Odell Beckham Jr., the receiver still chasing a catch he made with three fingers

Odell Beckham Jr.

Photo: Erik Drost / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 5, 1992 Baton Rouge
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Super Bowl LVI Champion · NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year · 3× Pro Bowl · 2× Second-team All-Pro · Paul Hornung Award

Odell Beckham Jr. has spent most of his adult life being asked to be the player from one Sunday night. Falling backwards toward the corner of the end zone, a Dallas cornerback draped across him, he stretched out his right hand and pulled the ball in with three fingers. The replay made him famous before much of the league had learned to pronounce his first name, and it set a standard no career could clear twice. What makes him worth reading now is not the catch but the stubbornness that followed it. The receiver who once broke rookie records by the week is back with the team that drafted him, in the number he wore then, fighting for a handful of snaps a game and still waiting for the ball to come his way.

The athletic inheritance was obvious from the start. Beckham was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on November 5, 1992, the son of two LSU athletes. His father, Odell Beckham Sr., was a running back for the Tigers who, as a high school player in Marshall, Texas, had turned up in the pages of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. His mother, Heather Van Norman, ran on LSU relay teams that won three national championships in 1993 and later coached track and field at Nicholls State. Their son grew up playing everything. At the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans he lettered in football, basketball and track, long-jumped beyond 6.8 metres and ran the 200 metres in 22.31 seconds, and as a senior he caught 50 passes for 1,010 yards and 19 touchdowns.

Football was not his first love, though. Soccer was, and his childhood idol was David Beckham, a man with whom he shares a surname and nothing else. Club coaches who watched him as a boy suggested a tryout for a junior national team; he turned it down. The affection never faded. In the spring of 2026, weeks before the Giants called, he was coaching Showtime FC in Baller League USA, a six-a-side indoor soccer competition staged in Miami with Ronaldinho and Usain Bolt among his fellow managers.

He chose LSU over Ole Miss and Nebraska, and in three seasons in Baton Rouge he became the most versatile player in the college game. As a junior in 2013, paired with Jarvis Landry in one of the most dangerous receiving duos in the SEC, he caught 57 passes for 1,117 yards, led the conference in kickoff returns and ran a missed field goal back 109 yards for a touchdown against UAB. He won the Paul Hornung Award as the country’s most versatile player, was named a first-team All-American and left a year early. The New York Giants took him 12th overall in the 2014 draft, the third receiver selected.

A hamstring injury kept him out of the first four games of his rookie season, and he later admitted he never played that year at full health. It hardly showed. From his debut in October against Atlanta he caught 91 passes for 1,305 yards and 12 touchdowns in 12 games, and he remains the only player in NFL history to pass 1,300 receiving yards in 12 games or fewer. He strung together nine straight games of 90 yards or more, tying a record held by Michael Irvin, and on November 23, 2014, on Sunday Night Football against the Cowboys, he made the catch. The Giants lost that night, 31-28. Within two weeks his jersey was on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The league named the play its Moment of the Year, and the Associated Press named him Offensive Rookie of the Year.

Fame arrived at a speed few rookies are built to handle. Fans voted him onto the cover of Madden NFL 16, making him the youngest cover athlete in the game’s history. During Super Bowl week he caught 33 one-handed passes in a minute from Drew Brees on live television. In 2017 Nike signed him to what was reported as the largest endorsement contract ever given to an NFL player, 25 million dollars over five years. He played himself in the HBO series Ballers, appeared in music videos for Drake and Nicki Minaj, and his friendships with LeBron James and Drake became part of the story told about him.

On the field the numbers kept coming. He had 1,450 yards and 13 touchdowns in 2015, then 101 catches for 1,367 yards in 2016, the only season of his first stint in which the Giants reached the playoffs. He reached 200 career receptions faster than anyone before him and matched Lance Alworth as the quickest to 4,000 receiving yards, with three straight Pro Bowls and two second-team All-Pro selections along the way. In August 2018 the Giants made him one of the best-paid receivers in football with a five-year extension worth 95 million dollars.

The other ledger filled up just as quickly, and it is the part of his story that the highlight reels leave out. A December 2015 game against Carolina became a running feud with cornerback Josh Norman; Beckham drew three personal fouls and a one-game suspension that was upheld on appeal. After the 2016 wild-card defeat in Green Bay he punched a hole in the wall of the visiting locker room, and the Giants paid for the repairs. His body began to break too: a fractured left ankle against the Chargers ended his 2017 season after four games, and a quad injury cost him the final month of 2018. By the time New York traded him to Cleveland in March 2019, less than seven months after the extension, the conversation around him had shifted from talent to temperament, and he did not always help his own case. It is just as fair to say that the incidents most often cited fit inside a few bad weeks of a career that, when he was healthy, produced more than anyone at his position had managed at the same age. The trade brought the Giants Jabrill Peppers, Kevin Zeitler and first- and third-round picks; it did not bring them a receiver of his class.

Cleveland reunited him with Landry and expected fireworks. There was one great afternoon, 161 yards back at MetLife Stadium against the Jets, and a 1,035-yard season played through a sports hernia that required surgery in January 2020. Then, in October 2020, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee while trying to make a tackle after an interception against Cincinnati. In November 2021, after his father publicly aired his frustration on social media over how the Browns were using his son, Cleveland released him.

The Los Angeles Rams signed him days later, and the revival was immediate: five touchdowns in eight regular-season games, his first playoff touchdown against Arizona and nine catches for 113 yards in the NFC Championship Game against San Francisco. In Super Bowl LVI, on February 13, 2022, at SoFi Stadium, he caught a 17-yard pass for the game’s first touchdown. In the second quarter his knee gave way and he did not return. It was his second torn ACL in less than 16 months, and, as with the first, the opponent was Cincinnati. The Rams won 23-20. Four days later his partner, Lauren Wood, gave birth to their son.

He sat out all of 2022 to rehabilitate, returning to SoFi only to watch the Rams raise their championship banner. That November he made headlines of a different kind when an American Airlines flight from Miami to Los Angeles returned to the gate after crew members said he would not fasten his seatbelt, and Miami-Dade police escorted him off the plane. The Baltimore Ravens gave him a one-year deal for 2023 and, under head coach John Harbaugh, he caught 35 passes for 565 yards and three touchdowns, averaging 16.1 yards a catch, with a 116-yard game against the Bengals. Miami followed in 2024 and it went badly. He opened the season on the physically unable to perform list after surgery, caught nine passes for 55 yards in nine games and was waived by mutual agreement in December.

The low point came in public. In October 2025, on the podcast The Pivot, Beckham disclosed that the NFL had suspended him for six games after a test from his Miami season showed elevated testosterone. He accepted the ban and said he had never knowingly taken a performance-enhancing drug. Unsigned at the time, he did not play a down in 2025, the second full season he had lost in four years.

Harbaugh, by then head coach of the Giants, offered a way back. New York brought him in for a workout on April 20, 2026, and signed him on June 1 to a one-year contract worth about 1.3 million dollars, a fraction of what the club once paid him. Nothing was promised, and he said it was the first time in his career that making a team had not felt guaranteed. “He’s played well. He’s gotten better as camp’s gone along,” Harbaugh said at the end of August. On September 1 he made the 53-man roster and reclaimed the No. 13 he wore as a rookie. “I had those tears when I got back to the hotel after figuring out I’m gonna be here,” he said. “I have an opportunity to rewrite some of the last bit of the chapter.”

The script has not yet caught up with the sentiment. The season opener, at home against Dallas, the opponent from the catch, brought him 11 snaps in a 28-20 win. In Week 2 he was on the field for three plays of a 28-6 loss to the Rams, the franchise that gave him his ring. Against Tennessee on September 27 he played six snaps and drew his first target of the season, which fell incomplete. Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy has said the staff is trying to “slowly package him in some things,” and Harbaugh has said he wants him more involved. Beckham has not caught a pass in an NFL game since December 8, 2024, when he took a one-yard reception for Miami against the Jets. In a receiver room built around Malik Nabers, with the young Jaxson Dart at quarterback, critics have been quick to point out that a 33-year-old receiver who does not play special teams has to justify his place on Sundays, not in the locker room.

Away from the field, faith has been the steadier thread. Beckham is a Christian and was baptized in the Jordan River in the summer of 2018. His younger brother, Kordell, won the sixth season of Love Island USA in 2024. His charitable record includes 500,000 dollars from jersey sales for the 2016 Louisiana floods and 100,000 dollars for Hurricane Harvey relief the following year, and he has appeared on screen as himself, most recently in the 2023 film House Party.

Next on the calendar is Arizona at MetLife Stadium on October 4. Beckham stands at 575 regular-season catches, 7,987 receiving yards and 59 touchdowns, 13 yards short of 8,000, a round number that one ordinary afternoon would cover. Whether that afternoon comes will decide how this last chapter reads: as a farewell the Giants granted out of sentiment, or as proof that the hands behind one impossible catch still belong in the league. He has rewritten an ending once already, on a Super Bowl stage. The difference now is that he has to earn the chance to try.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Los Angeles Rams, New York Giants, Cleveland Browns, John Harbaugh, Super Bowl LVI, Odell Beckham Jr., Wide receivers