As the world’s most-watched sporting event approaches, it is ever so more clear that Britain’s real royal family lives outside London in a Hertfordshire mansion dubbed “Beckingham Palace” — replete with a king who these days sleeps alone in a special, low-oxygen tent.
This palace is the home of English soccer superstar-celebrity David Beckham, his pregnant wife, Victoria, and their son, Brooklyn. You may remember Mrs. Beckham, a.k.a. Posh Spice, as the dark-haired, ultra-tanned member of the Spice Girls. But it’s really “King Becks,” not “Queen Victoria,” who rules these days and is the source of a nation’s palpable anxiety.
Imagine Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky rolled up in a package that could have just walked off stage with ‘N Sync and you sort of have David Beckham (BECK-um). With model looks and a keen fashion sense — Beckham is the first man ever to appear on the cover of Marie Claire, the popular women’s monthly — he has revolutionized the English game with pinpoint-accurate, long-range shots and passes, and an ability to curve the ball around defenders and past goalies. There’s even a box office-busting summer Brit-flick titled “Bend It Like Beckham.”
In England, the biggest star of the world’s biggest sport has pulled off the astounding marketing trick of being in commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. When British Petroleum went looking for a frontman for an international campaign, it found that 80 percent of motorists in China, Vietnam and Thailand recognized him. Try that with a photo of Derek Jeter or Kobe Bryant. There’s even a Buddhist shrine to him in the Pariwas temple of Bangkok.
Beckham, a midfielder, earns $1.8 million in salary and about $10 million more in endorsements each year. He also plays for the most valuable sports franchise in the world, Manchester United, worth about $900 million.
Life should be pretty sweet for “Golden Balls,” as her Poshness privately calls him, especially given wealth that allowed him to order $450,000 worth of orchids for one “Beckingham Palace” soiree.
4 billion eyes on him
But with the once-every-four-years World Cup, to be played in Japan and South Korea before an estimated 2 billion television viewers worldwide, two weeks away, his situation is symbolized by his nightly travail: sleeping alone in a bone-mending, hypoxic tent that simulates air at an altitude of 15,000 feet and increases red blood cell production, the pregnant Victoria unable to join him for fear of harming their unborn child and, perhaps, jostling what must be deemed the world’s most important metatarsal bone.
You do know where the second metatarsal is, right? Second from the right along the top row of bones that run down the front of the foot.Well, rest assured, everybody here, from commodities dealers to blue-haired florists, knows because their hopes ride on Beckham, the man with the heretofore golden boot.
Beckham, 27, is not just a great player; he’s the captain of England’s national soccer team. And in a country whose psyche is marked by three dates (1918, 1945 and 1966), symbolizing the end of two world wars and its only capture of the World Cup, the possibility it can go far without him seems unlikely.
And that’s why, in an action that could live in infamy, an Argentine, Pedro Duscher, brought down Beckham during a game last month and sent him off wincing in pain with a broken metatarsal in his left foot. The national reaction was swift, the ongoing national consternation rampant.
“The sound of its snapping reverberated across the planet,” wrote former England star Gary Lineker in The Telegraph.
Heated rivalry
To add to the melodrama, England shares a rivalry with Argentina that makes the battles between the Hatfields and the McCoys seem a bit like Ping-Pong at a seniors home in Miami. The ill will peaked with the war over the Falkland Islands in the early 1980s, and fans bitterly remember the 1986 World Cup in Mexico when Argentina controversially knocked England out of the competition. Replays showed that Argentina’s Diego Maradona, whose stature back then was comparable to Beckham’s today, had scored the winning goal with an illegal use of a hand (“the hand of God,” the Argentines have since referred to the goal).
And, in the 1998 World Cup in France, Beckham became the focus of genuine hate in his own homeland after he kicked out petulantly at an Argentine player. He was sent out of the game for the foul, and the British team, minus a player, was knocked out of the competition. Angry supporters burned an effigy of the disgraced star, who stayed out of the country for a prolonged period.
It has thus been a long and remarkable journey back into the nation’s heart and an unprecedented reversal of fortune, rising from personna non grata to captain of the national squad.
Then came Wednesday, April 10, and the encounter between Beckham and Duscher. It was just a tad less than two months before England and Argentina, as fate would have it, would meet once again, this time in Sapporo, in the World Cup.
That day had already not been short of news. Bloodshed in the Middle East, the troubling collapse of the nation’s Air Traffic Control computers, a new baby for actress Elizabeth Hurley and rumblings of multibillion-dollar health-care spending increases to be announced in the government budget. But none of that really mattered the following day with the obsession over “Beckham’s foot,” a financial matter of sorts because at least one company valued its own loss of income if he missed the competition at $150 million.
This was a race against time. Medical opinion suggested a healing period of at least 6 to 10 weeks for the broken bone. England will play an important warmup against Cameroon on May 26, seven weeks after the injury, and face its first real match against Sweden on June 2. (The World Cup begins May 31 with a match between Senegal and France.)
Turning to God
Out of desperation, usually secular Brits sought spiritual assistance. Under the headline “Beck Us Pray,” the tabloid newspaper The Sun — best known for the naked lady on Page 3 each day — had a religious turn and urged readers to touch a front page picture of his foot while beseeching the almighty to mend the metatarsal. Three bishops also offered prayers. There were even appeals to more occult forces. A white witch — they’re the good sort, apparently — cast a healing spell, and spoon bender Uri Geller attempted to enlist the nation’s psychic powers in straightening out Beckham’s foot on the popular “Good Morning TV.”
One result of Beck’s international acclaim was help from unexpected corners. The Osaka Supporters Club in Japan sent 6,000 red and white origami cranes to an amused English Soccer Association, following a Japanese tradition that folding 1,000 cranes will make a wish come true. That’s how much they wanted to see Beck’s play against Nigeria as scheduled in Osaka. More orthodox offers of treatment came from Queen Elizabeth II, whose granddaughter, Zara Phillips, is a qualified physiotherapist and had nursed her boyfriend-jockey Richard Johnson’s broken leg.
We’ll never know whether supernatural intervention or the hypoxic tent fused the bones of Beckham’s left foot. Medical experts have pronounced him fit for the competition and England’s coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, kept him on the unchangeable list of England’s full squad he had to submit recently. Yet, inevitably, doubts persist.
On Friday, Beckham was training with his English mates at the training camp in Dubai, although the mega-midfield is still unable to kick with his left foot, a team official said.
The pressure’s on
During a pre-World Cup visit to the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing St., Tony Blair is said to have told a visibly limping Beckham, “Our World Cup hopes rest with you.” Picturing the punk-haired footballer, outside No. 10, The Daily Mirror was even blunter: “Win the World Cup David and you can have the [prime minister’s] job.”
England is certainly playing a high stakes game with Beckham, who now travels in a grenade-proof Mercedes. For a young man whose erratic behavior once suggested he was on his way to becoming an English Dennis Rodman — weird haircuts, wearing heavy makeup for a GQ photo shoot, being seen at Heathrow Airport in a sarong and bandana, temperamental on the field of play — the decision to make him captain was truly brave and controversial (in part because of his inconsistency and seeming immaturity) but seems to have paid off.
His skills and renewed commitment earned England a place in the final group of 32 teams, with a stunning last-minute goal against Greece in a key qualification round match, while the added responsibility seems to have matured him. But in Beckham’s absence, another young star has had a chance to shine. A fleet 22-year-old named Michael Owen, of Liverpool, led England to a convincing 4-0 win over Paraguay.
Perhaps the truth is closer to the notorious Argentine Duscher’s own assessment, shortly after the injury-inflicting tackle. “Everybody gives too much importance to the things that surround Beckham.”
Maybe. But come the World Cup, one nation’s hearts will be in its throats, worrying about a fragile metatarsal bone.
