Sielski: Green-Beckham gets second chance to prove what matters most to him

Around his neck Dorial Green-Beckham wore a spangled gold necklace with a pendant shaped like a dog tag. The jewelry glittered in the faint light of a near-empty locker room late Thursday night at Lincoln Financial Field. Inscribed vertically on the pendant were the all-capped letters DGB - the initials of him and his 1-year-old son, Drelyn.

Green-Beckham entered the NFL, as a second-round draft pick last year, two months before Drelyn was born. He is not the first professional athlete to commemorate new wealth, the promise of stardom, or the birth of a child with an expensive vanity purchase. And if he doesn't fulfill that promise now that he has a fresh, clean beginning with the Eagles - they acquired him in a trade with the Tennessee Titans three weeks ago - he won't be the first pro athlete to have celebrated himself and his presumptive brilliance prematurely. But then, that's the crossroads at which Green-Beckham, at 23, already finds himself.

"You can't look back, and that's one thing I'm not trying to do," he said. "Being around a good group of guys and a great coaching staff, I'm trying to let that stuff go. You can't look back at all the bad stuff that's happened to you. You've just got to do the best you can do to try to make it better."

Stuff. It's a quick catch-all term for why he's no longer in Nashville. It's not often that a wide receiver of Green-Beckham's size (6-foot-5, 237 pounds) and first-season production (32 catches, 17.2 yards per reception, four touchdowns) gets ditched for a backup offensive lineman (Dennis Kelly) to a team in need of skill-position talent and depth (the Eagles). To watch him over the two preseason games he has played with the Eagles is to see all that he's capable of. He caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Sam Bradford on a fade route in his first game, against the Indianapolis Colts, and showed off his strength and speed Thursday against the New York Jets, gaining 31 yards on two catches on short slants.

"You're just playing football," he said. "You're going back to the fundamentals. Most guys forget those little details, but that stuff is critical when it comes to, like, close games."

Just playing has never been his problem. "Obviously," Eagles receiver Jordan Matthews said, "you can tell he's a freak of nature just by looking at him." His problem has been that there has been more to him, or maybe less, than meets the eye. Two arrests for marijuana possession, an accusation that he pushed a woman down a flight of stairs, his dismissal from the University of Missouri football team - these red flags had driven up NFL teams' fears about drafting Green-Beckham and driven down his perceived value. To Green-Beckham, though, that recent past is ancient history.

"It is, because you don't have anything else that comes up," he said. "You see how long ago that was, and you say, 'What has he done since then?' For me, all that stuff has been erased. I've done everything I was supposed to do since those things happened, and everybody sees that. I have not had one person bring up my past because they're like, 'Hey, we shouldn't have to say anything to him.' "

In Tennessee, they said other things. There was no small irony in hearing Green-Beckham mention fundamentals and little details - the kinds of phrases that a player hoping to make a good impression might use - after Thursday's game. Reportedly, his inattention to those details was the reason he sank to the bottom of the Titans' wide-receivers depth chart.

"It's always a misunderstanding," he said. "They don't know what we go through as receivers, so I don't really listen to all that stuff. I just focus on what I need to do and try to be a better person each and every day."

Stuff. There's that word again. Just before the Titans traded Green-Beckham, their coach, Mike Mularkey, said of him: "He's just got to find a way to come out every day and make the plays that are called his way. That's got to be every day, and it just hasn't been that way. I'd say [he's] inconsistent still. It's bad day, good day, same thing since the very first day."

Is that the kind of stuff that he doesn't listen to?

"Stuff like that, yeah."

Will he listen to it if he hears it from Eagles coach Doug Pederson? From his new teammates? Matthews, the de facto leader of the wide-receivers group, acknowledged that "the narrative" of Green-Beckham's career paints a powerful picture of who he might be. Nevertheless, he said that he will pick and choose the appropriate moments to counsel or advise Green-Beckham, and that there have been few such moments so far.

"He's a man, and you can only treat somebody how they treat you," Matthews said. "If somebody were to deal with me based on what somebody said, then you've already started on the wrong foot. This is a new situation, a new start, and I want to give him the respect he deserves to prove himself."

The Eagles will give him that opportunity, at least for a while, because they need him. They need him for his size and his skills and that oh-so-intoxicating promise of what he might yet become. But Green-Beckham should understand that he needs this opportunity, too, maybe more than his new team does. Another worn-out welcome, another misunderstanding, and what then for him and his career? Yes, he needs this second chance to show that it's the stuff you can't buy, the stuff you can only earn, that matters more to him.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski