Too much Beckham, thankee very much

I just watched a great MLS All-Star game, where the good guys defeated Scottish League champion Celtic 2-0. It could easily have been 4-0 (or more), but the Celtic goalkeeper stopped a penalty kick cold, and stonewalled a wide-open point-blank shot early on. The All-Stars were a good mix of American-born and foreign-born talent, and the pace of the game was exciting from the first minute to the last.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was overshadowed by the idol-worship the ESPN crew was bestowing on David Beckham. Now, Beckham's arrival is exciting and all, and certainly good for the L.A. Galaxy, if not the whole league. And it's a development which probably deserved some comment, and the halftime interview was justified and interesting. Beckham showed in the interview that he is genuinely enthusiastic and was quite the gentleman.

But the ongoing, non-stop chatter about the man just served to insult the quality of the product currently on the field. Every segment of the show somehow found a way to refer him. WHILE THE GAME WAS GOING, we saw him smiling in a booth, sitting in some seats, waving at a friend, walking here, walking there, putting on a microphone, waving some more... It was gratuitous. Rather than augmenting the All-Star Game with some exciting coverage of the Beckham phenomenon, ESPN treated the game as an afterthought, or an accessory to the Beckham Show.

It's not like the players on the field were slouches -- the MLS All-Stars absolutely handed it to a quality European squad. And if the MLS team had the advantage of playing mid-season (it's just pre-season for Celtic), the Scots had the advantage of being a real team that has been through the fires together. It wasn't a fluke -- the MLSers really were better.

The low point of the Beckham idolatry was the interview with the All-Star MVP, a guy named Angel, who scored a very nice goal and has really made a big impression on the league this season. In a quality broadcast, the interviewer would discuss the actual game, the key goal, the European opponent and the player himself for a bit. Then, at the end, it might be worth bringing up a topic like Beckham. Not question #2, for heaven's sake.

It was all just a bit too much.

Beckham will be a great ambassador, etc., etc. I'm not ripping on Becks here -- I'm excited too. But he'll be playing in one stadium, for one team, in front of one crowd each week. The challenge for MLS is to prove to its new fans that the product is a good quality and worth watching -- every week in every stadium. Beckham alone can't do it, and that's why the hero-worship is misplaced. His fame couldn't rescue a flawed product, but tonight's game showed me that the quality is there in MLS.

This was supposed to be a night to show off the talent that's already playing. ESPN lost sight of that.