A couple of weeks ago, David Beckham was holding forth in the Galaxy locker room after a victory over the Chicago Fire when the conversation got around to the beard he was sporting.
Was it a disguise to allow him to slip into Ukraine unnoticed with the rest of England's national team?
"No," Beckham said. "I just got lazy. It'll probably be gone tomorrow."
Hair today, gone tomorrow? No way.
By the next day, it wasn't gone. The beard accompanied Beckham to Europe for England's World Cup qualifiers against Ukraine and Belarus. In fact, it caused almost as much comment as England's play.
Newspapers and their websites delighted in showing the various looks Beckham has unveiled over the years. The accompanying opinions were withering but not altogether unkind.
"It's a terrible beard," wrote the Times of London. "Almost laughably so. Scrappy, overgrown, rumpled . . . an unruly pelt that tapers far below the acceptable Adam's apple line and, unforgivably, joins up with the chest hair. A little bit Wolverine, a little bit Abraham Lincoln."
Beckham was compared to a lumberjack, a polar explorer, a backwoodsman, Che Guevara.
But even the latter was better than the comparison drawn by the Daily Mail in the spring of 2008, when the midfielder last opted for the hairy look.
"With his shaved head and flourishing beard, Beckham's new look has prompted onlookers to ask whether he has secretly joined the Taliban," the tabloid wrote.
This time around, the "quality dailies" were less unforgiving.
"There is nothing wrong with beards," wrote the Telegraph. "But they need to be cut, trimmed and as carefully nurtured as topiary; or else a long statement of hirsute superiority, as proudly sported by ZZ Top front man Billy Gibbons.
"Anything else just looks as careless as Julia Roberts forgetting to shave under her arms."
It was left to another Telegraph columnist to deliver the final verdict:
"Even in the world of soccer it rates as less nightmarish than the fungus that was once sported by U.S. star Alexi Lalas."
Magician at work
No one compared Beckham to the long-bearded Merlin, but another former Manchester United No. 7 has fallen afoul of magicians.
At least that's what Jose "Pepe" Ruz, a self-styled professional warlock from Malaga in Spain, is claiming. He wrote a letter recently to Florentino Perez, the president of Real Madrid, warning that he had been "contracted" to make sure Cristiano Ronaldo suffers a serious injury.
