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the sanctimonious and hard to please multimillionaire

below i quote extensive proof of why the fiver is something the great coffeehouse tattlers of the eighteenth century would have been proud to write.

Barry Glendenning
Thursday 2 July 2009

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DONOVAN

The Fiver yields to no man in its admiration for American rhythm mag Sports Illustrated. At least that’s what we thought until this morning, when we learned that the collection of archive copies dating back to 1964 that we keep under our mattress isn’t as complete as we thought. It turns out they publish 51 other issues per year, issues in which photos of scantily-clad models playfully hooking their thumbs into each other’s string bikinis are forced to make way for less adventurously illustrated articles … about sport. For reasons best known to the Fiver, it seems that three million red-blooded American males take a weekly interest in this tedious nonsense. That’s almost half as many as take the Fiver.

It’s not as if these articles about sports are particularly incisive. Take this month’s issue, in which an extract from Grant Wahl’s book The Beckham Experiment sensationally reveals that David Beckham may not have had the best interests of LA Galaxy at heart when he retired from football to hang around with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes while occasionally playing soccerball in the MLS for $800m-per-year back in 2007, and that USA! USA! USA! star Landon Donovan got the hump when it was decided that he be stripped of the team’s captaincy so that Becks could be given the armband. A cynic might say that one over-rated blue-eyed poster-boy with a glamourous celebrity wife was jealous at being replaced by another. Not that Donovan’s ever been good enough to be considered over-rated, although he does win the celebrity wives.

“All that we care about at a minimum is that he committed himself to us,” moaned Landon, before spelling out The Rules of Engagement for the man whose time at the Galaxy has been as disastrous for the club as the Fiver predicted it would be six months before he first played for them. “As time has gone on, that has not proven to be the case in many ways - on the field, off the field. Does the fact that he earns that much money come into it? Yeah. If someone’s paying you more than anybody in the league, more than double anybody in the league, the least we expect is that you show up to every game, whether you’re suspended or not.” It’s a valid enough grumble, albeit one smothered by an acrid cloud of sour grapes.

Riper grapes feature in a vino-related vignette featured in the Sports Illustrated bit on Becks, relating to the time he and Abel Xavier were refused wine in a restaurant while out dining with their Galaxy team-mates because American restaurants and bars are staffed by idiots and they were unable to prove they were over 21. They got to join their team-mates in a toast once one of Beckham’s bodyguards pulled The Big “they are”, although Donovan became riled when “cheapskate” Beckham only paid his own share of the bill, rather than risk being labelled a “flash Harry” by covering the entire tab for a group of team-mates … including the sanctimonious and hard-to-please multi-millionaire Landon Donovan.

the fiver

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