IT’S ON YOU, KID
Beckham backlash will end with more on-field brilliance
WE REALLY won’t know the impact these missed days will have for years, maybe for decades. If the Giants finish their season in Minneapolis’ U.S. Bank Stadium next February, with confetti falling from the roof and triumph filling their hearts, then the fact Odell Beckham Jr. went missing from voluntary OTAs will be little more than a footnote to all that came after.
And there will be a string of told-you-so’s cued up on Twitter.
Fans, as a rule, will tolerate a lot of things from their favorite athletes, both on and off the field. They will turn the other cheek until they are out of cheeks. They will endure, absorb, justify just about just about anything. Not showing up for work … Even when that work is voluntary …
At the top, it is important to emphasize: This is not a holdout. OTAs are voluntary, and voluntary means what it means: There is no obligation to be there. You aren’t being paid. Sure, it is a sign of good faith. It is a sign of teamfirst commitment. Eli Manning was at OTAs. If it’s good enough for Eli, shouldn’t it be good enough for his favorite receiver?
Still, this isn’t, say, Michael Strahan sitting out all but the final week of the 2007 preseason, blowing off hundred-degree two-a-days in the Albany humidity, showing up just in time for work opening week against (of course) the Cowboys in (of course) Dallas. Strahan rolled up a bundle in fines for that absence — $500,000 that was negotiated down to $200,000 — and quipped as he walked in the door, “I could lie and told you I missed this.”
And yet hardly anyone looks negatively on that time. Strahan has two things going for him:
1. He was a 14-year veteran who already had built up massive amounts of equity as a star player, and already had been a part of a Super Bowl participant.
2. The Giants won a Super Bowl at the end — a storybook finish for Strahan, one that allowed his holdout to become a part of that team’s folklore. As he has said more than once in the years since: “Maybe I should have held out more often.” Giants fans surely would have signed up for that.
Before Joe DiMaggio became a secular saint, especially among Yankees fans, he was a kid from California who New York slowly was warming up to, even as he played in the formidable shadow of Lou Gehrig.
DiMaggio earned $8,000 as a rookie in 1936 and $15,000 in ’37, when he hit .346 with 46 homers and 167 RBIs. He sought $40,000 in 1938 from Ed Barrow, the Yankees’ general manager.
“Young man,” said Barrow, as the story goes, “do you realize Gehrig only makes $43,000 a year after 13 years?”
“In that case, Mr. Barrow,” DiMaggio famously replied, “Mr. Gehrig is a very underpaid ballplayer.”
DiMaggio held out. It didn’t go well. The Yankees staged a massive PR campaign in the papers. He settled for $25,000. When he returned he was booed unmercifully at Yankee Stadium. Of course, DiMaggio ultimately became DiMaggio — “the perfect ballplayer,” according to Yogi Berra, and others. By 1941, the holdout was an afterthought. By the time he retired in ’51, it was all but erased from memory.
Whatever backlash Beckham hears now, or will hear, it will be based on the notion that he is selfish, not team-first (as opposed to financially greedy), and whether that is true or not will really mean little. He can make it all irrelevant pretty simply: have the same kind of season in Year 4 that he has had his first three. And maybe catch an extra ball or two in the playoffs.
If he does, this all will seem like the silliest kind of silly, and actually may contribute to his legacy. If he doesn’t? Well, he doesn’t have to look very far. Ask an average Jets fan about Darrelle Revis. Whatever he did as a premier corner, the Jets never won a Super Bowl and he held out on them. That is what the people remember now. Better or worse. How will it go for OBJ? That, entirely, will be up to OBJ.