Former New York Giants star wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. has reached much fame and fortune in his 10-year NFL career.
He has had many highs, setting several league records making spectacular plays and even winning a Super Bowl ring while exhibiting flair, headlines, and eccentricity along the way.
Now a member of the AFC powerhouse Baltimore Ravens, the 31-year-old Beckham would like to have a do-over on some of those moments, however.
One such moment of note is the infamous ‘boat trip’ escapade the week before the Giants were to face the Green Bay Packers in the 2017 Wild Card round.
Beckham and his fellow Giants wide receivers (including Victor Cruz and Sterling Shepard) took a short vacation down to Florida and documented the trip with a sunny group portrait taken on a boat.
The Giants went on to get annihilated by the Packers in the Wild Card round, 38-13. Beckham was especially flat, catching four passes for a total of 28 yards.
“When the picture came out, the energy — I’m a huge energy person … everybody around me, even in my own self, I felt like we had lost,” Beckham said during an appearance on the Punch Line Podcast, hosted by his Ravens teammate Marlon Humphrey.
From the New York Post:
“I had the best week in practice, I didn’t let it bother me, tried to dance it off … but deep down inside something had felt wrong. The attention had been shifted from the New York Giants versus the Green Bay Packers to this boat story.
“My biggest regret about all of that is that incident allowed that to happen. Not that I went and had a good time on New Year’s. It’s that I put myself in a situation where this story could be used to create a distraction from what’s really going on.”
The Giants didn’t hold the incident against Beckham as the next summer, he was inked to a five-year, $95 million contract extension with a total of $65 million in guarantees ($41 million fully guaranteed).
OBJ was subsequently traded to the Cleveland Browns in 2019 for a package of players and picks and has been a hired gun (between injuries) ever since, winning a Super Bowl with the Rams and is aiming for another with the Ravens.
