What Is Beckham?

"David Beckham's not here just to play soccer," said David Flores, who wore an England jersey and made a five-hour drive from San Antonio with two friends. "He's here to sell the league. He should have come with the team just to wave to the crowd and everybody would have understood."

"I understand why he's not playing," Jessica [Anderson] said. "But he's making $250 million to be an ambassador. Why can't he sit on the bench?"
- LA Daily News, 7.31.07 (LINK)

Not to get all existentialist on you, but what is David Beckham? A player? A commodity? Or, as Jessica Anderson put it, an ambassador? Just to throw out two answers to those questions, along with another question: not yet; yes; and, well, should he be?

To begin, there’s a kind of genius to Jessica’s point. With the fallout continuing (even Perez Hilton is getting in on this one) after the Galaxy’s (wise) decision to let Beckham stay at home for the Los Angeles Galaxy’s Superliga tie against FC Dallas, she asks a fair question. How many people went to see FC Dallas in the same spirit as they would cruise Rodeo Drive - e.g. rubber-necking after stars? If just seeing the man is enough, what’s the harm in sitting him on the bench and letting him wave, sign autographs, etc. - even if he’s not playing?

Dammit...more questions...time to move to answers.

I think we can judge Beckham as a brand - e.g. a commodity - at this point: he has been a success, even allowing for the short-term disappointment in Dallas. And with outlets as weird as Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight helping to build the brand with a series of fluffy-happy pieces (caught another one last night; don’t ask...OK, we hadn’t switched to Jeopardy yet), that success looks set to continue. But that dives headlong into a familiar question: does that kind of press have Anna-Nicole-style stamina, or is this more of a Paula-Abdul-on-pills flash-in-the-pan?

Given how the size, and, more significantly, the nature of the hype, I’m even beginning to wonder if Beckham even have to play all that well; I mean, will people fascinated by his connection to TomKat even grok when he’s phoning it in? But, I do believe that, at some point, Beckham has to do what he’s here to do - e.g. play the game. At some point, even total ignorance of the sport among the relevant slice of the population won’t cover the fact he’s just standing and waving at the crowd. I mean, even Paris Hilton feels compelled to record a single, right? In some ways, then, I think the ambassador thing is a road traveled for only the shortest distance...and I think, with this weekend’s game in Toronto, we’re as far down there as we want to go.

Turning to the player theme, there’s something about the pressure for Beckham to play that rides the ridge of off-putting and tilts a bit to the alarming side. The day he played in the friendly against Chelsea, a shift in the kind of commodity he was occurred: he went from “brand” to slab of meat. My “mind’s ear” heard echoes of “Dance, Monkey!” That’s kind of the scary side of all this. There are times when I see how Beckham is constantly surrounded by unfamiliar humans doing interviews and photo shoots or being generally pawed, ogled and photographed by the hoi polloi, when I think he’s heard the voice telling him to dance so many times that the response is automatic. He’ll never live up to expectations, so it’s probably lucky that he won’t have to - though that assumes I’m correct on that.

Turning from Beckham “The Whatever the Hell He Is” to what he means to Major League Soccer after he’s gone, one effect already seems in place - though it’s fair to question the extent to which Beckham served as cause. Does anyone remember a year with as many new, mid- (think Juan Pablo Angel) to high- (think Blanco) interest players coming into the league? In a sense, those signings are the red blood cells of professional athletics: it’s the low of a mediocre season trumped by the high of seeing the next New Hope for changing things embodied in this forward or that midfielder. That’s what keeps people coming back: the little changes in personnel, tactics, etc. that promises, if not better things to come, something different at least. Maybe Beckham signing opened the door for all those signings. Maybe Beckham’s less of a player, a commodity, or an ambassador, than he is a lure - though not in the sense I had once believed.

Then again, maybe it was the designated player rule that did all this. I mean, look at all the friggin’ green cards in this league. Maybe all it took was a means of avoiding a massive pay-cut for the apparent appeal of living in the States to pay off.

Any thoughts on this?

Superliga: WTF!?

Has the "watch it live on MLSnet.com" thing worked out for anyone when it comes to Superliga? I have looked for every friggin' game to this point and cannot, for the life of me, figure out where the hell to go.

To given an example, there's this impressive banner on one side of this web-page that reads, "Watch every Superliga match LIVE [ed. - and it's glowing] exclusively on Telefutura and MLSnet.com." So, I click the little yellow "Watch Now!" button and - poof! - there I am on the extremely subpar Superliga site, which is dotted with old highlight reels and nothing I'm seeing that would allow for live viewing.

So...um....help? How and where do I go to make the live feed work? I'm not having much luck, any in fact. I'd go so far as to say I'm feeling like an FC Dallas "acquaintance," who bought higher-priced tickets to tonight's Superliga game just for the privilege of seeing the empty space on the LA Galaxy bench where David Beckham would have placed those golden cheeks in a kinder world.

(########)

First, Live Beckham Shirt Sighting

I know I'm supposed to be on hiatus, but something unique prompted a quick check-in.

Last night, while attending the Hillsboro, Oregon Tuesday Farmer's Market, I spotted my first David Beckham LA Galaxy jersey. Not that interesting, one might say, but the context is significant. To begin, when one sees a soccer shirt in Hillsboro, it will be a Mexican club teams 80 times out of 100; 19 times out of 100, it will be a Mexican National team jersey; I once saw someone wearing a generic Chicago Fire jersey, which resulted in a day-long meditation on how the hell such things happen. The crucial thing is, Mexican clubs rule Hillsboro; you may get Euro clubs' jerseys in Portland, but not in Hillsboro.

The second point of interest was the person wearing it and where she chose to wear it. The girl in question was a high school student, a white, "chunky-athletic" brunette whose general appearance suggested neither nerd nor princess; more accurately, she looked determinedly normal, as in she didn't have the appearance of one looking to set high-risk trends. And that brings us to the occasion: the Tuesday market is kind of Hillsboro's "big night out." The place is crawling with packs of teenagers, out on the town to see and be seen.

Here's how I put it all together: a young girl gets dressed up to go hang out with her friends in a decidedly high-traffic area, and one crawling with her peers; given that, she must, on some level, think a Beckham jersey is cool. Whether her statement was love of the game (doubtful), love of the player (more likely), or love of the shirt as an accessory, someone out my way thinks this whole Beckham-thing is pretty hip.

I call that evidence that the whole master-plan continues to work as intended....so far at least....

(##########)

A Loose Definition of Evil

With a hat-tip to The Offside Rules, I give you...evil!

(#########)

Of SJ (congrats, I think) & LA

I'm sure everyone who cares enough has posted about Major League Soccer (MLS) returning to San Jose for 2008 - and that's good for a lot of reasons, as laid out by Ian Plenderleith in his space on USSoccerplayers.com. You can also get a pretty good "wise-guy" background on how this all came together - most notably, the waiver of the soccer-stadium clause - from Jonah Freedman's latest for Sports Illustrated. (Whoops...second latest; the a-hole turned out something on John Terry that, no doubt, doesn't interest me; and "wise-guy" is a compliment.)

Count me thrilled with the league getting to 14 teams, welcome back San Jose (you're coming to Portland for the Open Cup), and all that, but one notion that kept recurring in San Jose area write-ups on the deal (like this one) appears in the discussions of where a San Jose team will play until they get their stadium built:

"Instead, the source said, the team will divide its 15 home games between two sites - McAfee Coliseum in Oakland for top-caliber foes such as the Los Angeles Galaxy with icon David Beckham, and a smaller facility for more routine opponents."

Did the parts in bold have anyone else squinting their eyes and saying, "suck what, now?" Beckham-mania will wear off at some point - a point before San Jose finishes their stadium, I'm guessing - which makes it worth examining that word "top-caliber" currently being applied to the Galaxy. Turning to last night and LA's first game in the World Series of Inanity and Profit, here are some descriptive passages:

"It's not good," [LA Galaxy head coach Frank Yallop] said. "It's not good. I think we were very nervous, to be quite honest. I think we were very — how can I say it? — scared to get on the ball and scared to make a mistake."

[SNIP]

"Former Galaxy player Mauricio Cienfuegos, who was a midfield key in the days when the Galaxy threw fear into the opposition, said it appeared that the current team has no heart.

[SNIP]

"The Galaxy players, with Beckham in the room, were told in no uncertain terms what Yallop thought of their performance. The offense was virtually nonexistent and the defense was stumbling blindly in the dark."

[SNIP]

"The heart and the desire and the determination should be there every game and it just wasn't tonight," [Galaxy midfielder Kyle] Martino said. "Everyone needs to go home and kind of look in the mirror and really do some soul-searching."

If this were a unusually poor performance, well, that'd be something. But go back and read what was said by various LA players and officials after the losses to Columbus and the Richmond Kickers and you'll see familiar themes; hell, the Martino quote matches something Landon Donovan said after the Kickers' loss almost verbatim. Sucking looks like the steady state for this bunch. Doesn't the appellation "super club" take more than Alexi Lalas' blessing?

Am I bitter? No. I'm a little nervous is all. The league put a lot of eggs in the Beckham basket and the current Galaxy team is like a slop of horse manure amid all the dyed eggs and chocolate bunnies.

I Hate Beckham for Making Me Write This

“What I am saying is that the [David Beckham] media blitz is going to bring new meaning to the term overkill.”
- Ives Galarcep, Soccer by Ives, 07.13.07

That’s precisely what has me feeling a bit of ambivalence about adding to the frenzy - and that goes double with Posh in tow, who, the more I see of her, gives the impression that we’ve imported a second Paris Hilton...as if the first one wasn’t enough (I mean, look at her hamming in the damned silly photo on Galarcep’s post; I’m embarrassed for her). ESPN’s “front page” alone (which, sadly, will be gone by the end of the weekend at the latest) carries an image sufficiently over-the-top to tip my lunch “over-the-top” of my throat.

There’s good stuff and bad being written about Beckham’s arrival, some welcoming, some worried, and all shades of opinion in between. I’ll spare you from the jottings of soccer-hating meatheads, who predict this will be still another flash in the pan; they won’t admit defeat if the MLS Players’ Union bought the goddamn NFL and made them grounds-keepers at the local soccer-specific. But a guy named John Smallwood wrote an intelligent deflation of the Beckham hype for the Philadelphia Enquirer; contrary opinions defending Beckham the player, as well as Beckham the commodity, are pretty easy to come by, though. Hell, you can even find man-on-the-street quotes saying Beckham will be the Galaxy’s best player after Landon Donovan - which is just classic. I love my country sometimes.

With all the things being written, I have to confess that it was Frank Dell’Appa’s column for ESPN that provided the inspiration for me joining this orgy of speculation. His piece contained two of the more subtly novel talking points I’ve seen in all this; maybe that kind of clarity results when people keep asking you about what you think of Beckham's arrival. First, from the business perspective, Dell’Appa writes:

“Several high-powered potential investors are watching MLS closely, and some will be in Commerce City when the MLS All-Star team meets Celtic on Thursday. Their names are not Tom Cruise, but these are people whose transactions are found in the financial sections of newspapers, the ones who make most of their moves behind the scenes. And they are intrigued by MLS' possibilities.”

We all know about the people looking into buying Chicago, but it's the choice of the word “several” that catches the eye in that it implies still more people are looking. The news on the Chicago sale is interesting enough (are they investing to make home money or merely diversifying for shits-and-giggles?), but hints of wider interest are something else again. Without names being attached to teams, Dell’Appa’s assertion just kind of hangs there, to be sure, but that kind of talk gets one daydreaming.

But it was something Dell’Appa said about Beckham the player that really struck me, something I hadn’t, in all the months of thinking and reading about this, properly considered:

“And if Beckham stumbles, unable to cruise through an MLS opponent's tough tackling, barbed-wire midfield, it could reflect well on the league's level of play. Either way, people will be watching the league, analyzing it, regarding U.S. soccer on its own terms.”

For all the scenarios I considered in which Beckham flopped, this little upside never occurred to me. Beckham flopping could actually be a good thing? Well, don’t that beat all...

What do I think of all this? As someone who has followed soccer in the States since the early 1990s, I can safely say the scale and - this is crucial - the durability of the Beckham hype is like nothing I’ve seen before; the only thing that came close was the warm, fuzzy, yet brief embrace of the U.S. Women’s after the 1999 Women’s World Cup. I have to say that I don’t know that I like all this attention. Maybe it’s only because we have to hear Rob Stone say “Beckham” twelve times a minute, as he did in last night’s Primetime game; that was fucking ridiculous and I sincerely hope it never happens again. Then again, maybe it’s only because all this attention and all this hoopla surrounds just one player; maybe if the elevated chatter talked about the league, or even soccer, as a whole, I wouldn’t mind so much.

Whatever I think, it’s happening. And it’s not like I’m going to stop watching to get away from the hype. I mean, I’m going to watch the (damned) World Series of Soccer, whoops, Football next weekend just to see what Beckham looks like. So, try as I may, I’m clearly not immune. Off we go into the Wild Brit Yonder, right?

Finally - and I feel like an a-hole for burying this, ‘cause it made me laugh out loud when I read it - Laurie, from the inimitable LA Galaxy Offside, wrote up her thoughts after taking in the televised screening of Beckham’s Big Reveal. It’s full of good stuff - so, do go read the whole thing - but none of them topped this passage, which described the comments offered by LA Galaxy GM Alexi Lalas:

“– Lalas thanks the team, the “Galaxy family.” Because hell, yeah, I know I sell off my kids and buy new ones when they start to bore me.”

And, with that, I’ll anxiously wait to see what Beckham can do on Major League Soccer’s fields.

Beckham Watch and Self-Esteem

This won't make sense to future visitors to this site, but, if you're read this within 3 days, 17 hours, 31 minutes, and 26...wait, 25....24 seconds of me posting this, you'll see the "Countdown to David Beckham's Arrival" on MLSnet.com.

I have to say that the whole Beckham-Watch thing depresses me a little. 11 years of history ain't a lot, but it's something. It's not like we were all sitting here in the corner waiting till the cute boy noticed us. Are we teenage girls? Teenage girls who just cleared up a wicked acne problem and finally got the boobs the rest of our peers picked up in 8th grade?*

No, dammit! We're attractive, intelligent young women with plenty to offer any guy smart enough notice. So let's start acting like it....dammit!

(* Look, if you're offended by the gender thing - and I don't think anyone will be, but...anyway - I went that way 'cause Beckham's a guy and all that. The boy's version would be something like, "Pizza-faced teenage boys with a sunken chest, bucked-teeth, one undescended testicle, and patchy facial hair alarmingly at odds with a pubic region that looks like the Wilds of the Amazon.")

(########)

Bonuses Better than Beckham?

Before getting to the point of this post, I want to make one thing clear: YES, I know that Beckham's signing with Major League Soccer (MLS) represents a unique shot at raising the league's profile as never before and that that shot has already paid some fairly clear dividends. (The open question, though, is one of the permanence of this raised profile). Put another way, I'm not trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison with what follows.

And here that is...

About halfway through his return to the syndicated column world, Jimmy Conrad, of Wizards, radio, and online jibberish-fame, poses a serious question about the best way to build the game in this country:

"There are other ways to make this work. We could invest our resources into gambling, display our love in Las Vegas, and take advantage of a growing addiction for many people. Or we could use the money already promised to the Chosen One [ed. - yep, that's Beckham] to spread the wealth with per game bonuses for each player. If we put a meaningful amount on each result ($1,500 a win, $500 a tie per player, and prorate the net sum by playing time, being on the roster, etc.), then the level of play in practices and, more importantly, games, would vastly improve.

Without digging into the absolute truth or falsity of this statement - for example, one could argue that more money to the same caliber players won't result in meaningful change - I think it can be safely posited that once Beckham's playing days in MLS come and go, the concept Conrad lays out here should be kept in mind at the very least. If nothing else, some attention should be directed to noticing any unforeseen impacts the current, rather severe if sharply focused, wage gaps might produce.

On a personal note, this is the first time I've used "David Beckham" as a label for a post...remarkable.

(########)