A COUSIN’S HAIL MARY
Odell kin faces Giant odds
HE’S NOT trying to be Odell Beckham Jr. and yet everyone keeps telling Terron Beckham that that is exactly what he’s doing.
This isn’t about football (at least not yet). It’s about the other Beckham’s blond-streaked hair, the hair that Terron Beckham is about to change. For months, the muscular fitness model from Queens has heard the jokes from his friends, about how he’s trying to look like Giants star Odell Beckham, his cousin and one of the most recognizable mops of hair in football.
So in the coming days, Terron will debut a wild new ’do, one that could be an homage to two of his favorite Marvel Comics heroes, Storm and Quicksilver.
“Everybody comes to me and they’re like, ‘Why you copying off your cousin,’” he told the Daily News. “I’m like, ‘The only reason you’re saying that is because he’s more famous than me!’ So I might do gray, black and white.”
These are the things you do when you’re the cousin of one of the most famous NFL talents on the planet, but you’re trying to make your own football name as a r unning back. And t h at ’s exactly what Terron Beckham, 23, is attempting to do this spring, despite the incredibly longshot odds against an ath- lete who looks the part with a chiseled physique, but hasn’t played organized football in six years.
Terron says he barely knows his cousin, although he does speak frequently with Odell’s father, Odell Sr. He hasn’t spoken with Odell Beckham Jr. since the Giant headed to LSU, in large part because his own, less star-studded story left him worried that he’d hold the most famous Beckham back.
“When he went to LSU, it’s almost like I looked at him like I look at him now: He’s going somewhere,” Terron said. “I didn’t want to feel like, ‘he’s going to LSU, let me try to talk to him.’ And I was putting myself back, because I was upset that I wasn’t at that level.”
But on Thursday, Terron Beckham can jumpstart his bid to catch up. While the NFL descends on Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the annual Scouting Combine, Beckham will be in Indy participating in the National Scouting Combine, a smaller event for unknown prospects.
It will be his first chance to show what he can do since putting his career as a fitness personality on pause five months ago to chase NFL glory. Since then, he’s left his Queens home of three years to move into a New Jersey hotel and train daily at TEST Sports Club’s NFL Draft Academy in Martinsville, where he’s dropped to 230 pounds and focused on the nuances of the running back position.
He’s under no illusion that he will be drafted; one NFC scout told The News that he “didn’t know much about him.” Beckham is free to sign with any team as a free agent, according to TEST CEO Kevin Dunn, who has worked closely with Beckham, since he did not attend college this year. And after attracting 120,000 followers to his Instagram account with a bevy of feats of strength — including benching 225 pounds a linemen-esque 40 times — he’s hoping his jaw-dropping athleticism will prompt someone to give him at least a training camp chance.
All Beckham wants is a shot. He wasn’t even thinking about football last September, when he was wandering through the Las Vegas Convention Center just days before the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition. He noticed an Inner Armour supplement booth set up to test vertical leaps. He wound up leaping 44 inches, a figure that would have ranked third at last year’s NFL Combine, instantly catching Dunn’s eye.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Dunn said. “You don’t see things like that all the time. I’m like, this kid is special.”
“Kevin’s over there in awe,” Beckham added. “And so we had this pretty long conversation about my past and where I am now and what I did with football.”
Not that Beckham had done much with football. During his first three years at Richardson High in Texas, he had seemed like a potential star. But in his senior year, he left Texas to live with his aunt and uncle in Maryland. It was a decision he made by himself, he said, a teenager’s attempt to help his parents save money. He believes the switch in schools hurt his chances of getting recruited to a stronger program, he said. So in 2010, he landed at Division III Stevenson University in Maryland, and before the season was even done, he’d dropped off the team. “Ended up not having enough money, even with loans, to take care of my school finances,” he said. “I started slacking a bit in school, because I was dead from work. That semester got over with and I ended up leaving."
He hasn’t played football since. He moved to New York in 2013 and began building his fitness training business. Even if the NFL doesn’t come calling, Beckham expects to be playing football in 2016; a month ago, the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League invited him to training camp. Dunn called that “plan B.”
“Just go for it,” he said. “Don’t mess up. Make sure I’m on point. It’s all happening now.”