Unguarded

Odell Beckham Jr. has a new team, a new city, a new car. But will it be a true fresh start for OBJ, or will controversy continue to follow him? We sat down with the NFL’s electric wide receiver—and he opened up like he never has before.

- Mark Anthony Green

YOU’D THINK SUNSET BOULEVARD would be hard to impress at this point. But judging by the people scrambling for their phones and mouthing expletives as we drove by, they’d apparently never seen a Rolls-Royce quite like Odell Beckham Jr.’s before. The color, for starters, is an orange that’s somewhere between electric tangerine and Snooki. The rims, blacked out, are massive. Like, manhole-cover massive. And the sound system was loud enough to fill the Comedy Store’s lobby with Lil Baby’s “Drip Too Hard” while we waited for a light to change. But no feature on the car turned heads like the hood ornament: a chrome figurine of The Catch.

Odell refers to The Catch as though it’s a universally consequential event. Like the big bang. But in case it didn’t sear into your brain the way it did for some, he’s referring to his second-quarter reception in the New York Giants’ November 2014 Sunday Night Football game against the Dallas Cowboys. The play where Odell, levitating faceup and fully stretched out, caught the ball with less surface area of his fingertips than it takes to unlock an iPhone. The announcer called it an absolutely impossible catch. Many others would agree. The Catch might not have actually changed the world, but it changed Odell’s life. And now his life is changing all over again.