The Wind Blows Strongest At The Top Of The Mountain:Beckham.

We all know the story, more or less, of David Beckham's incredible career. The ups, the downs, the incredible level of celebrity he achieved and, less well remembered, his ability as a player. But that doesn't stop Netflix's Beckham documentary being an enjoyable watch from start to finish. 

Although it veers a little too close to a hagiography in places (and doesn't touch on former LGBTQ+ ally David Beckham's role in being an ambassador for the Qatar World Cup - a country where homosexuality is illegal) there are lots of footage of the now late forties, and heavily tattooed, Beckham wandering around his massive garden, looking after his bees, talking about his love for Lego, and, more than anything, talking about the love he has for his wife and his kids. At one point, David and Victoria even dance to Islands In The Stream.

It could be schmaltzy but, somehow, it's not. It could be sanitised but, somehow, it's not. The list of talking heads lining up to talk about him shows what high esteem he's held in and it's a pretty impressive cast. There's David and Victoria and there's David's parents Ted and Sandra and then there's Alex Ferguson, Eric Cantona, Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos, Landon Donovan, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Roy Keane, Paul Ince, Phil Neville, Ole Gunnar Solsjkaer, Steve Bruce, Diego Simeone, Fabio Capello, Carlos Quieroz, Florentino Perez, and Michel Salgado (but not, for some reason, Ryan Giggs - hmm) and from outside the world of football there's Mel C, Peter Hook, and Anna Wintour.

Phew! Starting with a soundtrack of Fatboy Slim, Supersonic by Oasis, and Len's Steal My Sunshine the programme kicks off with footage of Beckham scoring THAT goal against Wimbledon in 1996. You know the one. The one from the halfway line. A trick Pele had tried to pull off and failed. Beckham didn't miss.

Beckham had grown up with a Man Utd obsessed dad who worked as a gas engineer and a hairdresser mum. We see footage of his amazing skills as a kid and we hear that he was as football obsessed as his dad. To the point of having no friends, no interest in partying, and no interest in girls.

We see him coming on, as a substitute for Andrei Kanchelskis, for his first Man Utd game against Brighton in 1992 and we see him score his first goal - against Galatasaray - for the club in 1994. Beckham says he was excited to score the goal but even more excited that he got to celebrate it with Cantona.

As his fame grew he began to branch out and soon he was as much a product as a footballer. Striking deals with brands like Adidas and Brylcreem. As the money came in he treated himself to a Porsche and to a Rolex and even, much to Roy Keane's performative astonishment, a very expensive pen.

Girls' knickers were sent to him through the post, he got in the papers for wearing a sarong but Beckham, even now, says the fame didn't change him. Alex Ferguson, for his part, still disagrees. When Beckham and his best mate Gary Neville watched a Spice Girls video, Beckham told Neville he was going to marry "the posh one, the one in the black dress". At that point he'd never met her.

But soon he did meet her, got with her, and would eventually marry her. You get the impression they immediately, and totally, fancied each other and you get the impression that they still do. Beckham got his first England call up for a World Cup qualifier against Moldova in September 1997. Playing at Wembley under Glenn Hoddle who had been one of Beckham's heroes as a boy.

He was picked for the World Cup in France in 1998 (Rio Ferdinand complains the players had to wear "shit suits") and even though no less an authority than Derek Jameson announced that even "you know what" (sex) is not as good as World Cup football, Glenn Hoddle thought Beckham perhaps thought otherwise and, unwisely, questioned Beckham's professionalism.

Even dropping him to the bench. I remember that World Cup and I remember the clamour in the country for Hoddle to play both Beckham and Liverpool's young wonder kid Michael Owen. It was a clamour he eventually gave in to and it worked well. Beckham scoring in a victory against Colombia (I watched it at a very rainy Glastonbury festival, I still remember a field full of people singing along to The Verve's Lucky Man before the game) and Owen against Romania and Argentina.

Owen's goal against Argentina (in the quarter final played in Saint Etienne) was brilliant, a goal for the ages, but it wasn't the only talking point of that game. The other would be David Beckham's red card for a silly, petulant, but hardly aggressive kick at Diego Simeone. Even Simeone, now, says it wasn't a red card but my abiding memory is of a very smug Gabriel Batistuta smirking at Beckham being sent off.

 

Argentina, of course, went on to win the game on penalties but what I didn;t know at the time was that, just before kick off, Victoria had told David she was pregnant with their first child. The initial anger in the country towards Simeone (and, in my case, Batistuta) turned, and was turned, to anger against Beckham. Once Paul Ince and David Batty had missed their penalties, Hoddle, to use football parlance, chucked Beckham under the bus. All but blaming him for the defeat.

Total abuse followed. An effigy of Beckham was hung outside of a pub, he was spat on, people threatened to stab him, and he received bullets through the post. I had no idea, at the time, how badly it affected him and I don't think many of us did. The late nineties was quite a harsh climate.

This was the era Brooklyn was born into. Trips to the Wacky Warehouse were accompanied by hordes of paparazzi and kidnap threats while crowds of 75,000 would sing to Victoria, Brooklyn's mum, that she "takes it up the arse". Victoria recalls it happening at one match and the woman sitting next to her, being unsure what to say, simply asking if she'd like a Polo.

How all this affected David Beckham the person he's still not sure but what seems pretty apparent is that it didn't affect David Beckham the footballer. The next year, famously, Man Utd won the treble. They flew to Barcelona for the Champions League final on Concorde, Beckham with about a suitcase's worth of Orbit gum, Solsjkaer throwing up in the toilets of the plane.

Of course they won with two late goals against Bayern Munich and later that summer David and Victoria got married. Sitting on daft thrones, OK magazine had paid £1,000,000 for exclusive photo rights and it all seemed a bit tasteless at the time. Though Gary Neville, the best man, made a decent joke at the wedding. Suggesting the other members of The Spice Girls had asked the Bayern Munich team to attend the event as they wanted to meet men who could stay on top for ninety minutes and still come second.

After the honeymoon (spent, quite bizarrely, at Andrew Lloyd-Webber's house in the south of France) the Beckhams returned to England and David was soon made captain of England by Sven-Goran Eriksson. During a vital World Cup qualifier against Greece (one that England had to at least draw), Beckham was booed off by the England fans at half time but then he scored one of his best ever free kicks to give England the point they needed and from there his rehabilitation in the eyes of the public seems assured.

Though when he returned to training with Man Utd, Alex Ferguson never mentioned the goal or even the game. Beckham's star continued to rise. Interviews with Parkinson and Ali G, a mohican haircut, dominating games, and filling the tabloids with stories both mundane and slightly bonkers. But when Carlos Quieroz arrived at Old Trafford to become Ferguson's new number two, Beckham didn't take to him and then there was the 'boot room incident'.

Following a defeat to Arsenal, Ferguson was - unsurprisingly - raging. He kicked at a pile of kits and one of Solsjkaer's boots flew out and hit, accidentally - all parties agree, Beckham just above the eye. Nothing too serious but it could have been worse. Ferguson felt Beckham made too much of it but even, after a game with Real Madrid, when Beckham swapped shirts with Zinedine Zidane and Zidane asked him if he was coming to Madrid, Beckham wanted to stay at Man Utd. It was his home. His second family.

Ferguson had other ideas and tried to sell Beckham to Barcelona. When Beckham found out he was now surplus to requirements at Old Trafford he insisted he was sold to Real Madrid - which he was. Another galactico to join the like of Ronaldo, Zidane, and Figo. It would be hard to claim he was a better player than any of them but in terms of marketability he was gold dust. His signing trebled Real Madrid's yearly revenue.

He was by now so famous that The Sun 'newspaper' claimed there was only one man in the world who didn't know who he was - a shepherd in Chad! The Spanish press weren't so kind. Spanish Vogue wrote that Victoria hated Spain and that she thought the country smelt of garlic.

Then, before his first game for Madrid, a new manager arrived at the Bernabeu - Carlos Quieroz. Beckham was substituted (by Quieroz, for Claude Makelele) in his first game,  a loss to a Samuel Eto'o inspired Real Mallorca. It was Mallorca who were Madrid's opponents for their first home game of the season too but this time Beckham played well.

Soon he started scoring goals and winning man of the match awards. The paparazzi in Madrid would follow him everywhere and Spanish TV even showed live footage of Brooklyn being taken on his school run. The rumours of an affair with Rebecca Loos came out. Loos isn't mentioned by name in the programme and David denies having had an affair but it's clear the allegations, true or not, placed a huge stress on their marriage.

The whole situation pissed Victoria off but she seemed nearly as annoyed, understandably, that David chose to do a photo shoot with Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce while she was giving birth to their third child, Cruz. On the pitch, Real Madrid were struggling, people were saying they were a marketing project more than a football team, and they were haemorrhaging mangers.

Quieroz went, Jose Antonio Camacho lasted four months, Mariano Garcia Remon three, Vanderlei Luxemburgo and Juan Ramon Lopez Carlo less than a year. Even the owner Perez resigned. Eventually the disciplinarian Italian manager Fabio Capello arrived. He put Beckham and Ronaldo on the bench. The owners of LA Galaxy spotted this, knew he wouldn't be happy, and made a move for him. He'd join them eventually but he had unfinished work at Madrid first.

Capello told Beckham he'd never play for Real Madrid again but, eventually - following a string of poor results, he was recalled to the the team and helped them come back from what looked like a disaster of a season to win the Spanish league - and then he moved to Los Angeles.

Arriving in LA, Tom Cruise and Will Smith threw a welcome party for him and Stevie Wonder turned up to play Happy Birthday to him at that event, The celebrity lifestyle was going well but the football at LA Galaxy wasn't great. He was playing with, mostly, journeymen. Some of them part time footballers who worked as pool cleaners and gardeners. It was a far cry from having Zidane and Ronaldo as team mates.

He was earning way way more than them. They estimated he earned more in the time it took him to go to toilet than they did in a year. The team struggled, David wasn't happy but Victoria was. She loved living in LA. Then, of all people, Fabio Capello became England manager and told David that if he wanted to make the World Cup squad he would have to return to, and play for, a top European club.

So he went on loan to AC Milan. Upsetting Victoria - and Landon Donovan - his LA Galaxy team mate. Galaxy fans (like England and Madrid fans before them) started to boo him on his return but, as ever, he managed to turn it round - especially when him and Donovan, the Galaxy's best homegrown player, put their 'shit' to one side.

After five years in California, David and Victoria moved back to the UK but, ever restless and in need of football, David immediately went to France and started to play for Paris SG (under Carlo Ancelotti). He only played ten games for PSG as he felt time was creeping up on him. His final game, against Stade Brestois 29, took place in May 2013 and he cried when he left the pitch.

Almost immediately he started to head up Inter Miami and eventually got them to sign Lionel Messi. Beckham seems content with his life now. He's got some of the most amazing football memories anybody could wish for (though sadly no trophies for England), he's got a loving family around him, and he's got a ridiculously massive house and garden. More than anything he smiles a lot and if you watch this you'll find yourself smiling with, and for, him. What a life.