Why Not?
Before all is said and done, soccer superstar David Beckham will be motorboating back to England with a quarter of a billion dollars piled up behind him. In his wake will be the burst bubble of American interest in a sport we'll never accept, with all the pundits talking about our "irrational exuberance" for a guy who essentially does the job of the least-respected athletes in normal American sports, placekickers. (If the movie had been "Bend It like Morten Anderson," we could be living in a very different world.)
We've got enough of an attention span to bullshit about the sport's pinnacle once every four years, and occasionally we give it some post facto attention when our own women's team beats the rest of the world (assuming at least one of them tears her shirt off). That's about it. Professional soccer should have learned its lesson long ago that interest will never be sustained in their sport, and instead only develop around players we're told are Great and headbutts we can tell are awesome. That much was evident at Beckham's MLS debut in the second half of the Galaxy's game at DC United earlier this month, when the sold-out crowd of 46,000+ burst into cheers every time Beckham so much as touched the ball.
But what's done is done. Stupid water under the idiot bridge. Now that the United States has leased David Beckham, we should at least send him where he will actually accomplish some long-term good. I'm talking, of course, about Iraq.
Not to fight; insurgents wouldn't really care if we tried giving them a yellow card for tripping in Sadr City. Instead, we should send him to Iraq to play soccer.
Remember when Iraq beat Saudi Arabia in an international soccer match a few weeks ago? A handful of people died as a result of "celebratory gunfire" as soccer fans flooded the streets. Think about the positive PR spinning options we would have if Beckham were playing for them. "Celebratory IED takes out American convoy after miraculous Beckham corner kick"; "Iraqi parliament declares war on Syria after hard foul goes uncalled." If this really is a war of ideas, I don't know why he's not over there already. Even if he tried objecting, which I'd hope his contract doesn't allow, it's really hot in the desert and the guy loves taking his shirt off.
The American public wouldn't have to miss out, either. We could produce a reality TV show featuring Posh Spice complaining about life in the Green Zone and marketing her own line of bedazzled burkas. "The Simple Life" meets one of those stupid shows on Bravo meets the Russian roulette scene in "The Deer Hunter."
I hope this is part of the Petraeus report. For a paltry $250 million, the United States has an obligation to its own people, its marketers, and the rest of the world to put Beckham on a one-way flight to Baghdad. We misplace that kind of money like it was going out of style. And there's nothing David Beckham would hate more than going out of style.
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Posted August 29, 2007 | 04:09 PM (EST)