In an expose with GQ, Odell Beckham Jr. groused over all kinds of slights, foes and phantoms. He addressed rumors over his sexuality, his personal life and his time as a professional football player with the New York Giants. And with each spin around the celebrity fishbowl, Beckham becomes harder to take or understand or explain.
Among his musings, Beckham chided the G-Men as a losing club that had nothing going for it except, well, him. In his mind, Beckham was the brand they called Big Blue, keeping the Giants afloat, while in return they showed nothing but impatience and imprudence and, of course, blatant disrespect. He said he was the only thing worth watching on a 5-11 football club. And they thanked him by trading him without counsel, and clearly sans his consent.
The electric, eccentric wideout is slowly descending from a harmless sideshow to an emotional freak show. He is the perfect emblem of the new-age athlete, wholly talented yet quite tormented, his entire life crafted by the car wash of social media.
A more enlightened person may feel sorry for Beckham, calling him the result of the social media experiment. When each part of your life, body and mind are dissected by the tentacles of Twitter and Instagram, a lab test after which some mangled form of a human psyche pops out.
But the difference between Beckham and, say, Julio Jones -- an equally gifted and productive NFL wideout -- is that Beckham asked for this, for the fame and name and jeweler's eye of the world upon him. He wrapped his arms around his stardom and asked for more. The problem with the nouveau diva athlete is he demands universal love and then scoffs at the impossibility of it. It's not enough that Beckham has 13 million devotees on Instagram who hang on his every whim. The rest of you must love him, too. If he gets 100,000 people to like his latest post, he barks at the 50 who don't. We ignored the evidence and preamble to this and all those random bursts of emotion on the sideline that had him crying and trying to marry a kicking net.
Some of us defended Beckham's antics and salary as the inevitable adjunct of his appeal. Football is a TV show, and having Beckham on the marquee made the Giants more exciting. We could digest his act as long as it didn't overshadow his athletic splendor. But now Beckham is crossing through some portal into paranoia.
Some of his rants were stenciled with half-truths. He was indeed one of the few attractions on a Giants team that had become less attractive. But he also became more detached from it on the field. And he takes no responsibility for his role in the breakup that got him booted to Cleveland. He didn't own his cage match with Josh Norman. He didn't address those bizarre moments of dehydration that sent him scrambling into the tunnel for an IV while his team was still on the field. He didn't apologize for the spastic end zone dance that mimicked a dog doing his business on the gridiron. He saw nothing wrong with doing a TV interview griping about his employer, with Lil Wayne next to him as though the rapper were his lawyer. He also didn't mention the fact that he, the high note on a tone-deaf team, led the Giants to a 31-49 mark while he was the main attraction.
And somewhere in the middle of all this mutiny, the Giants still signed Beckham to a contract worth $90 million plus incentives, which at the time was the richest deal for a wide receiver in NFL history.
Normally you don't blame a wide receiver for a team's woes. Except Beckham told us he was the beacon on a barren roster. Normally, you don't parse a man's personal feelings. Except Beckham labors so hard to share them with us. Normally, you wish a player well when he's traded. Except Beckham won't let go, sniping at the team that drafted him, believed in him and made him a wealthy young man.
And now the NFL cognoscenti are lavishing praise upon Beckham and his new-look Browns, the trendy pick to reach the playoffs despite their twin reputations as shipwrecks. Since Beckham has so much talent, he's been given the microphone, and the stage, whenever he likes. He knows no rules because they never apply to him. And then when things go wrong, he can hide behind his endless, senseless excuses.
For the first few years of his pro career, Beckham was a star football player who loved his celebrity on the side. Now he's a celebrity who plays a little football on the side. Out of the Giants' last 32 games, Beckham started in just 14 of them. More and more, he's leaning on his reputation, not his production. Too many fans see him through the flowery prism of his breakout seasons, not his breakdowns and bitter exit from the Big Apple.
We would still like to wish him well in Cleveland. If only he would let us.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel.
