From Sports Center to Sky Sports News, the remarkable grab that catapulted Odell Beckham Jr.’s into superstardom was shown across the globe. With Beckham entering a defining year amid talk of contract disputes, Gridiron revisits the story behind his breakout moment. 

They’re calling it the greatest catch in NFL history. But for Odell Beckham Jr., what happened that night against Dallas wasn’t luck. As he twisted and contorted his body, reaching his right arm far behind him to somehow pull the ball one-handed from the frigid New York sky, he knew that this was not anything special; it was nothing new. To him it was mere routine, a skill long forged on the Bayou. A catch 10 years in the making.

To understand what happened that night you have to go back to Beckham’s childhood and the gable-ended family house in Decatur, a suburb six miles north of Atlanta. It was there that the most famous hands in football were fashioned. Long hours of repetition after school, catch after catch, route after route, repeat, repeat, repeat, hands, hands, hands. “That’s all I used to say to him after every catch,” his father tells Gridiron from his office in New Orleans. “Hands, hands, hands. Sometimes in those early days he’d let the ball into his chest or it’d bounce off his arms. So I’d shout at him to catch it with his hands. And he’d be out there so long that in the end they were almost raw catching that ball.”

Odell Beckham Sr. knows a thing or two about good hands. A heavily recruited high-school running-back from Marshall High in Texas – which also produced Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A Tittle – he chose LSU over Alabama, Texas A&M and a Oklahoma State team looking to replace 1988 Heisman winner Barry Sanders. And he knew that if his son was to follow in his footsteps then preparation was key. So it came to pass that in the back garden of their house, overlooked by a small basketball hoop on a hill where the two Odells would practice free throws, the seven-year-old Beckham Jr. ran his routes and caught his passes – although back then it was two hands only. “I always made him catch it with two.” said his father. “Master that first and then move on to one hand. But he’s not very good at being mediocre so it didn’t take long for the one-handed stuff to start.”

You could say that Odell Jr. won the genetic lottery. Aside from his father’s talent, his mother, Heather Van Norman, was a high-school athletics legend, a six-time NCAA All-American who ran track for the Bayou Bengals. And even from a young age he showed off those inherited traits, the grace and explosion of a sprinter, the physicality of a football player and the hands that measure a remarkable 10ins from thumb to little finger? “I guess I’ve got to thank my mom for the long fingers,” he said during the press conference after he had become a worldwide superstar. “Her hands are maybe a half inch shorter than mine.”

But it’s one thing having hands that size, it’s another knowing how to use them, to be able to catch balls thrown at all angles at high speed and never drop a single one. “That was his goal growing up,” said his father. “Develop the hands in high-school, nurture them in college. Catch everything.” Easier said than done with cornerbacks draped all over you, which is where Beckham learned that if you can’t get both hands on the ball, then make sure you can get one. “I never thought he was showing off,” added Beckham Sr. “He just wanted to come down with the ball, by any means necessary, you know?”

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It was at Isidore Newman High School in New Orleans where Beckham first started catching the ball consistently with one hand. A private prep school, Isidore counts Peyton and Eli Manning as part of its alumni. Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, were also students there – although it’s doubtful either of them incurred the wrath of head coach Nelson Stewart for defying his wishes to catch the ball with two hands. “At first I wanted him to quit using one hand but he was so good that it was easier just to relent,” the coach reveals to Gridiron. “By his junior year, he was making so many of these catches that I just let him get on with it.” Beckham’s impact forced Stewart to change the offense from the West Coast style he utilised with Peyton 15 years earlier to a deep passing attack to suit his burgeoning superstar. “We broke every rule in the book when we let him to catch it with one hand. But I think we made the right choice.” And although Stewart admits he’s never seen Odell make a catch quite as good as the one against the Cowboys, he wasn’t surprised: “That’s just Odell. He’s a freak.”

‘The Freak’ was rated as the sixth-best receiver in the nation as a senior and, like his father, was highly recruited. However, the Beckham apple didn’t fall far from the tree, with Junior choosing LSU over Ole Miss, Oregon, Nebraska and Miami among others. But his decision had as much to do with a friendship forged at a seven-on-seven camp in Tuscaloosa during his sophomore year as any familial leanings. The relationship provided him with the emphasis to continue to hone his talent with a partner in crime every bit as driven as himself and with hands just as good: Jarvis Landry.

“We were fast friends and, right from the start, we knew we were similar in terms of our talent and what we wanted to achieve,” Landry told Gridiron from the Dolphins’ locker room ahead of their Week 13 Monday Night Football game with the Jets. “We decided that we would go to college together because we believed we could drive each other to greatness, to catches like the one he made against Dallas.”

And that’s what they did. Both played as freshman at LSU and developed into the best receiving tandem in college football. For Landry and Beckham, the challenge was to push the boundaries of their talent. To make the catch no matter what. “Oh man, I can’t remember who made the first one-handed grab but there’s been a few,” said Landry, laughing. “We used to go out late at night to make ourselves better. We’d be bored and so out we’d go. Some nights we’d break into the facility and throw, other times we’d just be in the parking lot outside where we lived, testing the limits.”

Like Beckham’s long afternoons in Decatur with his father, these sessions were all about repetition. “We’d fire a hundred balls at each other to catch two-handed, then another hundred right-hand only, then another hundred left-hand only. Then we’d do it all over again. Over and over, night after night.  It was the only way to get better, right there in the parking lot, pushing and pushing.” After LSU practices, the duo would stay behind and do more one-handed sessions for amazed teammates and coaches. “Let me tell you,” said head coach Les Miles. “It was nothing like you’ve ever seen in other players.”

Landry says there is a DVD of these sessions somewhere. “Oh it exists. I think Coach [Frank] Wilson has it. It’s like eight or nine minutes of total freakishness. Just the two of us, all one-hand stuff.” But this wasn’t just limited to practice; Beckham would make the ridiculous seem routine in games as well. He would regularly field kick-offs one-handed – against Georgia and UAB, for example – and, in last year’s Outback Bowl against Iowa, he caught a deep ball down the right sideline with his right hand, full stretch in mid-air – a grab his father says was similar to the one against the Cowboys. “That Iowa grab was incredible, insane. It was one for the ages. But maybe the Dallas one was better.”

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Odell Sr. was at MetLife Stadium that night in Week 12 – row 46, section 106 – and ‘The Catch’ happened right in front of him. He’s witnessed hundreds of his son’s one-handed snags from back gardens in Georgia to Tiger Stadium and beyond that even his latest effort feels normal. “I’ve seen so many that it’s become kind of routine for me. I mean, I felt 10ft tall when he pulled it in, but I expect that out of him now.”

And that’s the point. The surprise is there’s no surprise. To those who didn’t know, it was the greatest catch in NFL history. To those who did, it was just a catch, 10 years in the making. “We were walking through the airport when it flashed across the screen,” said Landry. “I wanted to scream. But I’ve seen him make that grab so many times. It was nothing new to me.”