Locker Room:The final and lucrative conclusion of David Beckham's steadily deteriorating relationship with the real world was always going to be a prolonged stay in the fantasy factory. There he will finish his current career doing a job whose usefulness is entirely unconnected to its reward structure.
This latest stage in the odyssey of Posh and Becks has, as a man on the radio told us yesterday, led us to "a moment in time". Quite so. Indeed, as Posh and Becks regress from being creatures of marginal talent in their respective branches of the entertainment industry to the status of being Mr and Mrs Mini-Me to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, we are, as a species, confronted with the most fundamental question of all: is it evolution, or grand design?
Despite her incessant advances, this column has never met Posh Spice, but we are free to state that even a limited interest in the erstwhile Spices led us to the conclusion that she was our least favourite of the range. Her warbling career has accordingly declined.
We have, however, knelt, tape recorder in hand, at the well-tended feet of Becks on several occasions when, in his (preposterous) capacity as captain of England, he sought to explain the reasons behind the overwhelming inadequacy of himself and his colleagues. On such occasions, Becks exhibited his Bush-like difficulty in constructing coherent sentences and would deliver what shallow insights he could in his comically vacant and nasal tone of voice. One often found oneself staring in an unseemly way at his eyes. Anybody home David? Any sign of intelligent life there inside your beautiful head?
It's true (thankfully) that the outsized celebrity of Posh and Becks has made them an easy target, and true also that in their respective professions there were certain things which they once did very, very well. But there is a temptation when caught up in such a snap-storm of hype and dollars to re-evaluate them both in unrealistically favourable terms.
There doesn't necessarily have to be more substance to them because they have caught the wave - tsunami rather - of wealth and celebrity and rode it all the way to the California coastline. Perhaps there's just a steady hand there guiding them and keeping them upright.
Apart from the unreliable indices of wealth and glamour, none of the available evidence suggests that either Posh or Becks has anything more going on in their heads than, say, that other avatar of media-spooned celebrity, Jade Goody.
What P&B have in common with Ms Goody is that serene, anaesthesised passivity which is necessary when surrendering to the process. Posh and Becks have put their existences in the hands of the lifestyle surgeons of Wiltshire Boulevard. The men and women of the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) have kept them alive as celebrities and "stories" long after their relevance to their professions ceased to be discernible.
P&B, addicted to glamour and visibility rather than to excellence, have taken the decision to go with the process. They can't but be pleased with the results. They have entered a realm of celebrity which has hitherto been uncharted. Posh's career has all but vanished and that of Becks is in precipitous decline, and yet the line of their fame points the other way. They appear pathos-free.
This week Becks bleated in that unironic way of his that he had extensively consulted Tom Cruise about his latest career move because Mr Cruise is "a very wise man". (Perhaps confusingly for Becks the Galactico, Tom Cruise, in his wisdom, believes that a being called Xenu was an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" and that 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of aliens to Earth in spacecraft, then stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.) Nobody laughed out loud, but some of us pined for the witty, unpackaged, self-promoting genius of a young Ali, the vulnerability of an on-the-make Georgie Best or the amusing bombast of a young McEnroe.
We are moving into a new era in sports. When Becks arrives in LA, there to save soccer for America or America for soccer, we're not sure which, it will matter not if we wonder aloud how he couldn't save soccer for England or how having one man earning many, many times the combined salary of his team-mates serves any team game or why nobody will stand up and demand to know what makes Beckham different from all the other past-it, one-last-handy-payday bandits who have tried to save soccer for America.
It doesn't matter because Hollywood has discovered a source of stories and dramas that doesn't require scriptwriters, directors or audience testing. When Liverpool fans bellowed to their team that they would never walk alone as they were losing 5-1 to Arsenal last week, they confirmed to the hustling classes that team sports are a market with pleasingly inelastic demand.
Sport may be going Hollywood, but it doesn't really require Tinseltown at all, just some sharp agents with an eye for packaging.
The biggest and sharpest agency of all, CAA, which shapes the careers of not just Tom 'n' Katie but Posh 'n' Becks too, took a corporate decision last spring to diversify into sports. CAA hired a couple of big-time gridiron football dealmakers (and their client lists), Tom Condon and Ken Kremer, from IMG (which used to be the last word in straightforward sports management) and they went into business. Other big entertainment agencies like William Morris and the Gersh Agency were quick to jump into the water.
Variety magazine, the in-house bible of old Hollywood, explained the fascination with sports in a manner we can all understand. An agency can get three to five per cent of a client's daily bread, but 10 per cent (at least) of endorsement deals.
According to Variety, Tiger Woods, last year's biggest earning jock, pulled down $80 million in endorsement loot. Peyton Manning, the lantern-jawed quarterback, hauled in $10.5 million, hoopster Kevin Garnett caught $7 million and baseball's Derek Jeter $6 million. Tennis star Serena Williams made a paltry $2.3 million in salary and winnings on the court, but clocked up $20 million in endorsements. Young golfer Michelle Wie has already put her name to a series of eight-figure endorsement deals with Sony, Nike and Omega.
At the time when the people who pimp the talent to Hollywood started buying up sports agents and their client lists, there was some eyeball-rolling among the old alpha male, Jerry Maguire-type agents. One or two were heard to comment that they had yet to see a deal done by the new agencies which couldn't have been done by a traditional pro.
Last week they saw such a deal: one small step for football, one giant leap for agentkind.
It suited the headlines to trumpet Beckham's deal as being worth $250 million over five years, as if that would be his reward for playing football. Instead, Becks will be hustling hard, using what exposure his football gives him to further his career shilling various products. In that sense it is hard to declare Beckham's deal as the biggest in sport because so little of it has anything to do with sport.
It is reckoned that for playing football in a backwater league Beckham will receive (a still astonishing) $10 million per season. Selling stuff for Adidas (who also kit out all MLS teams and were a major stakeholder in the deal), Gillette, Motorola and Pepsi will bring in twice as much again.
Then there's the jerseys and related gear which should bring $10 million, and finally Beckham's part of the proposed profit-sharing plan with his employers which will round off the annual salary.
We entered an era last week when the nuts and bolts of a deal were more interesting than the sporting implications. The figures involved were so dizzying that we found ourselves saying, fair play, he must be smarter than he looks or sounds. All this about a man whose vanity and lust for attention prematurely consumed his talent and left him living life in a gilded cage instead of fulfilling himself between the white lines.
Becks. He made the most without getting the most from himself.
A role model for the new era and its marketers.
