Page 6 - TalkTalk

David Beckham’s
Guide to Celebrity
It takes more than
just a pretty face
In 2004 this columnist visited a school near Basra in
southern Iraq. The affable boys seemed to know four
words of English. Two were obscenities. The other two
were “David Beckham”.
Not long before, recounts “Beckham”, a new
documentary series, the Sun newspaper claimed to
have found the only person on the planet who hadn’t
heard of Mr Beckham: a shepherd in Chad. The four-
part series on Netflix is a portal to the flighty years
around the turn of the millennium when the footballer
was in his sporting pomp. Watch closely and it is also,
for the ambitious, a handy how-to guide to becoming
a celebrity and ultimately a global brand.
It helps to be extremely good-looking. With his dirty- George Best, a Manchester United winger of another
blond mop and impish smile, Mr Beckham had a boy-
next-door charm when he hit tv screens in the mid-
1990s. Kath Phipps, a long-serving receptionist at
Manchester United, his first club, remembers all the
knickers that were sent to him (“It’s not nice, is it,
sending underwear to a boy?”). After that, as in a
time-lapse photo, the sculpted sex symbol emerges.
The tattoos spread across his torso, up his neck and
down his arms; the haircuts become jazzier, the
stubble better designed.
To bank it like Beckham, next find a beautiful and
famous spouse with an equal yen for exposure. “It
puts the heat factor way up,” Anna Wintour the boss
of Vogue, says on camera of Mr Beckham’s romance
with Victoria Adams—also known as Posh Spice—who
nicknamed him Golden Balls. “They were the new
Charles and Diana,” says his friend and former
teammate Gary Neville, a perceptive description of a
couple who, like the ill-starred royals, were both
lionised and lacerated by the media.
But looks and a canny marriage are nothing without
a plan that you make early and stick to. It is striking
how quickly and clearly Mr Beckham saw his path
from midfield to endorsements, fashion and beyond.
“He wanted to be more than a football player,” says
Mr Neville, and soon he was, hobnobbing with Tom
Cruise and Beyoncé. The usual retirement gigs of
coaching and punditry were not for him. Like many
British stars he strove to crack America, on and off
the field.
First he conquered Spain, where in 2003 Florentino
Pérez, president of Real Madrid, welcomed him as “a
symbol of post-modernity”. That suggests his success
is an artefact of image and marketing; yet it also rests
on old-fashioned qualities that are disappointingly
hard to simulate.
One is the talent that made his profile marketable.
generation, reputedly said that Mr Beckham couldn’t
kick with his left foot, head the ball or tackle, but
“apart from that he’s all right.” With his right foot,
however, he struck corners and free-kicks, and
launched passes and crosses, with magical whip and
accuracy. In boyhood matches you see his technique
develop: the distinctive diagonal body shape,
windmilling arm and touchingly bow-legged gait.
The most old-fashioned virtue of all—hard work—
turns out to be grindingly important. A pushy father
is useful in this regard. “Left foot, right foot, over and
over and over again,” David recalls of Ted Beckham’s
drills. If a corner went astray, “he’d kill me.” This
tough love, he says, helped him cope with the abuse
that followed his sending-off at the World Cup of
1998. (An island of discretion in a sea of self-publicity,
Ms Phipps, the receptionist, declines to discuss the
bullets that arrived in the post.) Sandra, his mum,
thinks Ted was too tough but seems steely herself,
deadpanning about her personal “hit list”.