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David Beckham: A Man in Full Kat Rosenfield

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Illustration by The Free Press, images via Getty

Who is David Beckham? 

Yes, I know he is a soccer player. And there was that movie, Bend It Like Beckham, and also that part in Love, Actually where Hugh Grant cites both of his feet as being among Britain’s top national treasures. 

But as a millennial American woman, I must admit I have always been less familiar with Beckham as an athlete than as—how to put this?—a specimen

The guy in that dramatically lit black-and-white photo, reclining topless—and bottomless, save for a pair of Armani briefs—on a bed, with his hair closely buzzed and his legs spread open. 

But now, thanks to Beckham, the new Netflix documentary series about the star’s life and career, I now know this was something of a scandal at the time. This meaning his freelance fashion career, of course, but also his various haircuts, one of which apparently inspired a wave of copycatting among UK schoolboys in the ’90s. At the height of his fame, people didn’t just want to bend it like Beckham; they wanted to be him. He was a male model, literally.

Also: he still is, just in a different way.

Beckham, the four-part series, finds the athlete looking slightly weathered (albeit still in the 99th percentile for handsomeness) and sporting a sort of coastal grandfather aesthetic; the tiny tighty-whities have been replaced by cable-knit sweaters, and he’s got a stubbly salt-and-pepper beard. He also has a gifted and sympathetic interlocutor in director Fisher Stevens, who traces the evolution of Beckham’s 20-year career through four countries, six premier league titles, two MLS championships, and three World Cups—including the one in 1998 where he got red-carded for impetuously kicking at an Argentine player (who, in classic soccer style, went down like a sack of potatoes even though he’d barely been grazed). The trajectory of Beckham the footballer is also inextricably linked with his personal life, including his relationship with his wife, Victoria, with whom he has four children.

But while Victoria gets her share of screen time, this is ultimately a story about men, and manhood—and most fascinating, it’s about how to be a good guy in a world where the word masculinity is often preceded by the word toxic. Fisher sits down not just with Beckham but also with multiple other star athletes of the era, his teammates and rivals and friends. 

The most compelling parts of the documentary are the moments where these men watch footage of their old games, which Fisher films in a fourth wall–breaking, intimate close-up: they are watching football, but it feels to the viewer as if they’re looking at you. The camera lingers on their faces, on the tiny ripples of emotion flickering there: joy and pride and longing. It’s strikingly, and disarmingly, vulnerable—to gaze into the eyes of a man who is gazing at the greatest love of his life. 

These men were formative figures in David Beckham’s life: teammates who were more like brothers. There is also a series of fathers, with whom things were much more complicated. Whatever natural talent Beckham was born with, it was his father, David “Ted” Beckham, who honed it into something greater. Both men remember how Ted drilled his son with endless free kick exercises until he developed the uncanny accuracy that made him a superstar; his mother, Sandra, recalls how her husband refused to ever praise Beckham’s performance lest he get complacent and stop working as hard. In at least one sense, this was good preparation: by the time Beckham was old enough to play football professionally, the role of his father was now adopted by various coaches—most notably Sir Alex Ferguson, who recruited Beckham for Manchester United when he was just 14 years old. 

The complexities of the relationship between coach and protégé, and its parallels to the one between parent and child, have always been ripe for dramatization. Ted Lasso is perhaps the most obvious and recent example, but the list goes on: Rudy, Rocky, Friday Night Lights. But these rosy narratives are fictional; Beckham reminds us that the truth is less feel-good and more fraught. The difference between a father and a coach is that a father wants his son to grow up, to become his own man, to find his own way. A coach wants things done his way, and every step toward independence is received as an affront.

Any decision Beckham made for himself, everything from cutting his hair to marrying a woman Ferguson didn’t approve of, created a new fracture in this relationship predicated on the most conditional sort of love. It was a relationship also mirrored by Beckham’s dynamic with the country at large: depending on his performance on the pitch, he was either England’s favorite son or its most loathed traitor. 

In the first act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the eponymous monarch moans: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”

But to spend years looking up to a father figure who in turn looks at you as an asset to be cultivated, guarded, and eventually sold off, having outlived its value: this is plenty sharp, too. As such, it’s remarkable—and inspiring—that the man who not only experienced this profoundly warped version of adolescence, but did so in public and under intense scrutiny, grew up to be the opposite of toxic. 

The through line in David Beckham’s life isn’t luck, but resilience. (Beckham/Netflix)

Despite being nicknamed “Golden Balls,” the through line in Beckham’s life isn’t luck, but resilience. Instead of using money and fame to insulate himself from his mistakes, he learned from them. Instead of becoming embittered when a coach or manager misjudged him, he proved himself through hard work. Instead of falling into the celebrity lifestyle trap, he stuck with the loyal circle of friends and family who loved him before (or in spite of) his rise to mega-fame—including the woman he’s been married to for nearly 25 years.

This is not to say that it’s always been smooth sailing. By the time he was in his mid-20s, with little education and exactly one marketable skill, Beckham was an aspirational figure—the man who women want and men want to be—but his sex appeal was also something of an albatross. It’s hard to believe that a man who looked like this, and who posed like that, wasn’t catting around. 

This came to a head in the early 2000s, when allegations surfaced that Beckham had had an affair, or perhaps multiple ones, which is also the one topic the documentary talks around rather than about. The result makes for an interesting Rorschach test: I read this part of the series, which features a lot of vague, cryptic language and long uncomfortable pauses, as such an obviously tacit admission of guilt that they might as well have tattooed a scarlet A on Beckham’s forehead. But when I said as much to my husband, his reaction was low-key horror: “I don’t think he would ever do that,” he said. 

Of course, neither of us actually know what David Beckham did or didn’t do. But two things are true: first, that Beckham doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would cheat on his wife, and second, downstream of this, that he is the kind of guy you want to believe the best of. The older, wiser, less-polished Beckham isn’t just inspiring in his resilience; he’s like a one-man rejoinder to the categorical denunciation of men, in general, as trash. 

And while his retirement from football was not so much an ending as a new chapter (he is currently the president and part owner of the Inter Miami professional soccer club in Florida), the overachieving celebrity version of Beckham makes only limited appearances in his namesake documentary. What we mostly see is a human man, puttering around his country estate in the Cotswolds: keeping bees, cooking in his outdoor kitchen, pointing out his favorite spot in the garden (it’s the one where he can sometimes catch a glimpse of his wife through the window, naked).

A king in his castle, at peace if not at rest. 

Kat Rosenfield is a writer and columnist. Read her last Free Press piece “Naked Attraction, The Golden Bachelor, and the Novelty of Vulnerability” and follow her on Twitter (now X) @katrosenfield.

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —The Editors


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November 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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November 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives. 

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national. 

America would become a slaveholding nation. 

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal. 

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them. 

But that’s not how it played out. 

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans. 

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.  

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence. 

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn. 

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power. 

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong. 

On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future. 

I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom. 

As always, the outcome is in our hands. 

“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”  

–-

Notes:

James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

New York Tribune, March 7, 1857, p. 4.

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