CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue: Who do you think you are?
Chapter One: Wannabe
Chapter Two: 2 Become 1
Chapter Three: Too Much
Chapter Four: Holler Holler
Chapter Five: Viva Forever
Postscript
Copyright
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Epub ISBN: 9781448137039
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Yellow Jersey Press 2002
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Julie Burchill 2002
Julie Burchill has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Yellow Jersey Press
Yellow Jersey Press
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Random House Australia (Pty) Limited
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www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224061926
For Stuart Walton
A WISE MAN once said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize. But for me, satire finally pegged it on that spring day in 2001 when it was announced that Coutts & Co, the royal bank, were to open a special department to court the boy kings of football. Even before it opened for business, some 60 players had signed up.
What space odyssey had led us to these strange days, in this parallel universe, where the Queen’s bank danced attendance on young men it would previously not have employed as doormen? At first it seemed like some sort of sarky joke, like that annual day at the major public school when the masters wait on the pupils, and call them ‘Sir’ in horrible oily drawls. But the royal bank meant business; a spokesperson said, ‘There was a time when footballers were known for wasting all their money and ending their careers bankrupt. But all that is in the past; they are much more sensible now . . . There’s been a huge influx of money to the game over the last eight years and there’s never been a better time for them to manage their money properly . . . They only have about twelve years in their career at the top and we have to ensure they make the most of that.’
All this sounded fine – New Britain, New Money, breaking down the fusty old barriers of privilege, all that jazz – until one remembered that Coutts itself had recently been the subject of much loose talk. It was alleged that such stellar clients as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Phil Collins had closed their accounts and taken their pennies home in a huff. Fancy – finishing up the stuff left on the side of the plate by characters as irretrievably naff as Phil Collins and Andrew Lloyd Webber! Was this really, then, the New Breed of switched-on, stylish footballer who would take the Beautiful Game for ever out of the sweaty slipstreams of naffness and into the deep blue depths of Cool? Or was the account at Coutts just the latest in a long line of footie follies like mock-Tudor houses, plastic Alice bands worn on the pitch, ‘opening a boutique, Brian’ and sleeping with Page 3 girls who had higher IQs than you?
The weird, sad thing about English football is that only when players were paid pocket money did they seem like real men; the minute they got a man’s wage, they became Lads; then, when they achieved a king’s ransom, they became little boys. Many of us were mildly surprised when we discovered that one of David Beckham’s hobbies was tracing and copying cartoon drawings such as The Lion King – which he would send to his fiancée Victoria Adams as love tokens – but we soon got used to the idea, and probably thought ‘Ah, isn’t that sweet.’ The same with the revelation, made to Michael Parkinson on his television chat show, that he first worked out Victoria fancied him ‘when she bought me a big bunny, and I think that was the first time I realised she liked me a little bit.’
But we weren’t really shocked, as we would have been if we’d learned this about Stanley Matthews. By this time, we knew that the heartbreakingly named George Best had for three decades been so addicted to the bottomless bottle that he would apparently rather die than stop suckling at its toxic teat, and that Tony Adams had regularly been so out of control on drink that he wet himself. We took to the idea of sportsmen as the new rock stars – drunken, drugged, destructive towards both themselves and their sexy blonde companions – with surprising equanimity. It came as a real relief to find out that tracing lions and taking receipt of large stuffed rabbits was as bad as it got with the boy Beckham.
Somehow, it made sense; there was a sort of folk memory which understood that once sportsmen stopped playing for the love of the game, things would go horribly wrong. For sport is basically playing, as children play; if this side of a human being is overly concentrated on, obviously everything else will be neglected. By being paid so little, Matthews and his contemporaries somehow brought dignity to the state of being a sportsman; that is, being able to run fast, kick a ball and generally skive off all the boring, soul-grinding, backbreaking jobs that other working-class men had to do. But obviously once huge amounts of money were awarded to adult men for not growing up, they were going to regress even further; it was the pure logic of the playpen.
Once we had Busby’s Babes, and we were proud of them; from the Nineties onwards we had Britain’s Amazing Footballing Babies, and we hung our heads in shame. They might be physically incontinent, like Adams, or simply emotionally and morally incontinent like Paul Gascoigne and Stan Collymore, but the end result is the same; generally, our footballers are a greater source of shame than pride to us, and have been for many years. And it is hard to believe that the vile behaviour of English players off the pitch is not reflected in the notoriously violent behaviour of England fans abroad, and vice versa; that overpaid players and underclass supporters alike are intent on playing out some sort of danse macabre amid the ruins of brute masculinity, determined to take as many as they can down with them. It is very hard, seeing footage of rioting England fans in the cities of mainland Europe, not to remember the last time large numbers of young English men were over there: to liberate Europe from Fascism. At the risk of sounding like a Daily Mail editorial – what went wrong?
David Beckham bears a great burden on his beautiful shoulders. While being the most perfectly childlike of modern footballers, and also the most fragrantly feminine, he is paradoxically the one to whom we look to return the once-beautiful game to that state of grace, that short-back-and-sides manly sainthood embodied by Matthews and Finney. Serious-eyed, resplendently saronged, perfectly still, wearing his wife’s knickers, this holy fool makes clowns of his contemporaries when he effortlessly equates football with civility while answering Michael Parkinson’s question: ‘Football is a very laddish game and very macho. Here you are, you’re not a boozer and you don’t go around thumping your wife, you adore your child and you’re this gay icon. That doesn’t embarrass you, does it?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘And you talk in your book about this feminine side that you like and admire. You’re against the grain –’
‘I think it’s because I’ve never been involved in that sort of circle. When I was younger, I used to stay at home and watch Match of the Day instead of going down to the corner shop for a bottle of cider. That’s the way I’ve been brought up. I have a drink now and again, but I don’t go out drinking and beating up women, so I’m happy.’
And this is the key: rich, successful and sexy, Beckham is, above all, happy, in an age where flagrant displays of happiness are frowned on by the rich and famous. Every last whinging celeb has a customised sob story about how they saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus when they were five years old, and that’s why they’re a dipsomaniac/nymphomaniac/bulimic/alcoholic. Being happy is seen as shallow, a sign of peasant breeding; to be ‘troubled’, on the other hand, is classy, deep, fascinating. But the sad fact is that it is neurotic people who are shocking bores. Like junkies, they all have exactly the same personality. Transpose interviews with Geri Halliwell, Robbie Williams and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, for instance, and you’ll never be able to tell who’s saying what.
Beckham has bypassed this sad attention-seeking, as he has bypassed the Crisis of Masculinity, the End of Industry and the failure of The Lion King II to do the business at the box office. Does this make him really dumb, very clever or just extremely fortunate? No one is sure. And whether he can take English football with him, under his captainship, out from the darkness and into the light, remains to be seen. But if not him, then who, and if not now, when?
THIS SMALL BUT perfectly informed book was commissioned by its editor, Rachel Cugnoni of Random House, in late 2000. It was delivered in June 2001 and published that November. I started writing this postscript in June 2002, when we were still in the World Cup, finished it in July after we’d been knocked out, and I think it’s fair to say I’m both over the moon and sick as a parrot. And all because the boy done good. Real good.
For once in my life, I’m quite confused. And it’s been this way for a while now. It was initially Beckham’s pariah status, the almost surreal amount of hate and loathing poured on him after he told that psychotic Argentinian where to get off, that attracted me to him, and kept me interested enough to write the weighty tome you hold in your trembling hands. But by the time I was promoting it he was a hero again – bigger and better and more golden than ever, with added gravitas this time – and I found myself peddling a product just about as cutting edge and controversial as an authorised biography of Vera Lynn in the run-up to Christmas 1945. I’ve never been conventionally minded, to put it mildly, and I never feel the need to follow the sound of the crowd, except on obviously commonsense matters such as keeping the pound and bringing back public hanging. Hence I found myself terminally tired and emotional – and not even drunk! – as I careered from radio station to radio station almost in tears trying to explain why I had committed sizeable verbal shaking of the Most Popular Boy In The School, and committed it to paper no less. I had left a paper trail, a veritable ticker-tape typhoon, of my sycophancy! The shame! Damn that goal against Greece in the 93rd minute!
‘So, Julie – you, like millions of others, worship David Beckham . . .’ the interviewer would begin, reasonably enough, only to be confronted with the strange spectacle of this half-mad ingrate railing against the apparent object of her affections.
‘Nooo! It’s not like that! When I took on this job, no one liked him! He was a pariah, the scum of the earth! The Sun said he should stick to wearing skirts and never be allowed to put on an England shirt again, and the Standard said his wife should be locked up in the Tower! And remember the pigs’ heads in the butcher’s window, one with DAVID and one with VICTORIA written on them . . . well, that proved to be half right,’ I couldn’t resist adding cattily, ‘but still obviously unfair to him. And all because he wouldn’t let that Argie push him around –’
‘But now all that’s forgotten, and Beckham is a hero to everyone –’
‘I don’t see why!’ I’d snap then, carefully changing tack. ‘The man’s obviously deranged. Lashing out at that Argentinian player like that. The poor bloke was only trying to brush the hair out of Beckham’s eyes . . . so he could see the ball better . . . and that’s the thanks he gets!’
But the goodwill just kept on coming, a turnaround tidal wave of adoration – not just from the common people, but from the type of person who normally thinks sport is strictly for people who read with not just their lips but their fingers moving. Noncey male novelists wrote elegies to his feet; Germaine Greer and Doris Lessing (‘He is extremely good-looking . . . and so noble. He’s behaving like something like out of The Lord of the Rings . . . I think he’s wonderful’) carried on like schoolgirls who’d just got a glimpse of Gareth Gates. For once I was in the vanguard of chattering-class opinion – and I didn’t like it one little bit.
I’d built up my