On 13 November David Beckham hosted a football fundraiser at Old Trafford. Few in the stadium or watching on television had even the vaguest notion of his astonishing pre-match itinerary.
In 10 days he played seven games of football in seven continents on seven different surfaces: the scrub of Papua New Guinea, Kathmandu cobblestones, Djibouti gravel, Buenos Aires concrete, Antarctic ice, rooftop AstroTurf in Miami and, finally, the green green grass of home. David Beckham: for the Love of the Game (BBC One) pursued him throughout this logistical miracle.
For a man whose charity is named after the number he always wore on his football shirt, his whistlestop seven/seven odyssey had the potential to smack of towering grandiosity. But there’s just something about Becks, isn’t there? Ambassadorially polite, fluent in the lingua franca of keepy-uppy and gigawatt grins, he circumnavigated the globe like football’s Palin.
On the way he wanted to test his theory that all the world’s a pitch, and all the men and women merely players (although he didn’t put it quite like that). Beyond that, it was never quite clear what the trip was all for. Though not explicitly a call for donations, it shone the briefest light into geopolitical problems: malnutrition, the refugee crisis, poverty and natural disasters. On the polar ice cap for under three hours, he had no slack in his schedule to discuss global warming with Hannah McKeand, the remarkable British super-explorer. Instead, she helped him erect goals from skis. Back in Manchester, there was a skimpy cameo for another global crisis when news broke of the terrorist attack in Paris.
• David Beckham: career in pictures
It was like an issue of The Week guest-edited by a pin-up. Packing only a bagful of casuals and a limited stock of blameless superlatives, Beckham hared to and from airports, as often as not driving a series of coughing jalopies himself. He was superhumanly tolerant of the camera, knowing that over his shoulder it would catch a glimpse of the real story.
What it lacked in depth the documentary compensated with sumptuous images. Even Beckham had to weep at the humbling majesty of Antarctica. “What was the temperature?” asked Sir Alex Ferguson in Manchester, ever-keen to lop the head off tall poppies.
“Minus 20,” said Becks.
“We used to get that in Aberdeen all the time.”
Welcome home, son.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét