Nobody who cares about football is neutral on Odell Beckham. Either you have a Beckham JR 13 jersey in your closet right now, or you give your dog a Beckham JR 13 doll to thrash on Sundays. He's a dashing, fiery superhero who gives Donnie from Metuchen funny feelings he doesn't understand, or he's a preening jackhole prick. Since we all made up our minds about Cam Newton years ago, OBJ might even be the NFL's most polarizing player right now. But in one key respect, everyone is unanimous about Beckham: Holy shit, he's good. The circus catches are a meme-y thing even your mom knows about. The streaking slant routes conjure Jerry Rice, the only wideout who made our 50 Greatest Living Athletes list. And the fear he puts in his haters that he might score at any moment, from anywhere on the field—that's real, and it never lies. —Devin Gordon
It takes guts—not to mention huge talent, stainless-steel self-confidence, and charm—for someone who's still basically just a kid to shake up the rites and rules of her sport. Until Mallory Pugh came along, skipping college and going straight to the pros was something male phenoms did. But last year, Pugh bent The Way Things Work like a perfect free kick into the upper 90. First she deferred enrollment at UCLA to play in the Under-20 World Cup; then she turned pro without playing in a college game, making Pugh, 19, only her sport's second prep to pro. At the moment, she's honing her skills in the National Women's Soccer League, so keep your eye on her and impress your friends when you call her breakout at the 2019 World Cup in France. —Sam Schube
Surfing is, in some profound way, a non-competitive sport: You contend with waves, not with one another. So it was strange when lifelong surfers and habitués of Oahu's North Shore began talking about a gangly blond adolescent Hawaii native who they said was the best in the world. How could they really know? Especially when, for years, John John Florence lost nearly every competition he entered? But then last year, he won everything there was to win, and the rest of us got our answer. There is a practical explanation for his genius—he grew up opposite Pipeline, one of the world's most terrifying waves, so now he surfs waves like it the way other kids ride bikes around their own neighborhoods—but it's also an intangible matter of style: He just looks better, and more natural, on a surfboard than anyone else who has come along. —Zach Baron
Karl-Anthony Towns isn't just the NBA's best young center. He's so absurdly skilled that “skilled” (and “best”) hardly does him justice. Just two years into his career with the Minnesota Timberwolves, still just barely north of drinking age—he turns 22 this month—KAT is already a budding all-star and the prototype for a new vanguard of big men: the muscular seven-footer who can rain threes, who can clean up the glass and push the ball up the floor himself. Towns is also blessed with a smooth, amiable charisma that is somehow never corny, giving sub-zero Minneapolis a reason to get excited for the future of its historically sub-competent franchise. The loaded Wolves are expected to make a leap this season, and if they do, one big reason will be KAT's evolution from nascent superstar to legend in the making. —Nathaniel Friedman
We know you’ve heard it before: The future of U.S. soccer is upon us. Enough promising American teenagers have crashed out from beneath the cursed crown that we know the eye-rolls are justified. But this is different. Especially since the crown just took on new weight in early October when the United States Men’s National Team crashed out of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. The USMNT’s absence from a World Cup for the first time since 1986 means Christian Pulisic—the 19-year-old Pennsylvania native and sole streak of promise during the qualification campaign—has been tasked not just with leading his country through the next calendar year but with serving as the tip of the spear of a whole-cloth revolution within the ranks of the American game. It’s an unprecedented burden. But Pulisic is like no “future of American soccer” we’ve seen before. He’s a more rapidly evolved Landon Donovan, who when streaking down the wing with the ball at his feet can at times look like (cue the eye-rolling) Lionel Messi with a better haircut. He’s already the youngest to do most things in American soccer history. And his starring role on a top-tier European club—Borussia Dortmund, currently the league leaders in Germany’s Bundesliga—means that “Das American” will have plenty of time in the global spotlight even as his countrymen sit out the World Cup cycle. There’s more at stake than ever before for the future of American soccer. But we’ve never had a player more equipped to break the bones of a failing system and build it back up in the image of his own speed, skill, and—perhaps most essentially—never-say-die American-grade grit. —Daniel Riley
For other gymnasts, competing in the era of Simone Biles must be like chopping wood next to Paul Bunyan. Her abilities are so singular, the number of distinct tasks she can perform in the air, in one second, is so preposterously high, that she'll be easier to comprehend in retrospect. Statements of basic fact about her—like that this four-foot-eight woman who wants to marry Zac Efron is the best gymnast of all time, Nadia Comăneci included—sound hyperbolic. Her moves are so advanced that the vocabulary literally does not exist for them; that's why a stupendously dangerous double midair somersault with a blind landing is called a Biles. Simone hopes to Biles again at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, and if she repeats her all-around gold, she'll be the first woman to do so since 1968. Nadia included. —Caity Weaver
Joel Embiid was already a star before he played in a single NBA game: Coming out of college, six years after he first picked up a basketball as a teenager in Cameroon, he combined the talent of a franchise-altering big man with the thirsty Twitter fingers of a boisterous seven-foot kid who drinks too many Shirley Temples. (His campaign for a date with Rihanna was one of many museum-worthy tweets.) Injuries have limited Embiid to just 31 career games so far...but man, those 31 games! He was an earthquake hitting the NBA, an instant and overwhelming force. He just looked huge out there, and he single-handedly made the piss-poor Philadelphia 76ers into a must-watch team. Then he got hurt again, which has only made him more tantalizing. Embiid seems destined to be all or nothing: He'll be one of the NBA's great what-ifs, or one of its greats, period. —Clay Skipper
Jordan Spieth seems to win big tournaments in one of two ways. Sometimes it's dramatic—a chip-in from a bunker on the first playoff hole, or a spate of mile-long putts on the back nine. But more often, he'll just slowly, systematically squeeze the will out of his foes, asphyxiating the field from wire to wire. It's almost boring, this latter habit—the steadiness, the methodical dominance, the uncanny way that, in a game of misses, he seems to miss less than anyone who's come before him. Barring a sex scandal or a prescription-drug addiction—and if Spieth seems too steady for that, well, it's not like we saw the other guy's implosion coming—he should have two-plus decades of clear skies to challenge first Tiger's record, then Jack's, all while putting his standard-issue squeeze on everyone who challenges him. —D.R.
Would you believe that the youngest, most talented rock climber in the universe is from…New York City? With all due respect to Alex Honnold—the guy who conquered El Capitan earlier this year—Ashima Shiraishi, just 16, is a human spider. She discovered climbing at age 6 in Central Park, got serious at age 7, and started bouldering—no ropes, no harness—when she was 8. In March 2016, she became the first female human of any age to climb a V15 boulder. If you don't know what that means, picture a bowling ball that's as big as a house. Now imagine climbing it. And no, you don't get one of those pickax thingies. Shiraishi didn't need one. All she needed was shoes. —Drew Magary
Whenever hockeyheads want to piss on the latest kid dubbed heir to the Great One—a.k.a. Wayne Gretzky—they call him the Next One. As in: Maybe someday, kid, but not yet. None of the Next Ones, not even Sid Crosby, have quite measured up to the O.G. G.O. But that might change with the new Next One: 20-year-old Connor McDavid. The fastest man in hockey is the youngest team captain in NHL history (wearing the C on the same Edmonton Oilers sweater Gretzky wore), a Hart Memorial Trophy winner (that's Canadian for “MVP”), and the recipient of a $100 million contract (that's American for $100 million). McDavid is also the rare prolific scorer who makes his teammates better, which is why Edmonton is now a contender for the first time since the Oilers shipped the Great One out of Canada. —Steve Marsh
This story originally appeared in the November 2017 issue with the title "The Ten Who'll Be Next."
