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 IDo 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 team- mates: 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. \ Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground 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, \ Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground 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 been trained on it. Shorts and socks are folded neatly beneath on the bench. I’m all alone. I can hear muffled conversations going on at the far end of the room, around the door I’d come in. I take my time getting changed, folding my clothes up next to the uniform that’s been left for me. A half-open door leads out to the training field. Beside it, there’s a full-length mirror bolted to the wall. I look the bloke in the mirror up and down. The all-white Real strip seems to make me look big. Makes me feel big. This is a uniform and a half. I catch the sound of excited voices. Suddenly I’m aware that I’m looking into my future. There’s a rush of satisfaction, nerves stood on end. I’m here. In fact, we’d been here, in Madrid, nearly 24 hours; long enough for the Beckham family to begin a new life. My Manchester United contract had expired on the last day of June and I’d signed my name at the 2 \ Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground Bernabeu on the first day of July. Today, July 2, the Real adventure has begun. We’re all going to be part of what will happen here: I’ve been trans- ferred to a new club and new country but it’s the family who are moving to Spain. I wanted us together to see what we were letting ourselves in for. And, to be honest, I needed the support. The excitement and tension had been building up for nearly a month ahead of these two days in Spain. I knew from the moment we touched down at half past one on Tuesday afternoon that every minute was going to matter. Having my family with me meant that Madrid – the city and Real – would get the right first impression of me: a soccer player who’s a husband and father. Romeo, still only nine months old, stayed in England with Vic- toria’s parents, but I had Victoria with me, Brooklyn too. And my mum, who’d agreed to the job of finding some fun for a four-year-old when he got fed up with what Mummy and Daddy were doing.