David Beckham: Snapshot

David Beckham: Five Fun Facts

1. David Beckham takes after his mother, Sandra, who is prone to crying. "My dad's sort of a man's man, but I've got more of my mum's personality," he tells Sports Illustrated."She's a lot softer, a lot more affectionate. We both get really emotional."
2. There is a gold-covered bronze statue of David Beckham in a Thai Buddhist temple, a 10-ft. statue built of chocolate in Tokyo, and his picture adorns a Japanese chain of beauty salons.
3. In a 2004 celebrity nativity scene at Madame Tussauds in London, wax figures of David and Victoria Beckham depict the couple as Mary and Joseph. George Bush is one of three wise men; Hugh Grant is a shepherd; and Kylie Minogue is an angel. A Vatican spokesman told the London Times it was "in very poor taste."
4. After posing for the cover of Attitude, an English gay magazine, David Beckham, who is known for wearing his wife's nail polish and underwear, tells Sports Illustrated that "being a gay icon is a great honor for me. I'm quite sure of my feminine side, and I've not got a problem with that at all. These days it's the norm, and it should be."
5. The frequent English magazine and tabloid coverboy posed on the cover of American Vanity Fair shirtless in July 2004, wearing a string of Dolce & Gabbana-designed rosary beads. Sales of rosary beads consequently spiked in the U.K., reported the BBC.

David Beckham: Biography

1986

Scout, You're It!

An 11-year-old Beckham wins an important youth soccer event, the Bobby Charlton Soccer Schools National Skills competition. He also impresses Manchester United scouts while playing a game for his neighborhood club, the Ridgeway Rovers. When his mother tells him Manchester United wants him to try out for their youth league, he "just stood there and cried," Beckham says in Sports Illustrated.

1991

July 08

Living the Dream

Beckham leaves home at 16 to play for the training division of his favorite club, Manchester United, a legendary English soccer team with more than fifty million fans worldwide. He works on developing his signature free kicks, passing and corner kicks – skills that later make him known for his deadly accurate, game-clinching goals. He joins the team proper in 1993 and makes the starting lineup for the first time two years later, making an immediate splash as a talented goalmaker. He's voted the Professional Footballers' Association Young Player of the Year in 1997.

1997

March

Posh Meets Becks

Victoria "Posh Spice" Adams, at the height of Spice Girls fame, sits for an interview with a soccer magazine. The reporter shows her a picture of Beckham. "I had no idea who he was," she tells Britain's Sun, "but I remember thinking one word: gorgeous." She meets Beckham for the first time after a United-Sheffield game that month, and it was "love at first sight." They become a British tabloid obsession.

Read More on David Beckham's Life

David Beckham: Special Feature