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MY WORLD ----BECKHAM
beckham
BOTH FEET ON THE GROUND
David Beckham
with Tom Watt
To Victoria, Brooklyn and Romeo
The three people who always make me smile
My Babies Forever
Love David
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction: For Real 1
1 Murdering the Flowerbeds 17
2 The Man in the Brown Sierra 35
3 Home from Home 45
4 DB on the Tarmac 73
5 The One with the Legs 97
6 Don’t Cry for Me 119
7 Thanks for Standing By Me 143
8 I Do 173
9 The Germans 201
10 My Foot in It 229
11 Beckham (pen) 261
12 Bubble Beckham 293
13 About Loyalty 315
14 United Born and Bred 335
Career Record 367
About David Beckham
About Tom Watt
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
To Mum and Dad: without your love and guidance there wouldn’t be
a story here for the telling.
Love to the family, especially Lynne and Joanne, Colin, Georgina and
Freddie, Nan and Grandad, Tony and Jackie, Louise, Haydn, Liberty
and Tululah, Christian and Lucy.
To my school friends, my pals from boyhood and my Ridgeway
teammates:
I’ve not forgotten any of you.
To the friends I’ve been lucky enough to find during a career in
professional football, including Gary, Phil, Ryan, Nicky and Scholesy.
And special thanks to Dave, Terry and Steve for your company, advice
and more in recent years.
To Andrew and Charles; Caroline and Jo.
To everyone at HarperCollins, including Michael, Tom, Jane and
David, for their patience and support. Particular thanks to my co-writer
Tom, for jogging my memory and helping me find the words I needed.
To the team at SFX: Sam, Simon, Andy, Andy, Matt, Helene, Jamie
and everyone else. Thanks for making the impossible possible.
To my mentor and friend, a father figure for me: Tony. I know you’ll
be surprised reading this but you’re an amazing man who I had to thank
specially for having helped make such amazing things happen for me.
Thanks to all the coaches and managers, particularly Stuart
Underwood, Malcolm Fidgeon, Eric Harrison, Sir Alex Ferguson and
Sven-Goran Eriksson, who’ve lit up my time in the game we love: you
have my gratitude, respect and admiration.
Thanks, as well, to all the great players I’ve been privileged to play
alongside for Manchester United and England. Whatever I’ve done has
only been possible because of the talent, commitment and inspiration
of the other ten.
And finally, thanks – gracias – to all my new team-mates at Real
Madrid who’ve helped me settle in so quickly as our adventure together
gets underway.
David Beckham
August 2003
Foreword
The rest of the world says America isn’t interested in soccer. I’m not
so sure. Every time I visit, I see kids playing in parks and on school and
college campuses everywhere. Whenever I turn on the television, it
seems there’s a game being transmitted from England’s Premiership,
Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A or one of the South American leagues.
My old club, Manchester United, played matches in front of capacity
crowds coast to coast on their 2003 Summer Tour.
Baseball, Football, Ice Hockey and Basketball are the established
team sports in the States, I know. Those sports have their own history
and traditions, their superstars and millions of knowledgeable fans. I get
the feeling, though, that soccer’s time is about to come. Team USA
showed how much raw talent there is here at the 2002 FIFA World
Cup. Their 3–2 win over Portugal was one of the most impressive
performances of the entire tournament. The national women’s team has
long been one of the best in the world. I found out all about them first
hand when I joined the squad for a training day, organized by adidas,
last summer. There’s a buzz around soccer in the States that points
towards a very exciting future. Not interested? I’d say the rest of the
world had better watch out.
I’ve been lucky to have been a pretty regular visitor to America since
I was a boy. Time enough to get to know a country that I’ve grown to
love. I have snapshots of wonderful moments locked away in my
memory: a teenage soccer tournament in Texas in the late eighties;
watching my wife-to-be Victoria onstage at Madison Square Garden
with the Spice Girls in the nineties; presenting an award at the MTV
Awards Night in Los Angeles last summer. We’ve had fantastic family
holidays here, too, with our sons Brooklyn and Romeo.
If I could take one aspect of American life back to England with me,
it would be this country’s sense of patriotism: the feeling of a whole
nation united under one flag. Maybe the pride Americans take in their
country is one of the reasons why sports stars here seem to enjoy a
level of respect that’s not always the case in Europe. Heroes of mine
like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi and Michael Johnson
have been pushed on to greater achievement, I’d say, because they
know they’ve got the unqualified support of the whole country behind
them when they go into action.
Those sporting greats – and the rappers who are the soundtrack to
my days and nights, too, for that matter – have taken advantage of
being born and raised in the land of opportunity. The American Dream
is founded on the same principles as my own: if you work hard enough,
there never needs to be a limit on how far life can take you. I was born
loving soccer and, thanks to my parents, team-mates, school teachers
and coaches, I’ve been able to experience some amazing things over
the past 28 years.
Both Feet On The Ground is the story of how that happened: playing
for a decade at the club I supported as a boy; captaining my country
at soccer’s biggest tournament, the World Cup; and, now, beginning a
new journey with the most successful team in the history of the game.
Alongside my career, I’ve got a tale of the heart I want to tell as well:
a love affair that’s given me the marriage and family that make David
Beckham feel complete.
Opportunity; hard work; the love of my wife and family. I hope it’s a
story that every American will be able to recognize. Even if this one’s
written by a very English guy. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
David Beckham
August 2003
Introduction: For Real
‘Senor Perez, Senor di Stefano,
ladies and gentlemen...’
Anybody who’s ever played soccer has been inside these dressing
rooms. Scuffed tiles on the floor, the smell of disinfectant drifting up
from around your ankles. Lines of narrow grey lockers for which you
need your own little padlock, their doors stiff from years of being
slammed shut a few minutes before kick-off, and one or two missing
altogether. Benches in rows so close you’d struggle to slump down
opposite a team-mate after a game. One locker door is hanging open
at the far end: mine. In the gloom of the dressing room, the brilliant
white of the Real Madrid shirt hooked over it is luminous, like a
spotlight’s
