Beckham Fatigue

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Human beings who don’t know a jot about soccer and can’t tell Ronaldo from Cristiano Ronaldo still might come down with Beckham Fatigue. Beckham Fatigue is real. Beckham Fatigue is resilient. Specialists have spotted Beckham Fatigue all over the planet, with fresh cases doubtlessly popping up around Los Angeles given this Beckham-to-Milan story.

The ceaselessness of seeing David and/or Victoria Beckham and hearing about David and/or Victoria Beckham triggers Beckham Fatigue, and symptoms include a dullish, gauzy, bored feeling, a sense that the world has gone stale, and a wondering. People who don’t follow soccer might wonder why they see the face so often and why they have to keep hearing the name. People who do follow soccer might wonder why they see the face so often and why they have to keep hearing the name given it belongs to a player who long has qualified as very-very good, but never as ironclad-great.

Both groups of people might recover from Beckham Fatigue only to walk thoughtlessly into a supermarket checkout line and -- boom -- there’s the face and name again upon a magazine. While grocery stores certainly rate the most perilous places for Beckham Fatigue, there’s no assurance against, say, riding in a taxi in Paris and not even pondering the danger when suddenly there’s Beckham in his Armani underwear above a metro stop.

Relapse.

The weirdest thing about Beckham Fatigue? It never seems to stem the march of Beckham Mania. Even here in England, where you’d think people might want to crawl under rugs after years upon years upon years of Beckham Fatigue, newspapers and radio and television teem with this Beckham-to-Milan binge. Some poll fans: What’s your educated guess as to Beckham’s motivation for continuing with England’s national team? Products with Beckham’s endorsement or a link to Beckham reportedly celebrate rises in sales. The AC Milan website, already larded up with stars, coos that Beckham’s coming.

Certainly he betrays an unmistakable decency through the fog of ghastly fame, and absolutely he exudes good-guy, but that doesn’t begin to cover the mystery. Some bugs just prove intractable to antibiotics, avoid extinction and, as with Beckham Fatigue, you get a sense they just might not ever, ever stop.

-- Chuck Culpepper