David Beckham, Football Ambassador

Courtesy of the New York Times

MADRID Football is the world's lingua franca, spoken by most people other than Americans, who quaintly call the game soccer. That's a problem, at a time when the Land of Bush often looks to outsiders like another planet, but its solution may lie right here at Real Madrid's Bernabéu Stadium.

Skip to next paragraph Spanish papers have been full of photographs of a glum-looking David Beckham watching from the stands as his club labored to a 1-0 victory over Zaragoza. The English footballer, who's slow but can still land a ball on a dime from 70 meters, is out of favor for having signed with the Los Angeles Galaxy team.

That deal, as the world knows, is worth about $250 million over five years, so you'd say Beckham has little reason to feel low. But Fabio Capello, the Real coach who's in trouble with his fans for giving them the finger in a gesture of defiant vulgarity after that Zaragoza win, has been behaving with similar tact toward Beckham.

He has called him untrustworthy. He has accused Beckham of making the deal without telling the club - "a very bad thing." He has vowed never to allow Beckham to wear the Real shirt until his contract expires in June, a decision that means Becks will be collecting several million dollars just for training. Nice work if you can get it.

Capello, in short, seems to have lost it in a fit of pique. Beckham, who's shrewd and knows when he's unwanted, has again shown a talent for getting out while the going's good - a sign of a less-than-blinding ego. At 31, he has decided to try to grow "the world's most popular game in a country that is as passionate about its sport as my own." That's a huge challenge. The hold of the big three - American football, baseball and basketball - is powerful. The financial interests surrounding them are vast; their stop-go rhythms are made for television advertising; the vernacular that accompanies them is as ubiquitous as it is obscure to outsiders.

That's a huge challenge. But if anyone can bring the United States home to the global house of football, it's Becks.

I know, he likes the limelight, he has a flashy wife and tattoos and a penchant for big houses, he changes his hairstyle a lot, he has released his own scent, he hasn't dribbled past an opponent since the last century, he has the acceleration of a Trabant, his odd attraction to the right touchline might be usefully analyzed by a West Coast shrink, and he has entered the downward glide of most athletes in their 30s.

But Beckham, the son of a kitchen fitter, is no rudderless airhead. He saw, faster than most, the power of an image in the age of globalization. In all the talk of his marriage to the singer Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham) and of the couple's extravagance and peccadilloes, one surprising thing tends to get forgotten: he is still married and raising his three children.

In fact, a Madrid friend with children at the Runnymede British School tells me that Becks is often there accompanying his kids and he's unfailingly courteous. She thinks he has had bad Spanish press ever since Posh complained about the garlic on arrival. That was not politic, but the real problem has been Real's form, which has had more to do with topsy-turvy management than Beckham's performance.

Now he's out to change America's Major League Soccer, or MLS, which has fizzled over the past dozen years. I doubt he'll do that through his dwindling skills on the pitch. But Beckham in Hollywood is a powerful planetary lure that's likely to bring America closer to the world more effectively than anything Karen Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, has been able to dream up.

Hughes, who has been trying without much luck to burnish America's image in the age of the Iraq war, and who last year named the figure skater Michelle Kwan as a worldwide good- will ambassador, would be well advised to take note of Beckham's arrival in California.

Why not fast-forward the naturalization process and name Beckham as an ambassador to explain America to the world? He's a self-made man, an image merchant, a constant reinventor of himself: in other words, he's American to the core. Nothing against Kwan, but figure skating rates closer to the World Darts Championship in global appeal than it does to the World Cup.

Beckham has already shown through his successful fund-raising for the United Nations Children's Fund that he thrives on international ambassadorial work. He may have to fine- tune his understanding of Iraq, but he has grasped that Spain is now small potatoes for his ambitions and America the natural home for his talents.

Speaking of Iraq, I once had a hard time getting out of the country at night because the Kuwaiti border was closed. The guards were unmoved by my pleas until it somehow transpired that one of them shared my passion for the Chelsea football club. That did it: the barriers swung open and a lively conversation about goals by Didier Drogba accompanied my passage by car to the other side.

Hughes should take note: football opens doors. If Beckham can indeed bring the MLS to life, he will be bridge-building. America's "otherness" has been attributed to many things in recent years - its churchgoing, its military-industrial complex, its insensitivity to global warming - but its failure to fall in love with what the rest of world calls football strikes billions of people as weird.

There's hope, however. The National Football League in the United States is planning its first-ever regular season game outside North America this year, probably pitting the Miami Dolphins against the New York Giants at London's Wembley Stadium. That'll happen soon after Becks hits Los Angeles, producing a double whammy that will shrink the Atlantic more than all the earnest chat at Davos.

Perhaps Becks can even persuade Americans to stop saying "PK" for penalty kicks. With this muchacho, anything's possible.

 

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