Making It Through This Soccer Match Is Real Kick
I’m very excited. I’m at a soccer game. Sorry, soccer match.
The last soccer match I attended was in 1978, Giants Stadium, and something called the Cosmos won, 1-0. I went to the bathroom and missed the match’s only score, so I’m pretty excited at the prospect of maybe seeing my first goal.
I’ve just got to lay off the water and coffee, if you know what I mean.
They have sold out the Home Depot Center -- 27,000 people with nothing else apparently going on in their lives, including selling patches of lawn to sit on for $50, to watch Real Madrid, which is a strange name for a team when you consider most of the players on the roster are not from Spain.
By soccer standards, Phony Madrid is playing the Washington Generals, who prefer to be called the Galaxy. The guy who runs Phony Madrid, when asked a day earlier about its opponent, reportedly could not name a single player on the Galaxy. Who knew I’d have so much in common with a guy from Spain?
Five of the top nine highest-paid soccer players in the world play for Phony Madrid, and one of them, Beckham, makes more than the entire 12-team MLS payroll. He’s also married to one of the Spice Girls, Posh, which ruins that theory that everything eventually evens out.
I arrived early to chat with Beckham. I can’t imagine many people go out of their way to talk to a soccer player and figured it would be a nice American gesture. At the very least I was interested in hearing what he had to say about the Daily Mirror’s breaking story Monday morning on the Internet: “Pluck ‘Em Beckham, David removes all his armpit hair ... which cuts sex appeal apparently, Posh.”
It’s pretty embarrassing when The Times has a reporter at Sunday’s soccer practice and he doesn’t notice that Beckham has shaved all his armpit hair, allowing a publication overseas to beat him on the story.
“The England skipper [I had no idea he also sailed boats], who already waxes his chest and has a sponsorship deal with razor firm Gillette, revealed the new Goldenbald image on the soccer tour of the U.S. at the weekend,” wrote Mirror.co.uk’s Tom Reilly, who also consulted with experts, who warned “underarm pruning” could be unhealthy.
You talk about getting to the bottom of things ...
I never got the chance, though. Security told everyone before Phony Madrid’s arrival that no one would be allowed to get near the players. Right now, I’d imagine Jeff Kent is wishing he was a soccer player. I thought about waving hi to Beckham in the hopes he might hold up his arm so I could confirm the Mirror.co.uk story, but he had a shirt on.
Carolyn Hughes sat for a one-on-one with Beckham, and I was told I could watch FSN West 2’s pregame show if I wanted to hear what Beckham had to say, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to get me to watch FSN West 2.
The soccer officials did allow me to talk to all the Generals that I wanted, and I chose the two guys from UCLA so I could find out where they went wrong -- besides going to UCLA. I began with the goalie, Kevin Hartman, who told me right away he was also a hockey fan. I saw no reason to continue our conversation.
Next, I tried Cobi Jones, who told me Phony Madrid has very good players -- now there’s a news flash, but that they are also human. I think I know who can play the part of Karl Dullard if they ever make a movie about him.
At this point of the evening I had already been stopped from talking to any of the really good players, and had only gotten mush from the stooges hired to get stomped by the good guys.
When it came time for the Generals to take the field, ah, pitch, they came out wearing jerseys with “Budweiser” stitched across their backs. I’m worried now the Boston Parking Lot Attendant will take notice, and he’ll put the names back on the Dodger jerseys, all right, but they’ll all read, “Farmer Johns.”
I took a stroll around the Home Depot Center, and noticed they were selling Beckham, Raul, Zidane and Siemens jerseys for $90 each. It wasn’t until later that I was told Siemens wasn’t a Phony Madrid player, but rather a sponsor.
The pregame festivities began with a bunch of kids coming onto the field reverentially carrying an oversized Generals’ jersey above their heads. I’m surprised it didn’t have a price tag attached -- everything else here does.
Then both teams came out with each player holding the hand of a youngster. Well, that’s not quite true. The kid assigned to Zidane left him and went to Beckham, so Beckham got two kids while Zidane walked alone. Now you understand why it wasn’t called, “Bend It Like Zidane.”
The match began, and every one just started to run around, while some of the sportswriters began asking, “Where’s Ronaldo?” For the longest time I thought they were saying, “Where’s Waldo?” and took for granted it was some kind of tradition that soccer writers follow until I was told Phony Madrid really was missing some guy named Ronaldo.
Phony Madrid scored the first goal. And the second.
Several of the Phonies had shots at a wide open net, and missed, including Beckham, who clutched his butt and begged out of the game after botching a free kick. For a moment there I thought he was doing an imitation of Garret Anderson.
The crowd seemed to enjoy the exhibition match, or were just determined to whoop it up to get their $20 worth for parking on top of the price for tickets, including front-row field seats that went for $1,000 each.
The goalie for the Generals, the UCLA guy that liked hockey, made two spectacular stops in succession on a couple of the Phonies for the hometown highlight of the night. When it was over, I was just glad that I hadn’t made the commitment to avoid the bathroom until the home team scored.
I’ve been to too many Dodger games to make that mistake.
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T.J. Simers can be reached at
t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.
