Detroit Lions receiver Kalif Raymond remembers the mantra he says he heard while growing up playing backyard football in Georgia: You don’t need gloves. Catch with your hands. If he dropped a pass, a glove had to come off.
“Using gloves was a privilege,” Raymond says. “If I got gloves, I better catch the ball.”
Raymond is such a gearhead now that he spent three months earlier this season searching the internet for the model of gloves he wore in high school — the Nike Elite Remix Magnigrip. He recalled seeing a photo of former Minnesota Vikings receiver and returner Percy Harvin wearing them and had to have them.
“They’re in such low stock, you can’t even go on eBay,” says Raymond, who is expected to return from injured reserve in time for the playoffs but won’t play on “Monday Night Football” when the Lions visit the San Francisco 49ers. “Like, you can’t find ’em anywhere. But I remember having those gloves when I was young, and I loved ’em. I loved the stick.”
Raymond, a second-team All-Pro punt returner in 2022, is among the NFL players who are particular about the material, grip, fit and feel of what’s on their hands. He says he and “a good deal” of wideouts spend precious free time searching for the perfect gloves — like the model Odell Beckham Jr. wore making his iconic one-handed catch a decade ago.
“We called ’em the Odell gloves from [2014] when ‘O’ was catching everything,” Raymond says. “Like, ‘Man, put on the Odell gloves and you’re good.'”
In today’s pass-centric NFL, Sundays are inundated with one-handed catches reminiscent of Beckham’s. But for as much as the bonds between quarterbacks and receivers are dissected, what often goes overlooked is an almost symbiotic relationship between a receiver and his gloves. Like the late blues musician B.B. King and his trusty Gibson ES-335s, all of which he named “Lucille,” the relationship is rich with love and care and frustration and tension, and constant adjustments in the pursuit of perceived perfection, which may or may not be attainable.
Since the NFL banned glue-like Stickum in 1981, gloves have evolved into receivers’ most trusted sidekicks. ESPN spoke with glove manufacturers, equipment regulators, and current and former NFL players, including Lions receivers coach Antwaan Randle El, Hall of Famers Steve Largent and Tim Brown, and Pro Bowl receiver Keenan McCardell who now coaches receivers with the Minnesota Vikings. They agreed that while the breadth of NFL wide receiving talent is arguably the best it’s ever been, OBJ-style catches are notable, in part, because of the technology on players’ fingertips.
Gregg Hartley, director of the Sports and Fitness Industry Association’s football council and the vice president of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, says technological advancements simply free wideouts in an unprecedented manner.
“Receivers are better than ever: bigger, stronger, faster [and] they’re practicing one-handed catches,” Hartley says. “The glove gave them that millisecond of adhesion, where if they didn’t have it, they probably wouldn’t have made that catch … but if you took a mannequin and put it on a football field, hand out with a glove on it, it’s not going to catch it. No glove is that sticky.”
Adam Thielen, a two-time Pro Bowl wide receiver formerly with the Vikings and now with the Carolina Panthers, takes it a step further.
“If you wear ’em two times, the third day, you notice a huge difference,” he says. “They’re not sticky anymore. It doesn’t matter the company, they’re all the same.”
Do they help you catch the ball?
“Yes, sometimes,” he says. “But sometimes they’re worse than just your bare hands.”
The early days of Stickum
The NFL rulebook states in Rule 5, Section 4, Article 4 on “Other Prohibited Equipment, Apparel,” Item No. 7 that the following is prohibited: “Adhesive or slippery substances on the body, equipment, or uniform of any player; provided, however, that players may wear gloves with a tackified surface if such tacky substance does not adhere to the football or otherwise cause handling problems for players.”
Such necessities were borne out of the prevalence of Stickum, a honey-thick paste made of paraffin wax, isopropyl alcohol and Staybelite ester resin, which players used to improve their ability to catch. (An aerosol spray Stickum also is available, albeit with slightly different ingredients.) The dominant Oakland Raiders teams of the 1970s are inextricable from the sticky stuff. Hall of Fame receiver Fred Biletnikoff was renowned for caking it on his socks for easy reapplication. Raiders defensive back Lester Hayes used it on his way to winning the 1980 Defensive Player of the Year. Team equipment manager Dick Romanski spent full days after games using paint thinner and turpentine to strip Stickum residue from uniforms and helmets.
By 1981, the NFL banned the use of Stickum — dubbed the “Lester Hayes Rule.” But even Hall of Fame wideout Jerry Rice, whose career began in 1985, later acknowledged secretly applying Stickum to his gloves.
The arrival of uber-sticky gloves didn’t immediately follow the ban. Early gloves were used more for protection than catching, like a golf glove or a batting glove, and the glove market was dominated by Neumann’s, which were treated leather whose most marked utility was protection against the cold.
But All-Pros such as Rice and Green Bay’s Sterling Sharpe began setting receiving records while wearing gloves in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1996, Jeff Beraznik, a receiver for the University of Ottawa, had a freak accident in training camp, suffering a hyperextended finger and torn tendons and skin, requiring surgery. When he recovered, his doctor told him he needed to wear gloves, but Beraznik hadn’t ever played with them and didn’t like any that were available. He remembered Don Blair, a wide receiver at the University of Calgary, had worn bulky orange gloves the year before.
“He was catching punts with one hand,” Beraznik says. “I called the equipment manager and said, ‘What are these gloves?’ He said, ‘They’re industrial gloves, used by glass cutters and glass handlers.’ He put me in touch with the distributor, I bought a whole box of them, everyone laughed at me.”
By season’s end, Beraznik says, his whole team was wearing them for warmth and their grip. After graduation, Beraznik went into real estate in Arizona, but teammates and other players started calling, asking him about the gloves.
“So I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, let’s see if I can make improvements,'” he recalls.
First just as a hobby, Beraznik started buying Ansell Edmont glass-cutter gloves and modifying them to make stickier football gloves. He sent them to players and equipment managers. Beraznik says quarterback Doug Flutie and brothers Raghib “Rocket” Ismail and Qadry “Missile” Ismail used them. Receivers Ed McCaffrey and Tony Martin also took an interest.
So did the NFL. Because the color of the early versions was too close to the color of a football, Beraznik says, the league sent a memo during 1997 training camp telling equipment managers the gloves were banned. That’s when Beraznik’s company, Cutters, was born and developed its own sticky material – called C-Tack.
Hartley says, around that time, a number of other companies were making gloves with substances like Stickum. The National Federation of State High School Associations approached the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), a trade association, out of concern for how sticky they were.
“The federation says, ‘Gloves are getting out of control. We’re going to ban them unless you create a reason for us not to,'” Hartley recalls. “There was a brand that had been nicknamed the ‘Toyota’ gloves – so sticky, they said you could pick up a Toyota.”
The SFIA then created the first standard for football gloves.
The science of stick
Eight years ago, Hartley asked Ryan Siskey of Exponent, a California-based engineering and scientific consulting firm, if it could test gloves. Exponent had previously evaluated helmets. While the NFL isn’t required to comply with SFIA regulations, Hartley says the league uses it as a guideline.
A potential glove has to meet three specifications: a labeling and instructions/fair use warning; a coefficient of friction test; and a peel adhesion test.
“Coefficient of friction is how slippery the surfaces slide against each other, an engineering parameter used in a lot of mechanical engineering applications, things like brake pads,” says Siskey, principal of Exponent Labs. “We slide the glove material against a piece of standardized glass and see how much that coefficient of friction is.”
In 2023, according to Siskey, Exponent helped rewrite the standard test for peel adhesion. “Before, it was using that same standardized glass, pressing the material against it under a known weight for an hour, flipping the glass over and the glove would have to fall; if it fell within 30 seconds, it passed, if it stuck, it would fail.”
Siskey says the majority of gloves passed without trouble.
“Manufacturers, mainly from Asia, started to allow in some variability,” he says, “so we started to stick the two gloves together, peel them apart, and measure the force to peel them apart.”
Glove sponsors pay a licensing fee to SFIA, whose logo appears on the approved gloves. If a glove is deemed too sticky, adjustments must be made for SFIA approval.
Russ Oehmen, director of sales support and institutional sales at Saranac Gloves, a Wisconsin-based glove manufacturer and an Adidas licensee, points to the curing process for gloves as responsible for the perceived stickiness.
“You have a flat piece of material and apply the first coat of white [paint], the base, then a piece of material goes through an area where it’s cured,” Oehmen says. “Think of one of those Domino’s ovens: One end, uncooked, comes out cooked. We do that process once for each layer of ink. For a white-palmed glove, we’ll put four layers of white ink and then four layers of clear ink, which is what the grip is being applied to. And the ink is silicone.”
As a tight end at the University of Maryland, Matt Furstenburg says he was going through hundreds of pairs of gloves a year just to keep that new stickiness.
“I was like, ‘There’s got to be a way to make these gloves more durable, more sticky, last longer,'” he says.
He says he learned that chemical engineers at the university were working on a polymer derived from shrimp and crab shells. They were testing the gel on pig skin to see if it could be used as a bandage for gunshot wounds.
“I was like, ‘Maybe this will work for football,'” Furstenburg says.
They created a partnership and eventually a gel and glove company called Grip Boost, which Furstenburg runs. The company’s products for football, baseball and hockey help enhance and revitalize the stickiness of surfaces.
Wear and tear and superstition
Raymond’s hunt for the Harvin and OBJ gloves didn’t just stem from nostalgia or a desire to emulate. The gloves he used last season were in extremely limited supply and his teammate, All-Pro wideout Amon-Ra St. Brown, used the same model.
“I was like, ‘Look, I’m going to move up to a different size, you need every pair you can get,'” Raymond says. “‘But if there’s one or two left over, sling ’em my way.'”
Raymond switched brands this season, another casualty in the tussle wideouts face with year-to-year, or sometimes day-to-day, adjustments in glove model quantities and design evolution.
“There’s always new studies coming out — gloves or cleats in the weather,” Raymond says. “I liked the Odell gloves and had them in 2015 and 2016, but they don’t have those gloves anymore. I’m in Year 9 now, I’d have to find them on eBay or Amazon, or something like that.”
Los Angeles Chargers rookie Ladd McConkey played quarterback when he was young. His dad wouldn’t let him wear gloves at that position, but when he played running back one year, he threw on gloves and was surprised.
“I was probably, like, 9 or 10, but I remember getting them, I was like, ‘OK, these are pretty sweet,” he says. “It’s kind of like a cheat code.”
McConkey didn’t become a full-time receiver until he got to the University of Georgia. This season, he is in the top five in touchdowns, targets, receptions and first downs among NFL rookies, and set single season Chargers rookie records for receptions (77) and receiving yards (1,054). McConkey goes bare-handed on Jugs machines and gloves up for practices and games.
“Those balls will tear gloves up,” he says, “but I wear the same [gloves] for practice throughout the week, fresh pair for games.”
Thielen says a fundamental misconception about gloves is how easy it is to catch with them. Despite what fans might think, he says, gloves aren’t as sticky as you’d imagine. He says he wears a new pair every game and won’t change unless he has a drop. That’s how he’s done it since high school.
“And it’s like, yeah, in very perfect conditions, yes, they help,” he says. “But as soon as they get a little wet or sweat breaks through them, they’re the opposite. They are way worse. … I’d rather just not wear gloves at all at that point.”
Raymond remembers a 2020 game when he was with the Tennessee Titans, playing against the Vikings, and had multiple pregame drops in a new pair of gloves.
“I took those off, went inside, grabbed the ones I’d been wearing in practice all week,” he says. “They were torn, the stitching in the finger was coming loose, but it felt right. Had one of the best games of my career.”
He had 118 yards — still a career high — on three catches before the gloves came apart at the seams. But now he doesn’t need to ration.
“If I got a drop in practice that day? Gloves are done,” he says. “Different color than I normally do and have a drop? Gloves are done, got to do a different color. Drop in the black pair? Black pair is kaput, like, I got to wear white and blue now.”
Oehmen says when Saranac Gloves worked with Reebok, Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson and Martellus Bennett would go through a pair of gloves every offensive series. And some receivers, like DeAndre Hopkins, had requirements that made supplying them difficult.
“We cater to requests: thickness, materials being used, or a throwback glove they fell in love with in high school,” Oehmen says. “[With Hopkins], he wanted his palm more matte than high gloss. And he has gigantic, 5XL hands. It’s all about player preference, whatever they feel comfortable with. We give them as much consistency as possible. This is their job and career.”
To glove or not to glove
For receivers from an earlier NFL era — some of whom now coach in the league — gloves are a hot-button topic.
McCardell, a two-time Pro Bowl receiver who now coaches receivers for the Vikings, didn’t wear gloves until he got to the NFL in 1991. UNLV’s coach and equipment manager, he says, banned them.
“If you wanted,” he says, “you could bring them to practice, but during games, you had to be bare-handed.”
When he got to the NFL, McCardell saw his Washington teammates wearing gloves.
“All of the receivers were wearing gloves, cool gloves,” he recalls. “Art Monk was wearing gloves. Gary Clark, Ricky Sanders. … At first, I was messing with them, like, ‘Man, y’all need to use your hands.’ And they just looked at me like, ‘Yo, you just getting here. What are you talking about?’ And then I put on a pair, and, like I said, it was like, ‘Man, this is cheating.'”
Randle El, Raymond’s wide receivers coach in Detroit, didn’t wear gloves until he reached the NFL, either — after he once caught the laces and split his hand open.
“I would tape my fingers up, got tired of doing that,” he says. “I found the best possible gloves and, for me at the time, that was Neumann. Didn’t matter how cold or hot it was, if it was raining. They were perfect, I think they would still be perfect today.”
Tim Brown and Steve Largent were anti-glove in their playing days.
Largent, who played for Tulsa, says he wouldn’t have been able to afford college without a scholarship. Thus, like most NFL wide receivers, his hands were his livelihood. Though Largent’s NFL career began in 1976, before Stickum was banned, he didn’t use that either.
“But if I could wear gloves like they had today, I would in a heartbeat,” he says. “I never had a reputation of being a guy that dropped passes — I don’t know if I would’ve caught any more balls – but it sure makes catching a football easier.”
Brown — despite 1,094 career receptions, 14,934 yards and 100 receiving touchdowns — is still haunted by an experience with gloves, after which he never wore them again.
“Initially I did wear gloves when it was cold,” he says. “At Notre Dame, there were a couple games I wore gloves, and early in my [pro] career. … But, in 1990, when we were playing the Bills, I fumbled a punt.”
He says the only reason he fumbled was the gloves.
“When you catch a punt, … you got to slide that ball back to the locked position and, because of the gloves, it was taking me an extra split second to do that,” he says. “When you got these guys coming down, you don’t have a split second, right? My rationale was: That’s the reason I fumbled the ball. So that was the reason I hung them up, and I never picked them up again.”
Even when he started dislocating the middle finger on both hands, he just taped them. He didn’t use gloves, and never felt like anyone had an advantage over him because of it.
“I thought some guys needed them. … I felt like a lot of guys were hiding behind those gloves, you know?” he says. “If it gave them an advantage, great for them.”
Brown said players blamed drops on gloves.
“It’s never them, always the gloves,” he says. “Well, I eliminated that for myself.”
Wes Welker, a five-time Pro Bowler and three-time NFL reception leader, started using gloves in college at Texas Tech and now coaches the wide receivers in Miami.
“Either you’ve got the hands,” Welker says, “or you don’t.”
Helping one-handed catches
On Halloween, New York Jets receiver Garrett Wilson backhanded a drifting Aaron Rodgers toss to the end zone with his right hand, and got a foot and shin down inbounds — almost 10 years to the day after OBJ’s snag.
Interim Jets head coach Jeff Ulbrich said the catch rivaled Beckham’s. Jets receiver Davante Adams joked that Nike might need to entice Wilson away from Adidas and use him to replace Michael Jordan as the Jumpman logo.
It’s difficult to quantify the scope and impact of OBJ’s three-fingered catch. But if you ask Riley Mahoney, senior business unit director of US & Specialist Sports at Adidas, it’s omnipresent in youth football. The one-handed catch has become the ultimate status symbol and currency for aspiring receivers.
“Social media has changed the focus and anyone can ‘go viral’ for making a one-handed catch,” he says.
Mahoney says even players too young to walk when OBJ pulled down Eli Manning’s pass now grow up emulating that moment in 7-on-7 tournaments.
“These are 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, four- and five-star recruits, and Odell still resonates with them,” he says. “They’re hashtagging #Odell, #OBJ; at the championships, Ja’Kayden Ferguson made arguably the catch of the year, has over a million views.”
Three weeks ago, Ferguson, a four-star recruit from Texas who’d long been committed to Kentucky, signed instead with Arkansas.
“He practiced that, it’s no longer something players do reactively, they practice it,” says Mahoney, who recalls taking his son to a University of Washington game last year and watching Rome Odunze — now a Chicago Bears wideout — working on one-handed catches in the back of the end zone before the game.
Companies like Adidas and Under Armour supply and test equipment at 7-on-7 tournaments and All-America events.
“If they have an opportunity to show, ‘I can nail this one-handed catch,’ they go for it,” says Jedd Komlos, who until recently was design manager of accessories, equipment and licensing at Under Armour.
Handing it down
Theilen is 34 now and a long way from Division II Minnesota State, Mankato. An undrafted rookie, he had nearly followed a different career path. There wasn’t much interest coming out of college, and not many NFL teams had him on their radars. Thielen almost took a job selling dental equipment.
As he nears the end of his 12th year in the league, he holds the NFL record for consecutive games with 100 receiving yards (eight) and his 70.1% catch percentage is third all-time among NFL wide receivers with 900 targets.
Thielen says he’s not too particular about the type of gloves he wears. He grew up wearing Cutters and would wash them to make them sticky again. He wore Nike for his first two seasons, then Adidas for eight, and now he’s back to Nike.
Despite his stunning one-handed catch against Tampa Bay in early December, Thielen says he is particular about trying to catch with two hands. His 8-year-old son Asher has just started playing flag football.
“You know, he sees the one-handers and I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t practice one-handers,'” Thielen says. “‘You don’t need to practice one-handers — if it happens it happens, but that’s when you’ll start having drops.'”
Thielen took Asher to Panthers training camp this season, and he made a “pretty sick” one-handed catch.
“It was a little out of reach,” Thielen says, “and he just naturally went for it with one hand.”
Thielen says he made a big deal about it. He laughs, and says maybe he shouldn’t have.
“I pumped him up about it,” Thielen says, “and then now he thinks it’s, like, cool to do that.”
