classiest organizations in sports, on your way to winning the Giants their first Super Bowl, then helping them win another. He was asked one time what he could do that no others who had played his position could do and said, “Drink.” You’re allowed, absolutely, to be worked up about what Beckham did in Philly. And still being hot about him being on that party boat before the Packers game. And acting like an out-of-control, and dangerous, jerk one afternoon against Josh Norman and the Carolina Panthers. And Lawrence Taylor got suspended because of cocaine between one Giants Super Bowl and the next.

Are the Giants blinded by Beckham’s talent? You know they are. Almost everybody is. But weren’t they blinded just as much by LT’s?

Obviously Beckham, even with those catches, can’t turn the Giants into a winner on his own. He can’t throw the ball to himself. But when they threw the money on the table at Lambeau last January, and Eli threw 11 balls his way, Beckham ended up with four catches and three drops, one of the drops on what would have been a touchdown for his team. In the biggest game of his life, less than a week after sunning himself in south Florida on a day off, he didn’t show up on a cold playoff Sunday in Green Bay.

Beckham deserved to hear it this week after what he did in that loss to the Eagles. Doesn’t mean he’s some kind of lost cause. Or that he shouldn’t get his money when the time comes. Or that he will never find a way to grow up. It isn’t just the Giants who convinced him that the whole world is hanging on his every move, including the dumb ones.

“Let’s go out there like a bunch of crazed dogs!” Lawrence Taylor once yelled, and famously. Who knew, all this time later, that the most talented Giant since him would take him this literally?

The rules of the road go something like this: You have to earn your right to act like an idiot in the big city. LT did. Beckham hasn’t, no matter how many highlight plays he’s made. One more rule? Try not to act like a bad dog on what’s been a dog team, at

least so far.