Finally, we could say, after several bumptious decades of endless sport, lucrative sponsorships, unflinching charity endeavor and not a few dicey moments along the way, England football legend and current part-owner of Inter Miami (and, not least, the man responsible for bringing GOAT Lionel Messi to the US) was knighted by Charles III during the King’s Birthday Honors at Windsor on November 4 for services “to sport and charity.”
The widely-reported ceremony was as brisk, military and filled with chivalric metaphor as possible, a reminder of the early-medieval institution of the elevation of extraordinary commoners into the narrower, and putatively finer, social and military circle of the courts around European monarchs for service to the various crowns. Specifically, a Knight Bachelor is the lowest and most ancient of the chivalric ranks, and the appellation “Bachelor” refers to the fact that Beckham, and others on that rung, are knighted without an official chivalric order to which they belong, such as Bath or Thistle.
The actual moment of elevation of the commoner Beckham to his Knight Bachelor rank was militarily swift.As Beckham knelt (on his right knee) on the handy knee-stair with its little handrail for those unable to kneel without being steadied, Charles’ swordsmanship in the moment of knighting was brisk and slick — the monarch has clearly done this a few thousand times with nary a nick to the noggin bowed below him.
The administrative drill was faultless: A fraction of a second after tapping his brand-new knight of the realm into his wider titled cohort, the king, still facing Beckham, snapped his sword arm sharply back to pass the weapon to a waiting equerry.
Sir David and Lady Beckham, pictured top minutes after his being minted with the title, had his quite jolly parents in tow for the ceremony as well as for the long and apparently intense after-party that evening at Gordon Ramsay’s splashy restaurant down in Chelsea. The dinner/rager, hosted by Ramsay himself, lasted for hours with all and sundry of the Beckham clan and inner circle present, albeit with the glaring (yet expected) absence of the young newlywed male Beckham heir who was unfortunately named by his parents for the Borough of Brooklyn, New York, because that was where the man’s mother learned that she was pregnant.
Briefly, for clarity: Back in the day, Lady Beckham was impregnated prior to her visit to Brooklyn. And, she has stated, she and her husband simply “liked the name.”
But young Brooklyn’s remarkable absence at Windsor and in London at Ramsay’s earlier in the month for this literal once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (of witnessing one’s father be knighted by “the” King) does bring us to our crux: It’s been a long, tough road for David Beckham to this — for him, anyway — deeply hoped-for honor. The highly amorphous and possibly mountain-out-of-a-molehill “feud” leading to the apparent distancing of Sir David and Lady Beckham’s eldest child from his family is just the latest twist in that road.
Put another way, young Brooklyn Beckham missed a comparatively easy opportunity to show up and at least demonstrate a bit of family feeling, if not actually engaging in some repair work on a few bridges that he seems more or less inexplicably to have rendered into rubble. His general and rather resolute absence from the public doings of the family fold has been Topic A for several months around town, and most pointedly among the bloodshot-eyed coursing dogs of Fleet Street who track such celebrity doings. To be fair, whether “it” can actually be classified as a feud, or whether it’s just some kind of longer-running tiff that’s somehow difficult to untangle, there is in fact considerable distancing at work. And yes, it’s a fact that there is now for Mr. Brooklyn “Peltz” Beckham another petite yet quite steely female at work.
Thus, the putative scion’s absence from the knighting coterie was instantly and excruciatingly covered in London along the lines of: Where-oh-where could the heir to the new knight of the realm be, not standing by as his father is knighted by the King? Yes, he’s lost his way making videos of himself making sandwiches and bottling hot sauce in the clutches of his wealthy American in-laws in Florida.
Or somesuch.
For his part on the day, Sir David seemed, sportingly, and at least publicly, to have risen above it, arguably floated on his day-of-all-days: ‘Today has been such an emotional day — more emotion than nerves, in all honesty. There have been a few tears and a lot of emotion. It’s been a very special day. It’s something that we can all be proud of today as a family. To have my parents there today, to have my wife there to celebrate with my children, it makes it a very emotional day. To receive such an important honor from His Majesty the King — one of the most elegant men, and someone from the most important and respected institution in the world.”
What it actually takes to gain a knighthood, Sir David knows only too well.