At 2.20pm on Friday, more than four hours after confetti cannons and the Def
Leppard song Hello America had announced his arrival, David Beckham
completed his final interview of the day. “I’m coming to one of the largest
sporting nations in the world, there isn’t quite the same interest in
football and I want to make a difference,” he told Carrie Brown of Al
Jazeera English. The formula had worked all day.
In addition to the blanket coverage on the sports channel ESPN, Beckham
featured on Entertainment Tonight and headlined on KCAL, the local TV
station for general entertainment, one of more than 700 media outlets that
covered his official presentation by LA Galaxy at the Home Depot Center. “It
will be interesting to see how long the spotlight lasts on soccer and what
[Beckham and Galaxy] are able to do with it,” concluded KCAL’s presenter
John Ireland as Beckham walked off the pitch.
His new teammates were just returning from training and were mobbed by the
season ticket-holders still hanging around the stadium. “Is this what the
future’s like?” Landon Donovan, the Galaxy captain, asked as he found
breathing space inside the main entrance. “I can’t do this every day.” He
may have to get used to it.
As Beckham drove away in a £44,000 Cadillac Escalade car - “Someone asked me
if [the Escalade and a £55,000 black Bent-ley Cabriolet] were a gift from
Tom Cruise but, no, I bought them myself,” he insisted, smiling and still
wearing his smoky grey Burberry suit - his wife, Victoria, was preparing to
make her debut appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It went well.
“We are neighbours. You’re just a few doors down from me,” Leno pointed out.
“Last night coming home I was stopped by the police on my street. ‘Hold it
right there. Where are you going?’ a cop asked me. I said, ‘I live here. Was
there a murder? What happened? Has OJ [Simpson] been in the neigh-bourhood?’
He said, ‘No, no, nothing like that. The Beckhams are moving in’. I thought,
‘Okay, I’ll go and get a cup of soup or something’.”
Victoria, whom the LA Times have dubbed “the woman the world can’t stop
watching”, took the banter in her stride and revealed to Leno a diversionary
tactic that the couple have used to give the slip to the paparazzi. “We went
to a sex shop and bought a blow-up doll, dressed it up as me and the
paparazzi followed it for a whole day,” she said, laughing.
Her husband did not appear on the show but Leno quipped at his expense: “The
Senate announced today that they have doubled the reward for information
which could lead to the capture of Osama Bin Laden to $50m! It sounds like a
lot until you realise that we here in LA have paid $250m for David Beckham.”
Galaxy, of course, consider it money well spent. With more than 250,000
shirts sold in just two days - a total to which Victoria contributed towards
by spending $583 in the club’s store before she was whisked off for an
interview with the LA Times at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood - the
team have almost recouped the amount they will spend on Beckham’s wages in
the next five years. Tim Leiweke, president of the Anschutz Entertainment
Group which owns Galaxy, has estimated that Beckham’s presence could be
worth up to $1 billion.
“A US Premiere That Already Looks Like a Blockbuster” was the headline in
yesterday’s New York Times, whose correspondent described the glitzy
unveiling as “part crusade, part contrived spectacle, as if it had been
jointly produced by Billy Graham and World Wrestling Entertainment”. Beckham
is sure to raise interest in the sport, he wrote, while Victoria’s entrance
“in a fuchsia dress and spiked heels, if nothing else, aerated the turf”.
The comparison was made between what Beckham is attempting to accomplish and
the impact Wayne Gretzky made when he joined the LA Kings ice hockey team in
1988. “There probably wasn’t anybody in Hollywood you can imagine who wasn’t
intrigued by the whole thing,” Bruce McNall, then owner of the Kings,
recalled recently. Yet the lesson of Gretzky’s eight years with the Kings,
during which time he never got his hands on the Stanley Cup, is that his
uplifting effect on his sport did not last. “[Beckham] has his work cut out
for him,” the Times’s correspondent suggested, illustrating its point with a
quote by the actor, Richard Chamberlain, who said in a television interview:
“I’m not sure I know who he is.”
In the Boston Globe, under the headline, “The brightest star in the Galaxy”,
MLS commissioner Don Garber insisted that “soccer doesn’t need to be saved.
It is an emerging sport and is only going to continue to grow.” New England
Revolution will provide opposition to Galaxy next month and the Revolution
coach, the former Liverpool midfield player Steve Nicol, believes that
Beckham’s arrival is already having an effect. “Our average crowd is between
14,000 and 16,000 but for the game against LA Galaxy on August 12 we’re
opening the stadium up to 30,000, maybe a little more, and it should be
full,” he said. “Beckham fills stadiums and that’s what will happen
throughout MLS now that he’s in the Galaxy team. People who don’t usually
come to watch football in this country want to come and watch because he’s
playing. Certainly, that’s the reaction in Boston.”
Predictably, most of LA’s local newspapers were effusive in their coverage of
Friday’s pomp and ceremony. The Daily Breeze’s columnist, Steve Dil-beck,
wrote about Beckham “the conglomerate, the pop star” under the headline,
“Galaxy in heaven as soccer god appears”. Dilbeck’s colleague, Billy Witz,
described the Beckhams’ commute from their Beverly Hills home down the
notoriously congested 405 freeway in the morning rush hour, “an Angleino
ritual”. Beckham, in fact, had time to stop off for coffee along the route
while still arriving at Galaxy’s stadium half an hour ahead of schedule. He
met staff and his new teammates, one of whom extended his hand, identified
himself, looked Beckham straight in the eye and said: “Who are you?”
Grahame Jones, soccer correspondent for the LA Times, assembled the best of
what had been said throughout the day, which ran beneath the headline, “The
wit and wisdom of Beckham”. On the subject of hype, Beckham maintained that
away from it all “I’m a pretty normal person”. His family, he reiterated,
are his biggest priority. “Once I’ve done this in front of all these
thousands of people and in front of the world’s press, I’ll go back home and
jump in the pool with my kids,” he said. “I like to do normal things, like
shopping for myself and I drive myself everywhere rather than-someone drive
me.”
He emphasised to Galaxy beat writers that he wants to remain involved with
England for as long as he can, “to Euro 2008 and even the World Cup in
2010”. “I’m very patriotic and this is one of the things that has always
impressed me about Americans,” he said. “Every house seems to fly the Stars
and Stripes. They’re so passionate.”
On fitting into the Galaxy team, with coach Frank Yallop having indicated that
he will take up a central midfield role, Beckham was particularly
enthusiastic. “I have no concerns about it and I’m looking forward to
playing in the position,” he said. “The first time I played that position
for Manchester United was in the European Cup final and I played there for
probably the first eight months of my time at Real Madrid when I probably
played some of the best football I’ve ever played in my career.”
On Monday Beckham is scheduled to train for the first time with his new
teammates. His wife’s NBC TV special, Victoria Beckham: Coming To America,
will air in the evening but the Galaxy’s latest recruit will be “focusing on
the football”. Last Wednesday in Richmond the team were knocked out of the
US Open Cup, embarrassingly by a side not good enough to compete in MLS. In
their 12 league games this season Galaxy have won three and lost five. “The
biggest challenge will be overcoming the perceptions my teammates have of me
as a person and as a player,” he said. “They’ve read things about me and now
they’ve seen the circus but the real business is about winning games and
together that’s what we have to do.”
With Cruise in the crowd and Hollywood beckoning, “Mission Impossible” is not
a headline Beckham will want to read any time soon.
How America reported Beckham’s Galaxy launch
The New York Times Under the headline ‘A US premiere that already
looks like a blockbuster’, it wrote: ‘David Beckham began his soccer career
in the United States with a stadium reception that was part crusade, part
contrived spectacle, as if it had been jointly produced by Billy Graham and
World Wrestling Entertainment’
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno The host of the talk show, which on
Friday night featured Victoria Beckham, left, said: ‘The Senate announced
today that they have doubled the reward for information which could lead to
the capture of Osama Bin Laden to $50m! It sounds like a lot until you
realise that we here in LA have paid $250m for David Beckham’
Los Angeles Times Beckham’s arrival was splashed over the sports pages
(‘Victoria gazed adoringly at her husband…’) of his new hometown newspaper
but he was reduced to a tiny item on the paper’s front page
Fox Soccer Channel Nick Webster of the Fox Soccer Channel said: ‘This
country knows how to turn something that’s not very interesting into an
event ... I’ve covered soccer in this country for 10 years and I’ve never
seen anything close to this’
USA Today The paper hailed Beckham as a ‘soccer saviour’ on Friday but
left the story off its news pages yesterday
