CARSON, CALIF. — This is the informal David Beckham, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, sipping on a soft drink and munching on a ham sandwich, his sore left ankle wrapped in an athletic bandage and propped up on a plastic chair.
No photos, please.
He looks not like a fashion icon, not like a star anticipating his paparazzi moment, but like a man relaxing in his own backyard.
And maybe that's the right image to explain Beckham in America, to explain why the most famous athlete in the biggest sport on the planet has chosen to relocate here, among the soccer philistines.
Related Articles
Maybe to take a break from being him. To be simply a famous guy in a place that's lousy with them rather than a national hero/scapegoat, to play a game that isn't the only one in town.
It is midafternoon Friday when we sit down to chat. Already, the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer have finished their training session, minus the celebrity who has been among them now for a week. Beckham's dodgy left ankle kept him out of practice and will keep him out of most, if not all, of Saturday's exhibition against Chelsea at the Home Depot Center. The educated guess is that he'll make a cameo appearance late in the game because the fans and the television networks demand it.
The conversation touches on his just-finished tenure with Real Madrid, on his new mission to raise soccer awareness in the United States, on the game he'll play in Toronto on Aug. 5.
"I'm looking forward to coming to Toronto," he said. "I've had many letters, many fans who wrote to me saying how excited they are about me coming there and the Galaxy coming there."
But what it comes back to in the end is home and family and a working-class Englishman's idea of the United States, or at least a working-class Englishman turned pop star's idea of a place he admires for its "passion" and "patriotism," but in which he hasn't had to bear the burden of unfulfilled soccer expectations.
"I've had a certain amount of that in Spain, in England," he said in his small, slightly high-pitched voice, with an accent that hasn't been altered to hide its origins. "I've had the positivity, I've had the negativity. And at the moment I'm enjoying the positivity of living in America. … Since we've arrived, everyone has been saying welcome home, welcome to L.A., thank you for coming to help the MLS. It's all good."
Here, it will never be life and death. Here they'll take his picture, they'll treat him as a curiosity, but they'll never wrap him in the flag for better or worse. They'll never curse him, as they did in England after he was sent off during the 1998 World Cup, and never blame him for a high-priced team's failings, as they did in Madrid.
On the flip side, there won't be a half a million people singing his name in celebration, as there were after Real won the Spanish League championship last month, and even in Los Angeles he won't exactly blend into the background. But still, he'll never be the biggest name in this town.
"I think everyone sees Hollywood and thinks of all the film stars and the glitz," Beckham said. "For me and Victoria to be living here, we're looking around thinking, god, we're living in L.A. and Hollywood's just down the road.
"We're sort of looking out our window and saying, 'Spider-Man lives there.' My wife bought the house and said here there's always an action hero somewhere near you. We laugh about that."
The Beckhams also believe that, Lindsay Lohan and a long line of other damaged Hollywood kids aside, Los Angeles is the perfect place to raise a normal family.
"We've always wanted a great place to bring up our kids, we wanted a great place to live as a family," Beckham said. "That's one of the reasons we wanted to move to L.A. We know that it's the right place for our kids to live.
"But also we always try to protect our kids away from the limelight and hopefully we can do that here. It's hard because our kids love to go to the beach, they love to go down to the park to ride their bikes, they love playing soccer on the field and we're never going to stop doing those things and we want our kids to grow up as normal as possible.
"We won't stop doing those sorts of things just because we're going to get photographed. We're a family. We're not the sort of family that are going to leave our kids at home because they're going to get photographed. We want our kids to enjoy life."
His contract here is for five years. There are some betting Beckham won't last more than a single season in a growing, entertaining but still second-rank league, so far from the soccer heartland and from his international duties for England.
But he hints that this is a move for the long term, that for all of the reasons stated above, that this may be home.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," he said.
4
