My husband was out of town hiking part of the Appalachian Trail this week (something I encouraged him to do bc men need hobbies and friends, too!), and so I had a lot of time in the evening to read. But I didn’t actually read, because for whatever reason I tend to watch shows when I’m alone. This is how I managed to cram the four episodes of the Netflix series Beckham into my brain in just three nights.
Neither a fan of football (in the non-American sense) nor a Spice-Girl-ophile, I was reluctant to dive in. What could Posh and Becks possibly offer me? From being a teen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remembered David Beckham as gorgeous and the inspiration for the Kira Knightley movie Bend It Like Beckham. And of course, I knew the Posh pout and like three Spice Girls songs. So it was a great surprise when I ended the series completely blown away by the life lessons and reflections I’d distilled from watching the Beckhams evolve over decades of their very public lives. (A disclaimer: David Beckham’s company produced the show, so one really needs to take any overly generous conclusions with a grain of salt.)
We see David’s devotion to football start young, maybe even before birth as we learn his father was a Manchester United fanatic. Both David and his mother allow that David’s father was very hard on him with regards to the sport. We come to understand football is basically all that David does and he has a tremendous work ethic. By fifteen years old, he’s picked up by some sort of incubator program at Manchester United and he ostensibly joins a new family headed by the Man United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. With absolutely no apology, Ferguson says football is about the performance, not the performer.
Suddenly I’m not so distracted by David’s good looks or his fancy cars and watches or his ever-evolving landscape of tattoos. I’m thinking: how did this parental affection that’s hinged on performance form David’s identity? How did his de facto parent Ferguson’s subversion of the individual to the success of the game shape him?
Perhaps I’d been primed to think this way because I’m reading Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic–and What We Can Do About It. In the book, Breheny introduces the term ‘conditional regard,’ defining it as “‘parental affection that depends on a child meeting certain expectations, whether academic, athletic, or behavioral.” This dynamic in the parent-child relationship can lead to the children focusing on pleasing others “[i]nstead of figuring out who they really are.” I’m imagining that for each David Beckham, conditional regard molds a hundred (or more? I’m completely guessing here) formerly decent soccer players with identity crises. And while I loved watching David’s story, I couldn’t help but think of all the others who didn’t have a professional soccer career to keep up the esteem.
Author Ana Homayoun sheds more light on the complications of defining success too narrowly in new book, Erasing the Finish Line: The New Blueprint for Success Beyond Grades and College Admission. In an interview with Anne Helen Petersen, Homayoun explains that the intense focus “on short-term markers of success (grades, test scores, college acceptances)” does a disservice to our kids who aren’t understanding “the daily routines and habits critical for promoting longer-term well-being and financial stability.” Author and psychologist Satya Doyle Byock describes the situation in starker terms: when we only focus on the external achievement milestones, “lives are reduced to ups and downs of successes and failures.” (See a previous post about Byock’s book Quarterlife here.)
In 1998, David Beckham earned a spot on England’s national football team. In the round of sixteen, England played arch-rival Argentina. With things tied up at 2-2, an Argentine player Diego Simeone fouled Beckham and “rubbed his knuckles against the back of Beckham’s head”. In retaliation, Beckham swung his leg at Simeone who then (in dramatic football fashion) fell over. This split-second of acting out that caused no real physical damage (Simeone confirms this) earned Beckham a red card. Practically this meant England had to play a man down the rest of the game, and England ultimately lost the game in a shootout. Notoriously vicious, the English press vilified Beckham and the public turned on him, resorting to spitting on him and even hanging him in effigy. I think it’s important to remember here that in 1998 Beckham was only 23 years old.
Victoria describes how David fell into a deep depression after the red-card incident. I’d actually be surprised if she said he felt completely fine after an entire nation made him its punching bag. It must have been all-consuming. The risk of this exact event happening again must be practically zer0 (as always flying by the seat of my pants on these numbers), but it struck me as a sad illustration of how transactional we can be and what humanity we sacrifice in our expectations of success. It made me think of much younger people whose whole identities revolve around some sort of external success and how they’ll be affected by life’s inevitable ups and downs.
All of this, of course, led me to social media (because all roads return to social media, don’t they?). We’re participating in a system that’s so focused on eliciting the approval of others, how could we possibly remain focused on finding out our own views, determining our own voice? Just like a child operating under the fickle nature of a parent’s conditional regard, we’re susceptible to the pressure of people-pleasing tendencies, riding a roller coaster of likes and reach and all those other metrics. Maybe we’ll end up like Beckham if we just try hard enough. But most likely we’ll end up somewhere on the spectrum of those hollow former soccer players wondering what the hell happened. I’ll borrow Lee Tilghman’s phrasing: “Social media had fucked our sense of success.”
Junot Diaz recently wrote about writing for the future, and I particularly loved this paragraph about hyper-present-focused careerism awakening “the great capitalist vampire-squid” in us all:
I’m not superhuman; I have a capitalist vampire-squid inside me like everybody else, and it bursts into tentacular life at the slightest hint of money/advantage, and what these 28 plus writing years have taught me is that I do better work, am a better human, when the vampire squid sleeps. And it sleeps best in me when I’m focused not on gaming the precarious present but reaching out to the still-possible unforeclosed future.
The vampire-squid thrives on social media where gaming “the precarious present” is necessarily top of mind. Ironically this affects our actual presence, which furthers our alienation from knowing ourselves and our goals.
So, what’s one to do in writing and in life? Breheny suggests, for our children at least, that we need to let them know they matter even when they’re not performing:
Our job as parents isn’t to push or drag our kids to excellence. It’s to correct the lies that our society tells them: that they matter only if they’re performing, if they’re achieving. Our job is to let them know they are enough, right now, in this moment.
I suspect this is true of us all: we matter in this moment. We could stand to remind each other of this more often.
Lessons from Beckham
Being an intense and obsessive parent may form one of the greatest soccer stars on earth but all it will most likely do is form an identity crisis.
The English press really is insane.
Even really talented people like David Beckham experience failure, setbacks, personality challenges that threaten everything. Bad luck or bad fits altered the course of David’s career. One particular Italian coach told Beckham he’d never play for him again.
For the most part, keep showing up, keep working.
Treat your teammates in life well. They’ll have your back someday. (Like Beckham’s teammates on Real Madrid after the Italian coach wouldn’t let Beckham practice with the team.)
The definition of success, which has always been too limited, continues to shrink.
Posh and Becks had A LOT of footage of them in a time when that wasn’t the norm.
what I read
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
what caught my eye
Absolutely loved Jo Piazza’s interview with Jessica Elefante and Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on the creative surge women in their late thirties and early forties seem to experience.
On writing…adored Paige Geiger’s excerpt of her memoir and hope it makes its way out into the world soon! Jami Attenberg’s piece on perfection and the writing mission was like the warm writing hug I needed. For those of you who read with children, read this excellent piece by Laura Milligan.
Love this! Still finishing Beckham but enjoying it so far for all the same reasons. Am going to get these parenting books now!