SHOCK THERAPY
Beckham wise to avoid recent cautionary tale
AT HIS very best, he was the kind of freakish athlete who seemed such a vast departure from who the Giants are, and what they’ve always been. He was colorful, and he had style, and swagger, and Lord did he have talent, so much talent you sometimes wondered if there was any ceiling to his potential.
He would move seasoned football men to hyperbole.
“When he plays well, we play well as an offense, we play well as a team, and there isn’t a thing we don’t believe we can do because all of us feed off his energy,” Plaxico Burress once said of him. “Everyone sees that. Everyone in this whole league knows it. Point blank.”
And Burress was right: even opponents were moved to tint their prose a rich shade of purple. “He’s the best at his position that I’ve ever played against,” LaVar Arrington once said. “He plays with a lot of emotion, a lot of intensity, and a lot of guys going against him just can’t match it.”
But there is another quote, later in the game, a sobering quote, one that speaks of unfulfilled promise and unrealized hope, and with the perspective of time it really does strike a melancholy chord, especially if you remember just how remarkable it was to watch him when he was young, when he seemed bulletproof, when he was the kind of ascendant star New York has always sought to adopt.
It will forever brand Jeremy Shockey a cautionary tale to all players. Not just Odell Beckham Jr. But especially him.
“He brought great energy to the game every time he stepped on the field ,” John Mara said July 21, 2008, the day the Giants traded Shockey to the Saints for secondand fifth-round draft picks. “I had a couple of long conversations with Jeremy this spring and summer. From those conver- sations, it was apparent to me that a fresh start was the best thing for us and for Jeremy.”
Odell Beckham Jr. doesn’t have to follow this script. He is an extraordinary football player who’s had some bad public moments the past few weeks. He booted a ball late in the game with the Jets a few weeks ago and was lucky that brain freeze only cost his team 5 yards and not 15. He chirps too much. And Sunday, of course, he took what should have been a fascinating match up with Panthers cornerback Josh Norman and turned it into an absurd ly immature study in lack of selfcontrol. Regardless of what the Carolina players, Norman and others, may or may not have done to egg Beckham on — homophobic slurs? Some kind of strange ritual where they lug Louisville Sluggers onto the field with them pregame? Chronic chippiness? — Beckham was wrong to behave as he did, and if his suspension for Sunday’s game with the Vikings is upheld he’ll have no complaint.
But, really, from where the Giants stand, and from where Beckham stands, that’s just a microscopic slice of the problem. Beckham’s gifts as a football player may be exceedingly rare, but his behavior is not. Young athletes — hell, young writers, young lawyers, young business executives — have forever believed they are immune to consequence.
George Bernard Shaw observed, “Youth is wasted on the young,” in the first half of the last century. This is not a new concept.
In sports, the cost is enormous, because of the dollars at stake and the fact that every misstep is played out on the public stage. And the canon is thick with tales of players who learned from early mistakes, who went on to have excellent careers and lead exemplary lives. And if you’ve spent five minutes around Beckham, you know that’s clearly the path he craves for himself.
But it is also hard to forget that other erstwhile Giants star, Shockey, who seemed destined for so much greatness and never got there, who squandered his early speed and war chest of goodwill so rapidly that when the Giants won a Super Bowl in his last year here, there was much belief inside and outside the locker room that one reason why they did was an injured Shockey had been removed from the mix.
Beckham should want so much more than that from the blissful future that ought to await him. For him, there is no need to waste any portion of that career. Particularly the youthful part.