You have to give soccer star David Beckham this: His contributions to the Los Angeles Galaxy on the pitch may be negligible, but he's always good for a headline in what so often seems like the Rodney Dangerfield of professional American sports.
This week, there's been coast-to-coast publicity over Beckham's return to L.A. from Italy, where he's spent five months playing for AC Milan. In the meantime, his teammate, Landon Donovan -- America's leading native-born player -- had given an interview in which he accused the former Manchester United and Real Madrid star and British national captain of giving up on the Galaxy and not giving anything like his best effort or attention. Donovan's criticisms are contained in a book published this week -- Grant Wahl's "The Beckham Experiment: How the World's Most Famous Athlete Tried to Conquer America" -- and the two reportedly have had words over the comments and patched up their differences . . . reportedly.
Like everything else said about Beckham, who signed with the Galaxy in 2007, it has to be taken with a shaker of salt, as this sometimes annoying, but far more frequently shrewd, compelling book demonstrates. Beckham's foray into the United States was engineered by entertainment conglomerate AEG, which owns the Galaxy, and from the start the English football icon's tenure has been a story of disappointment, miscalculation, manipulation and disaster -- at least on the field, which is sort of Donovan's complaint. Beckham arrived with a first-class air cabin full of advisors, including the manager who'd created both his wife Victoria's career with the Spice Girls and "American Idol."
In essence, "The Beckham Experiment" is a detailed, carefully reported account of the carnage that occurred when the international entertainment industry's culture of celebrity collided with the essentially blue-collar ambience of American soccer.
English-language sportswriting traces its origins to William Hazlitt's 1822 article "The Fight." Hazlitt was his era's most illustrious philosopher, critic and man of letters, and his revolutionary personal account of watching a bare-knuckles prize fight not only expanded notions of the essay form, but set a high literary bar for the sporting journalism that followed. For all the cliches and hack work the sporting press since has churned out, it's remarkable how many sportswriters in succeeding generations have -- to gloss the bare-knuckle boxing phrase -- come up to literary scratch.
