Is it just me, or was there a ludicrous spectacle broadcast live on national TV last weekend? I refer, of course, to the long-awaited debut of David Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Never has a single (and apparently not very intelligent) individual allegedly rocked America since Elvis Presley in the late 1950s!
General Manager of the Galaxy Alexi Lalas – whose team finished second bottom in the league last season - declared recently that Beckham can be "bigger than Tiger". At first I took this to be a reference to an aspect of their relationship that was best left to the tabloids, until I realized Lalas was actually inferring that Beckham was perfectly capable of picking up a golf club and becoming the best player in the world. Outrageous! Further in that article, which is featured on an unofficial Beckham website, Lalas says that Beckham can be bigger than Michael Jordan, which frankly had me laughing out loud. One, Beckham’s skeleton is over twenty one years old, and if my years at Harvard Medical School taught me anything it’s that the human bone machine stops growing at that point. And two, Michael Jordan was a basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, and so is really very tall and not likely to be topped by a dimwitted Limey superstar whose wife has never read a book in her life.
The level of razzamatazz associated with this non-event, in which the great man participated for just ten minutes due to a swollen and painful ankle – I can just see the publicists, agents, and assorted Galaxy bigwigs urging the lad to take the field and at least pretend he was match-fit, despite the pain he was in – was so out of proportion to the actual significance of what was happening that I was forced to watch the entire thing, interrupting it only to walk to the kitchen for more pizza. With hot sauce, of course. And through it all, Posh was sitting in the enclosed, er, posh section of the stadium, entertaining hordes of the worst kind of Hollywood gargoyles – those that know nothing about the sport, yet see an opportunity for self-promotion inherent in it.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with the game of soccer, as so many do here in America, but I do become quite nauseous in the face of a slavering paparazzi wolfpack clustered about an injured athlete, while the Goodyear Blimp, the Governor of California, half of Hollywood, Drew Carey, and a woman who’s never read a book in her life, make a bloody great meal of the occasion on live television!
