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 Los Angeles 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” ($24.99) — 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 advisers, including the manager who’d created Beckham’s Spice girl wife Victoria’s career with the group 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.
Wahl, 34, is a senior writer and 12-year veteran of Sports Illustrated, a historic venue for literate American sportswriting, so one brings certain expectations to “The Beckham Experiment.”
They’re met — in part. One of the unfortunate attributes of a good deal of our contemporary magazine journalism is the staccato salesmanship that has infiltrated the prose.Too much of the opening reads like an extended pitch.
Still, it’s worth making one’s way through the book’s unnecessarily histrionic, occasionally irritating early going, because when Wahl relaxes into his material, his superb reportorial strengths come to the fore.
Wahl seems at his very best when he allows his love for this game to come through and when he describes Beckham in action on the pitch (as in the memorable match in which he scored his first Galaxy goal).
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