Detroit Lions receiver Kalif Raymond remembers the mantra he says he heard whereas rising up taking part in yard soccer in Georgia: You do not want gloves. Catch together with your fingers. If he dropped a go, a glove needed to come off.
“Utilizing gloves was a privilege,” Raymond says. “If I bought gloves, I higher catch the ball.”
Raymond is such a gearhead now that he spent three months earlier this season looking out the web for the mannequin of gloves he wore in highschool — the Nike Elite Remix Magnigrip. He recalled seeing a photograph of former Minnesota Vikings receiver and returner Percy Harvin sporting them and needed to have them.
“They’re in such low inventory, you’ll be able to’t even go on eBay,” says Raymond, who is predicted to return from injured reserve in time for the playoffs however will not play on “Monday Night time Soccer” when the Lions go to the San Francisco 49ers. “Like, you’ll be able to’t discover ’em wherever. However I bear in mind having these gloves once I was younger, and I liked ’em. I liked the stick.”
Raymond, a second-team All-Professional punt returner in 2022, is among the many NFL gamers who’re explicit concerning the materials, grip, match and really feel of what is on their fingers. He says he and ” deal” of wideouts spend treasured free time looking for the proper gloves — just like the mannequin Odell Beckham Jr. wore making his iconic one-handed catch a decade in the past.
“We known as ’em the Odell gloves from [2014] when ‘O’ was catching every part,” Raymond says. “Like, ‘Man, placed on the Odell gloves and also you’re good.'”
In at this time’s pass-centric NFL, Sundays are inundated with one-handed catches harking back to Beckham’s. However for as a lot because the bonds between quarterbacks and receivers are dissected, what typically goes missed is an nearly symbiotic relationship between a receiver and his gloves. Just like the late blues musician B.B. King and his trusty Gibson ES-335s, all of which he named “Lucille,” the connection is wealthy with love and care and frustration and pressure, and fixed changes within the pursuit of perceived perfection, which can or will not be attainable.
For the reason that NFL banned glue-like Stickum in 1981, gloves have advanced into receivers’ most trusted sidekicks. ESPN spoke with glove producers, tools regulators, and present and former NFL gamers, together with Lions receivers coach Antwaan Randle El, Corridor of Famers Steve Largent and Tim Brown, and Professional Bowl receiver Keenan McCardell who now coaches receivers with the Minnesota Vikings. They agreed that whereas the breadth of NFL broad receiving expertise is arguably one of the best it is ever been, OBJ-style catches are notable, partly, due to the expertise on gamers’ fingertips.
Gregg Hartley, director of the Sports activities and Health Business Affiliation’s soccer council and the vice chairman of the Nationwide Working Committee on Requirements for Athletic Tools, says technological developments merely free wideouts in an unprecedented method.
“Receivers are higher than ever: larger, stronger, quicker [and] they’re practising one-handed catches,” Hartley says. “The glove gave them that millisecond of adhesion, the place in the event that they did not have it, they in all probability would not have made that catch … however in the event you took a model and put it on a soccer area, hand out with a glove on it, it is not going to catch it. No glove is that sticky.”
Adam Thielen, a two-time Professional Bowl broad receiver previously with the Vikings and now with the Carolina Panthers, takes it a step additional.
“When you put on ’em two occasions, the third day, you discover an enormous distinction,” he says. “They don’t seem to be sticky anymore. It would not matter the corporate, they’re all the identical.”
Do they aid you catch the ball?
“Sure, typically,” he says. “However typically they’re worse than simply your naked fingers.”
The early days of Stickum
The NFL rulebook states in Rule 5, Part 4, Article 4 on “Different Prohibited Tools, Attire,” Merchandise No. 7 that the next is prohibited: “Adhesive or slippery substances on the physique, tools, or uniform of any participant; offered, nonetheless, that gamers could put on gloves with a tackified floor if such cheesy substance doesn’t adhere to the soccer or in any other case trigger dealing with issues for gamers.”
Such requirements had been borne out of the prevalence of Stickum, a honey-thick paste fabricated from paraffin wax, isopropyl alcohol and Staybelite ester resin, which gamers used to enhance their capacity to catch. (An aerosol spray Stickum additionally is offered, albeit with barely completely different elements.) The dominant Oakland Raiders groups of the Nineteen Seventies are inextricable from the sticky stuff. Corridor of Fame receiver Fred Biletnikoff was famend for caking it on his socks for straightforward reapplication. Raiders defensive again Lester Hayes used it on his solution to successful the 1980 Defensive Participant of the 12 months. Staff tools supervisor Dick Romanski spent full days after video games utilizing paint thinner and turpentine to strip Stickum residue from uniforms and helmets.
By 1981, the NFL banned the usage of Stickum — dubbed the “Lester Hayes Rule.” However even Corridor of Fame wideout Jerry Rice, whose profession started in 1985, later acknowledged secretly making use of Stickum to his gloves.
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The arrival of uber-sticky gloves did not instantly observe the ban. Early gloves had been used extra for cover than catching, like a golf glove or a batting glove, and the glove market was dominated by Neumann’s, which had been handled leather-based whose most marked utility was safety towards the chilly.
However All-Execs comparable to Rice and Inexperienced Bay’s Sterling Sharpe started setting receiving information whereas sporting gloves within the late Eighties and early Nineties.
In 1996, Jeff Beraznik, a receiver for the College of Ottawa, had a freak accident in coaching camp, struggling a hyperextended finger and torn tendons and pores and skin, requiring surgical procedure. When he recovered, his physician advised him he wanted to put on gloves, however Beraznik hadn’t ever performed with them and did not like all that had been accessible. He remembered Don Blair, a large receiver on the College of Calgary, had worn cumbersome orange gloves the yr earlier than.
“He was catching punts with one hand,” Beraznik says. “I known as the tools supervisor and mentioned, ‘What are these gloves?’ He mentioned, ‘They’re industrial gloves, utilized by glass cutters and glass handlers.’ He put me in contact with the distributor, I purchased an entire field of them, everybody laughed at me.”
By season’s finish, Beraznik says, his entire crew was sporting them for heat and their grip. After commencement, Beraznik went into actual property in Arizona, however teammates and different gamers began calling, asking him concerning the gloves.
“So I used to be like, ‘If I am going to do that, let’s examine if I could make enhancements,'” he recollects.
First simply as a passion, Beraznik began shopping for Ansell Edmont glass-cutter gloves and modifying them to make stickier soccer gloves. He despatched them to gamers and tools managers. Beraznik says quarterback Doug Flutie and brothers Raghib “Rocket” Ismail and Qadry “Missile” Ismail used them. Receivers Ed McCaffrey and Tony Martin additionally took an curiosity.
So did the NFL. As a result of the colour of the early variations was too near the colour of a soccer, Beraznik says, the league despatched a memo throughout 1997 coaching camp telling tools managers the gloves had been banned. That is when Beraznik’s firm, Cutters, was born and developed its personal sticky materials – known as C-Tack.
Hartley says, round that point, various different corporations had been making gloves with substances like Stickum. The Nationwide Federation of State Excessive College Associations approached the Sports activities and Health Business Affiliation (SFIA), a commerce affiliation, out of concern for the way sticky they had been.
“The federation says, ‘Gloves are getting uncontrolled. We will ban them until you create a cause for us to not,'” Hartley recollects. “There was a model that had been nicknamed the ‘Toyota’ gloves – so sticky, they mentioned you possibly can decide up a Toyota.”
The SFIA then created the primary commonplace for soccer gloves.
The science of stick
Eight years in the past, Hartley requested Ryan Siskey of Exponent, a California-based engineering and scientific consulting agency, if it might take a look at gloves. Exponent had beforehand evaluated helmets. Whereas the NFL is not required to adjust to SFIA rules, Hartley says the league makes use of it as a suggestion.
A possible glove has to fulfill three specs: a labeling and directions/truthful use warning; a coefficient of friction take a look at; and a peel adhesion take a look at.
“Coefficient of friction is how slippery the surfaces slide towards one another, an engineering parameter utilized in lots of mechanical engineering purposes, issues like brake pads,” says Siskey, principal of Exponent Labs. “We slide the glove materials towards a bit of standardized glass and see how a lot that coefficient of friction is.”
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In 2023, in accordance with Siskey, Exponent helped rewrite the usual take a look at for peel adhesion. “Earlier than, it was utilizing that very same standardized glass, urgent the fabric towards it below a recognized weight for an hour, flipping the glass over and the glove must fall; if it fell inside 30 seconds, it handed, if it caught, it could fail.”
Siskey says nearly all of gloves handed with out bother.
“Producers, primarily from Asia, began to permit in some variability,” he says, “so we began to stay the 2 gloves collectively, peel them aside, and measure the pressure to peel them aside.”
Glove sponsors pay a licensing price to SFIA, whose emblem seems on the accepted gloves. If a glove is deemed too sticky, changes should be made for SFIA approval.
Russ Oehmen, director of gross sales help and institutional gross sales at Saranac Gloves, a Wisconsin-based glove producer and an Adidas licensee, factors to the curing course of for gloves as accountable for the perceived stickiness.
“You will have a flat piece of fabric and apply the primary coat of white [paint], the bottom, then a bit of fabric goes via an space the place it is cured,” Oehmen says. “Consider a type of Domino’s ovens: One finish, raw, comes out cooked. We try this course of as soon as for every layer of ink. For a white-palmed glove, we’ll put 4 layers of white ink after which 4 layers of clear ink, which is what the grip is being utilized to. And the ink is silicone.”
As a decent finish on the College of Maryland, Matt Furstenburg says he was going via lots of of pairs of gloves a yr simply to maintain that new stickiness.
“I used to be like, ‘There’s bought to be a solution to make these gloves extra sturdy, extra sticky, last more,'” he says.
He says he realized that chemical engineers on the college had been engaged on a polymer derived from shrimp and crab shells. They had been testing the gel on pig pores and skin to see if it could possibly be used as a bandage for gunshot wounds.
“I used to be like, ‘Perhaps this can work for soccer,'” Furstenburg says.
They created a partnership and finally a gel and glove firm known as Grip Increase, which Furstenburg runs. The corporate’s merchandise for soccer, baseball and hockey assist improve and revitalize the stickiness of surfaces.
Put on and tear and superstition
Raymond’s hunt for the Harvin and OBJ gloves did not simply stem from nostalgia or a need to emulate. The gloves he used final season had been in extraordinarily restricted provide and his teammate, All-Professional wideout Amon-Ra St. Brown, used the identical mannequin.
“I used to be like, ‘Look, I will transfer as much as a special measurement, you want each pair you may get,'” Raymond says. “‘But when there’s one or two left over, sling ’em my means.'”
Raymond switched manufacturers this season, one other casualty within the tussle wideouts face with year-to-year, or typically day-to-day, changes in glove mannequin portions and design evolution.
“There’s all the time new research popping out — gloves or cleats within the climate,” Raymond says. “I appreciated the Odell gloves and had them in 2015 and 2016, however they do not have these gloves anymore. I am in 12 months 9 now, I might have to search out them on eBay or Amazon, or one thing like that.”
Los Angeles Chargers rookie Ladd McConkey performed quarterback when he was younger. His dad would not let him put on gloves at that place, however when he performed operating again one yr, he threw on gloves and was shocked.
“I used to be in all probability, like, 9 or 10, however I bear in mind getting them, I used to be like, ‘OK, these are fairly candy,” he says. “It is form of like a cheat code.”
McConkey did not change into a full-time receiver till he bought to the College of Georgia. This season, he’s within the high 5 in touchdowns, targets, receptions and first downs amongst NFL rookies, and set single season Chargers rookie information for receptions (77) and receiving yards (1,054). McConkey goes bare-handed on Jugs machines and gloves up for practices and video games.
“These balls will tear gloves up,” he says, “however I put on the identical [gloves] for observe all through the week, recent pair for video games.”
Thielen says a basic false impression about gloves is how straightforward it’s to catch with them. Regardless of what followers would possibly suppose, he says, gloves aren’t as sticky as you’d think about. He says he wears a brand new pair each sport and will not change until he has a drop. That is how he is executed it since highschool.
“And it is like, yeah, in very good situations, sure, they assist,” he says. “However as quickly as they get a bit moist or sweat breaks via them, they’re the other. They’re means worse. … I might fairly simply not put on gloves in any respect at that time.”
Raymond remembers a 2020 sport when he was with the Tennessee Titans, taking part in towards the Vikings, and had a number of pregame drops in a brand new pair of gloves.
“I took these off, went inside, grabbed those I might been sporting in observe all week,” he says. “They had been torn, the stitching within the finger was coming free, nevertheless it felt proper. Had among the finest video games of my profession.”
He had 118 yards — nonetheless a profession excessive — on three catches earlier than the gloves got here aside on the seams. However now he would not have to ration.
“If I bought a drop in observe that day? Gloves are executed,” he says. “Completely different coloration than I usually do and have a drop? Gloves are executed, bought to do a special coloration. Drop within the black pair? Black pair is kaput, like, I bought to put on white and blue now.”
Oehmen says when Saranac Gloves labored with Reebok, Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson and Martellus Bennett would undergo a pair of gloves each offensive collection. And a few receivers, like DeAndre Hopkins, had necessities that made supplying them tough.
“We cater to requests: thickness, supplies getting used, or a throwback glove they fell in love with in highschool,” Oehmen says. “[With Hopkins], he needed his palm extra matte than excessive gloss. And he has gigantic, 5XL fingers. It is all about participant desire, no matter they really feel comfy with. We give them as a lot consistency as potential. That is their job and profession.”
To glove or to not glove
For receivers from an earlier NFL period — a few of whom now coach within the league — gloves are a hot-button subject.
McCardell, a two-time Professional Bowl receiver who now coaches receivers for the Vikings, did not put on gloves till he bought to the NFL in 1991. UNLV’s coach and tools supervisor, he says, banned them.
“When you needed,” he says, “you possibly can carry them to observe, however throughout video games, you needed to be bare-handed.”
When he bought to the NFL, McCardell noticed his Washington teammates sporting gloves.
“The entire receivers had been sporting gloves, cool gloves,” he recollects. “Artwork Monk was sporting gloves. Gary Clark, Ricky Sanders. … At first, I used to be messing with them, like, ‘Man, y’all want to make use of your fingers.’ They usually simply checked out me like, ‘Yo, you simply getting right here. What are you speaking about?’ After which I placed on a pair, and, like I mentioned, it was like, ‘Man, that is dishonest.'”
Randle El, Raymond’s broad receivers coach in Detroit, did not put on gloves till he reached the NFL, both — after he as soon as caught the laces and break up his hand open.
“I’d tape my fingers up, bought uninterested in doing that,” he says. “I discovered the absolute best gloves and, for me on the time, that was Neumann. Did not matter how chilly or scorching it was, if it was raining. They had been good, I believe they’d nonetheless be good at this time.”
Tim Brown and Steve Largent had been anti-glove of their taking part in days.
Largent, who performed for Tulsa, says he would not have been capable of afford faculty and not using a scholarship. Thus, like most NFL broad receivers, his fingers had been his livelihood. Although Largent’s NFL profession started in 1976, earlier than Stickum was banned, he did not use that both.
“But when I might put on gloves like that they had at this time, I’d in a heartbeat,” he says. “I by no means had a status of being a man that dropped passes — I do not know if I’d’ve caught any extra balls – nevertheless it certain makes catching a soccer simpler.”
Brown — regardless of 1,094 profession receptions, 14,934 yards and 100 receiving touchdowns — remains to be haunted by an expertise with gloves, after which he by no means wore them once more.
“Initially I did put on gloves when it was chilly,” he says. “At Notre Dame, there have been a pair video games I wore gloves, and early in my [pro] profession. … However, in 1990, after we had been taking part in the Payments, I fumbled a punt.”
He says the one cause he fumbled was the gloves.
“If you catch a punt, … you bought to slip that ball again to the locked place and, due to the gloves, it was taking me an additional break up second to do this,” he says. “If you bought these guys coming down, you do not have a break up second, proper? My rationale was: That is the explanation I fumbled the ball. In order that was the explanation I hung them up, and I by no means picked them up once more.”
Even when he began dislocating the center finger on each fingers, he simply taped them. He did not use gloves, and by no means felt like anybody had a bonus over him due to it.
“I believed some guys wanted them. … I felt like lots of guys had been hiding behind these gloves, you recognize?” he says. “If it gave them a bonus, nice for them.”
Brown mentioned gamers blamed drops on gloves.
“It is by no means them, all the time the gloves,” he says. “Effectively, I eradicated that for myself.”
Wes Welker, a five-time Professional Bowler and three-time NFL reception chief, began utilizing gloves in faculty at Texas Tech and now coaches the broad receivers in Miami.
“Both you’ve got bought the fingers,” Welker says, “or you do not.”
Serving to one-handed catches
On Halloween, New York Jets receiver Garrett Wilson backhanded a drifting Aaron Rodgers toss to the tip zone along with his proper hand, and bought a foot and shin down inbounds — nearly 10 years to the day after OBJ’s snag.
Interim Jets head coach Jeff Ulbrich mentioned the catch rivaled Beckham’s. Jets receiver Davante Adams joked that Nike would possibly have to entice Wilson away from Adidas and use him to switch Michael Jordan because the Jumpman emblem.
It is tough to quantify the scope and influence of OBJ’s three-fingered catch. However in the event you ask Riley Mahoney, senior enterprise unit director of US & Specialist Sports activities at Adidas, it is omnipresent in youth soccer. The one-handed catch has change into the last word standing image and forex for aspiring receivers.
“Social media has modified the main target and anybody can ‘go viral’ for making a one-handed catch,” he says.
Mahoney says even gamers too younger to stroll when OBJ pulled down Eli Manning’s go now develop up emulating that second in 7-on-7 tournaments.
“These are 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, four- and five-star recruits, and Odell nonetheless resonates with them,” he says. “They’re hashtagging #Odell, #OBJ; on the championships, Ja’Kayden Ferguson made arguably the catch of the yr, has over 1,000,000 views.”
Three weeks in the past, Ferguson, a four-star recruit from Texas who’d lengthy been dedicated to Kentucky, signed as an alternative with Arkansas.
“He practiced that, it is not one thing gamers do reactively, they observe it,” says Mahoney, who recollects taking his son to a College of Washington sport final yr and watching Rome Odunze — now a Chicago Bears wideout — engaged on one-handed catches at the back of the tip zone earlier than the sport.
Corporations like Adidas and Below Armour provide and take a look at tools at 7-on-7 tournaments and All-America occasions.
“If they’ve a possibility to point out, ‘I can nail this one-handed catch,’ they go for it,” says Jedd Komlos, who till not too long ago was design supervisor of equipment, tools and licensing at Below Armour.
Handing it down
Theilen is 34 now and a good distance from Division II Minnesota State, Mankato. An undrafted rookie, he had almost adopted a special profession path. There wasn’t a lot curiosity popping out of faculty, and never many NFL groups had him on their radars. Thielen nearly took a job promoting dental tools.
As he nears the tip of his twelfth yr within the league, he holds the NFL file for consecutive video games with 100 receiving yards (eight) and his 70.1% catch proportion is third all-time amongst NFL broad receivers with 900 targets.
Thielen says he isn’t too explicit about the kind of gloves he wears. He grew up sporting Cutters and would wash them to make them sticky once more. He wore Nike for his first two seasons, then Adidas for eight, and now he is again to Nike.
Regardless of his gorgeous one-handed catch towards Tampa Bay in early December, Thielen says he’s explicit about attempting to catch with two fingers. His 8-year-old son Asher has simply began taking part in flag soccer.
“, he sees the one-handers and I am like, ‘Dude, I do not observe one-handers,'” Thielen says. “‘You need not observe one-handers — if it occurs it occurs, however that is whenever you’ll begin having drops.'”
Thielen took Asher to Panthers coaching camp this season, and he made a “fairly sick” one-handed catch.
“It was a bit out of attain,” Thielen says, “and he simply naturally went for it with one hand.”
Thielen says he made a giant deal about it. He laughs, and says perhaps he should not have.
“I pumped him up about it,” Thielen says, “after which now he thinks it is, like, cool to do this.”
