We know that something deemed culturally significant transpired in town last night, because more than 45,000 people showed up at RFK, among them Michael Wilbon. This morning, his paper boasts an above-and-below-the-fold color photo of the phenomenon. This we know for a fact: there was not an important soccer game played in town last night. So why the panting print pack and their “Dewey Beats Truman” reaction? Also this morning, I’m asking this question: why when Beckham bends it is the Post atwitter and when Sir Sidney arrives do bloggers outnumber print press in the Verizon press box?
I’m no soccer fan, but truly, what the area MSM did to that sport this week was positively demeaning. “Soccer needs 25 more Beckhams” here in America, I heard last night. No, like hockey, it more needs 25,000 replacement editors of sports pages and newsrooms.
I’ve written before that the comparison of soccer and hockey and their comparable media coverage here (basically, ignored) is apt, as both sports reside far outside the American sporting mainstream. Both enjoy considerably greater popularity in Europe (and in hockey’s case, obviously, Canada). So what made last night so novel?
The answer is simple: Beckham serves as a cultural marker billboard for our present Cult of Celebrity. Style (and looks) over substance. Better still, a bit of bad boy style, too. What made last night supreme burlesque for me was listening to Wilbon squeezed in among authentic soccer broadcasters and analysts in the booth and pontificating on what soccer needs to do, at long last, to “make it in America.” Wilbon knows that soccer can’t ever dislodge any of America’s Big Four (actually, like hockey, it’s certainly hopelessly behind NASCAR as well); he doesn’t care that it never will, but he and his editors are grateful in any August for a Paris Hilton-on-the-pitch-like-buzz to arrive for one night. Not surprisingly, with respect to last night’s atmosphere in RFK, Wilbon referenced Barry Bonds in his column this morning.
David Beckham is a terrific soccer player. Occasionally, he evens wins a game by scoring a goal. But he most assuredly is not the Tiger Woods or Roger Federer of his sport. Or even its Sidney Crosby. He is the aura that he is partly because he has terrific skill but moreso because he’s extremely good looking and he’s presently attached to his physical equal off the field. In fact, yesterday’s WaPost reminded Washingtonians of this underpinning effect of Beckham Buzz, feature analyzing the beauties who congregate around the cleated.
It’s likely that Beckham’s lasting contribution to western culture is his being the peripheral inspiration for a film that introduced us to Keira Knightley. (No small accomplishment, that.)
Hockey has a fair number of superstars — many of them under the age of 25 — who dominate their game more than Beckham does his. And yet when Crosby and the Pens play at Verizon Center, there’s only a modest uptick in MSM mentioning of the matchup, virtually all of it pegged on the now hackneyed storyline of “Sidney vs. AO.”
Hockey is plagued by a long-standing dilemma as it relates to contemporary sports marketing and media coverage: its stars most often are little different from its lunchpailers in comportment. Many of them are soft-spoken, humble, deferential, at pains to take individual credit in their team sports. They’re really nice fellas. To put it crassly: neither Sidney nor Alex are likely soon to hang puppies in nooses from trees, or be located near drive-by shootings at discotheques.
Hockey’s roots truly would need a dastardly DNA transfusion to catch the lasting hyperventilating of contemporary MSM, a free-fall of character into the sewer.
May it forever remain marvelously lodged in its current irrelevancy.
3 Comments
“Both enjoy considerably greater popularity in Europe” … please. Soccer is bigger in the world than the rest of these sports combined. Even this hobbled version of Beckham finally making his American debut is a big deal, especially in a city that a) has a loyal soccer following and b) is desperate for any positive local sports news.
In their short history, the United have done more than the rest of the local sports teams combined over that same period — while playing in an old stadium that was recently refitted for an awful baseball team. Had Beckham made it onto the field in Salt Lake City or Columbus or at home in L.A., instead of here, the local “MSM” coverage would have been less.
Have you gone to any United games this year, to return the favor of their rabid fans filling a few rows of the Verizon Center?
I’m curious to see what the hoopala would have been if say Beckham’s balky ankle had kept him out of action until September, right around when the NFL and NCAA football are starting up.
I am a futbol (but not MLS) fan, as well as a hockey fan, even if both are marginalized here in the US by the MSM and most sports fans.
At least the MSM doesn’t make fun of hockey players’ toughness or ask who brings the orange slices to the games? :>
THE Post certainly seems to this futbol is higher on the pecking order these days. Look how often Steve Goff travels to events not related to DCU, while Tarik, it seems, is lucky if he’s allowed to even go to Kettler to cover a story.
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