LOS ANGELES -- It's my job to write about the entertainment world of television. Every two years or so, I write about soccer. Rarely do the two areas meet. But now they have and here I am, in the centre of the entertainment world.
Los Angeles is a company town. The company is the Hollywood entertainment racket.
In this town, because it's Hollywood's town, a person can be paid for celebrity, not for performance. That is the tragedy and the pragmatic reality of David Beckham's $250-million (U.S.) deal to join the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer.
It's a tragedy because this mad, money-fuelled adventure will probably end in tears, bankruptcy or both. Beckham is not going to truly elevate soccer in the United States. What will happen is a Beckham-inspired blip of interest in American soccer. Beckham can bring hoopla, but he can't win hearts. He can't change a culture.
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Sure, Beckham is going to sell season tickets for many MLS teams and sell a lot of replica shirts for the Galaxy. But soccer is a cult sport here and has nothing near the financial power, or powerful emotional grip on the American imagination, that baseball, basketball and football have.
American culture is steeped in its own sports and the ethos of those sports. Sports heroism, both on TV and in the movies, and in ordinary life in towns and cities across the United States, is defined on baseball diamonds, football fields and basketball courts. Soccer is an outsider sport, a thing for kids, immigrants and progressive weirdos.
This company town churns out movies and TV series about the traditional sports -- brave high-school football heroes, stubborn college basketball coaches and professional baseball players making a comeback -- and almost never makes a soccer movie. Those movies sell familiarity and comfort to Americans, reaffirming core, traditional values. Soccer has no part in these values. To follow the traditional sports here is to be patriotic. Those who follow soccer arouse amusement and sometimes contempt because they are rejecting traditional American values. In traditional American sports, the hero is ultra-American, low-key macho, stoic and strong. Beckham is famous, foreign and feminine.
The situation is also a tragedy because Beckham is only 31 and far from the end of his top-level playing days in Europe. Although dropped from England's team and struggling to start games for Real Madrid, those situations have more to do with external issues and management power struggles than Beckham's skill and ability. He still has oodles of both. In the United States, he'll be playing beneath his level.
Down here, only one thing tickles the media about Beckham's decision to join the Galaxy -- the celebrity factor. The story was front-page news. But, tellingly, almost every picture of Beckham in the local papers showed him with his wife, the former Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham. In Hollywood, Beckham's move to the Galaxy is seen as another celebrity-age deal. Just as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt became Brangelina, the new star couple will probably become known as Becktoria. That's showbiz.
On Friday, when Joan Rivers was the host of a breakfast bash for TV critics here, she was asked what she thought about the imminent arrival of Beckham. Rivers's professional life is entirely dependent on knowing and celebrating Hollywood celebrity. She acknowledged she knew who Beckham is and said she was really interested in his wife, whom she called Posh because "his wife is really into shopping."
On the morning show on KTLA, a TV channel here, Beckham coverage was gushing. Footage of that glorious goal he scored for England against Greece in a World Cup qualifying game was shown. Nobody mentioned -- they wouldn't know -- that it was a once-in-a-lifetime goal and unlikely to be repeated for the Galaxy. As the camera lingered on Beckham, the female anchor said, "Oooh, I had no idea he was that handsome." And her sidekick gushed, "And his wife is Posh Spice. Wow, what a couple."
Beckham has said that he took advice from Tom Cruise, and the possibility of Tom Cruise at Galaxy games cheering on Beckham is being talked about. Some observers may see it as the equivalent of Wayne Gretzky arriving at the Los Angeles Kings and John Candy being at Kings games here, but it isn't the same. Gretzky was still playing against the best in the National Hockey League. Beckham won't be playing against the best in soccer.
In its page-one story about the Beckham deal, the Los Angeles Times quoted the owner of a celebrity photo agency, the owner of a trendy restaurant, a Beverly Hills real-estate agent and the editor of Hello magazine. Apart from some understandably ecstatic quotes from MLS executives, soccer didn't feature at all in the story. The angle was fame and frivolity.
The Beckham blip will be fun. But Beckham will be famous for being famous. He'll be the Paris Hilton of the American sports world -- rich, blond, beautiful, none too bright and shrewd about the matter of staying famous. He's so L.A.
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