David Beckham didn’t save American soccer, he orphaned it

HOBOKEN, N.J. — Instead of walking into a news conference wearing his Allen Iverson [stats] tattoos and outdated Miami Vice stubble, David Beckham would have looked better in polka-dot pajamas, floppy shoes and a big red nose.
The guy is a clown of the first order. He arrived two years ago pledging to change the culture of American soccer, and he’s had the same impact on the sport that Brian Bosworth had on the American film industry.
Beckham has run nothing more than a shell game, appointing himself an ambassador for U.S. soccer in one breath, and booking his reservations across the pond in the next. He’ll play for the Los Angeles Galaxy in Giants Stadium on Thursday night, provided he doesn’t loan himself out to a European superpower between now and then.
And if you’re a Red Bulls ticket holder in the habit of jeering the villains of the day, the A-Rods and Mannys and the like, then you would be well within your rights to let ol’ Becks have it.
The Englishman swears he wants to be here.
He wants to be here as much as Ed Whitson wanted to be in the Bronx.
"I am here to play for this team," Beckham said. "I am contracted to play for this team, and at the moment, that’s the most important thing to me."
At the moment. It’s Beckham’s favorite expression, his default position when the subject turns to his commitment, or lack thereof.
"I’m an honest person," he said. "If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t."
His nose keeps growing longer than the list of perks in his contract.
Beckham signed a deal with the Galaxy reportedly worth up to a quarter-billion dollars, much of it invested in his "It" factor and smile. He was introduced as this generation’s Pele, the priceless import who was going to make Americans love their corner kicks as much as they love their monstrous home runs and alley-oop dunks.
Only Pele’s generosity of spirit, his pure eagerness to spread the sport’s gospel, left him a beloved figure in the States. His Cosmos practically made a home locker room out of Studio 54, but they never lost sight of the mission.
They needed to win games. They needed to fill Giants Stadium.
They needed to convince a baseball-football-basketball public that soccer was worthy of its affection and time.
Beckham? It’s clear he always was more interested in growing his brand rather than growing the game. He wanted to go Hollywood, hang with his buddy, Tom Cruise, and get his handsome face on the "Today" show and "Entertainment Tonight."
"If he didn’t have this look," Andranik Eskandarian, the former Cosmo, once told me, "maybe nobody would care."