So here we are, one year later, and David Beckham is strolling across the grass toward a handful of writers huddled like obedient sheep waiting to hear his every word.
It is a Beckham "availability" moment, in the words of the Galaxy, which, one year into the English midfielder's five-year-tenure in Major League Soccer, still has not quite grasped how to handle its one and only superstar.
The captain of England calls the shots, not the team that pays him $6.5 million a year to lead it to a .500 record.
And so, with the morning's training session done, Beckham approaches. He smiles. He almost always smiles. It is a tactic meant to disarm, and it invariably works. Twelve months into his MLS stay, he has yet to be asked a difficult or discomforting question.
There have been many ludicrous and simpering ones, but none that raise the hackles.
"Good morning," Beckham says, and the questions begin.
What Beckham will say this week will not differ much from anything he has said in each of the 52 previous weeks. He will be polite, he will be friendly, and he will say nothing that is even remotely controversial.
The anger that sometimes explodes on the soccer field is kept tightly under wraps in front of the media. What the video cameras, the digital recorders and the notepads get is Beckham-lite.
After 10 minutes or so of providing polite answers to the group, Beckham goes off to play a little one-on-one soccer with son Romeo, and the pair then leave the field by hitching a ride on the equipment cart -- Beckham stretched out across a bag of balls and cones, 5-year-old Romeo riding shotgun.
It would make a good photograph, but there is no photographer there, only a handful of writers staring bleakly down at some sparse and not especially interesting notes.
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Moving the attendance meter
Tim Leiweke is on the telephone, and the man who helped engineer Beckham's 2007 move from Real Madrid to the Galaxy is ready to take on the world.
Suggestions from some media quarters that the Beckham buzz has evaporated and that his impact on the sport in the U.S. has been minimal are met with withering scorn.
"To me, that is an indication that they do not know what they are talking about," says Leiweke, the chief executive of AEG, which counts the Galaxy among its many holdings.
