The glossy magazine which is to sport in the United States what Vogue is to high fashion and NME is to popular music published the photograph of a footballer on its front cover yesterday. Not a regular Joe of an American footballer like Mr Namath or Mr Montana but the kind of footballer who earns a hundred grand a week playing the game we call football.Sports Illustrated have given to David Beckham the kind of distinction usually reserved for the great ones in their own nation's favoured pursuits. For Messrs Namath and Montana. For The Greatest himself, Muhammad Ali. For basketball immortal Michael Jordan, baseball icons Babe Ruth and Broadway Joe diMaggio and ice hockey genius Wayne Gretzky.
For Carl Lewis when he kept scaling Mount Olympus; for Mark Spitz's record haul of seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics; for Lance Armstrong as he climbed off his deathbed to win the Tour de France; and for Dale Earnhardt, first in life as the king of Indianapolis, then in memoriam when he died at the wheel of his hurtling Nascar.
They need a special reason to elevate a soccer-ball kicker to their picture gallery of fame. They found one in Pele, when the greatest of them all scored his last big hit on Broadway. They made another exception when Diego Maradona plunged into drug-abusing infamy during the 1994 World Cup Finals in the USA. They were amused when the girl whose penalty won the Women's World Cup for America, Brandi Chastain, pulled off her shirt and celebrated in her bra.
Now they have Becks, our East End boy made good, if not quite great, as an England captain. Welcome to L.A., proclaimed Sports Illustrated, asking "Will He Change the Fate of American Soccer?" Sports Illustrated's cameraman will be among hundreds witnessing Los Angeles Galaxy unveil the 32-year-old Englishman who could earn up to £125million if he defies the gloomy predictions of Vinnie Jones and serves his full five years in football's equivalent of a mink-lined open prison. Namely Major League Soccer.
The article which accompanies the photo-shoot discusses whether Beckham can transform soccer-ball from a marginal role in American sport to major league status, or at least hitch it up a notch in U.S. public perception. That cover picture, however, tells the real story. It shows him holding a round ball, right enough, but he is standing on a red carpet as if at the Oscars and between those velvet ropes through which only the most famous are admitted to Hollywood's most exclusive gatherings.
Beckham reveals new all-white Galaxy kit