The Island Packet – This past week, David Beckham made his major league soccer debut with a team called the Los Angeles Galaxy, which was very exciting, except that it might have also been with the Los Angeles Clippers, as I’m not entirely clear on what each one does.
This is running news that has been covered in the sports and celebrity media with approximately the same degree of liveliness that you might expect if the Tiki Hut sprouted giant legs and arms and began defending itself against the condo people samurai-style, despite the fact that soccer has not been remotely popular in America since it was invented in 1975 (soccer, that is, America was of course invented in 1922).
There are people who are still befuddled by this, as a great many other things have been popular in America since 1975, including Ray Parker Jr., Teddy Ruxpin, country music and Chick-Fil-A. Yet for some reason soccer has never taken hold of the nation’s consciousness, the reason generally being that where other sports feature activity and scoring, soccer involves several hundred men who patiently kick a ball back and forth to each other for two to nine hours, and then, at the close of a typical game, all go home and have dessert, except for the hundreds of fans who have been killed in fights in the stands, which is a terrible way to go but does preclude them from knowing that they paid money to watch a tie.
I’m kidding, of course: I have nothing against soccer. In fact, I watch a lot of baseball, which is the reigning grandpappy of skull-crushingly boring sports, except, of course, when some tweaked-out acne-splattered freakshow breaks a home run record. But the fact remains that soccer is not popular here, and no amount of redirected celebrity worship will make that happen; there ain’t enough US Weeklys in the world to make it work, especially not with Lindsay Lohan running around town using up all the good paparazzi. In fact, despite his being highly famous, here is a fully comprehensive list of Things I Know About David Beckham:
1. He’s a soccer player
2. He has fantastic hair
3. According to film, he is capable of bending things, like steel beams and subway cars and human thought.
4. He is married to what is evidently a grown woman who answers to the name of Posh.
5. Posh needs a sandwich.
6. Posh has a TV show, in which cameras follow her around as she makes the tricky transition from life as an repellent talent-free celebrity in Britain to life as a repellent talent-free celebrity in L.A.
7. Posh is in the Spice Girls, a group that many writers quizzically insist on referring to as a “band,” creating an opportunity to debate which is currently less popular: the Spice Girls, major league soccer, or this weird blue lizard that keeps running around under my desk today (the lizard, it should be noted, is reasonably cute and has at least three fans in the newsroom, giving it, I think, the edge over the Spice Girls).
Now really, don’t get me wrong: I am not knocking soccer. Soccer should not be upset by its lack of popularity on the major-league level here; it keeps the sport free of stadium-naming-rights controversies and lets its players inject themselves with performance-enhancing drugs in relative peace. Nor am I saying that David Beckham should coast out his remaining years in Britain, as they eat terrible things for dinner over there. I am merely saying that the Beckham-as-superstar experiment will probably not work, and he and his wife may want to have something to fall back on. Luckily, they’re conveniently positioned for him to one day play for the Clippers.
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