Sports Saturday
David Beckham’s five-year run with the Los Angeles Galaxy began disappointingly, but when he helped lead his team to a second championship earlier this month, no one could complain. Legendary for free kicks that bent over and around walls of defenders, Beckham raised the popularity of professional soccer in the United States, perhaps permanently.
It wasn’t uncommon for Beckham to be responsible for most of the scoring of England’s national team. Like the Greeks with Achilles, the English had difficulty winning without him. Therefore poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy expressed the agony of a nation when Beckham suffered an Achilles injury before he could participate in the 2010 World Cup.
The nature of the injury gave Duffy the idea to compare him to the Greek hero, and she invokes the story (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) where Achilles’ mother dresses him in women’s clothes so that the Greeks, and Odysseus, won’t find him and take him off to the war. As one review of the poem notes, the Ovid reference serves to highlight Beckham’s tantalizing sexual ambiguity, which is one of the dimensions of his star power.
Beckham’s allure has transcended sports–he definitely is a “slippery golden boy”–and in an interview Duffy talks about how Beckham has a mythic aura like Achilles:
The public aspect of some lives provides a narrative, a story, for the rest of us to follow. We speak of “living the dream,” a “fairytale existence” of “legends” and of “heroes.”
Like Greek Myths, such public lives can contain triumph and tragedy and in a way we all learn from them, as we do from Ovid, or the Brothers Grimm, or Shakespeare.
Her reference to “spices” in the poem, meanwhile, undoubtedly points to Victoria Spice of the Spice Girls. After he married her, Beckham was criticized by his Manchester United coach for being more focused on life as a celebrity than on soccer, and in one photograph with her he is wearing a sarong. Nevertheless, when England needed him, he answered the call.
Oh, and without Beckham, England couldn’t take Troy. It couldn’t even make it to the second round.
Achilles (for David Beckham)
Myth’s river—where his mother dipped him,
fished him, a slippery golden boy—
flowed on, his name on its lips.
Without him, it was prophesied,
they would not take Troy.
Women hid him, concealed him in girls’ sarongs;
days of sweetmeats, spices, silver song…
but when Odysseus came,
with an athlete’s build, a sword and a shield,
he followed him to the battlefield,
the crowd’s roar,
and it was sport, not war,
his charmed foot on the ball…
but then his heel, his heel, his heel…
