David Beckham and Landon Donovan kiss and make up

By: NathanHJ | July 13th, 2009

Or at least come close.

As my good friend and late-night opium-smoking buddy Grahame Jones says in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times,

Although they have not exactly kissed and made up, their mini-feud is history. At least for now.

I swear I wrote the headline for this posting before I read through the entirety of my best pal and speedball-sharing bro’s latest piece on L’affaire Becks-Donovan. (I’m just kidding about the speedballs and opium. Everyone knows that Grahame is a simple blue-flake man. Ok ok! I keed, I keed! It’s really black tar. No. Seriously. I’ve never met the man. Well, there was that one time in a Thai bath house. No! I’m kidding! That was really in back alley in Rangoon. Now THERE’S a heckuva story. Ha ha! No. Again, I’m just joshin’. But I have to say if you ever need a man who can put back a pint and then grab your hat back from a gang of monkeys with hash pipes, then Grahame’s the guy I’d call. Right. For real this time. I’m making all this up. I just want to see if Jones ever Googles himself.)

Here’s the good part,

“It’s over,” Beckham said. “I’m not going to talk about what was said. That’s between me, Landon and the manager. But it’s finished. It’s over. So we move on.

“We spoke, the two of us, and also Bruce, and like I said, it’s finished.”

Donovan, while not exactly apologizing, said he was sorry for the fuss that his honestly stated opinions in the book caused, including describing last season as “miserable” and saying he wanted to see Beckham benched if he was not going to show some effort.

“There’s a lot of things I regret,” Donovan said Monday. “I regret the way that I went about this and I regret some of the things I said. For me, it’s not a fiasco. I knew what I was doing. I was not the smartest in those moments.”

Donovan indicated he and Beckham had patched things up.

“We’re getting past it, we’re moving on,” Donovan said, adding that any lingering ill will had not been evident during practice. “Being on the field was great. It was fun. It was good to have him back.”

Wait, that’s the good part? No, that’s totally boring. Where’s Giorgio Chinaglia when you need him?

Ah, but, thanks to Billy Witz at USA Today, we’ve got (a guy from) the LA Riot Squad on record saying what many fans really feel,

“The teeny boppers and the soccer moms are still going to love him, but to the die-hard fans, he’s Judas to us,” said Matt Simanski, a member of the Riot Squad fan club. “Donovan’s comments were absolutely spot-on. Beckham … sold us out. The guy is dead to us.”

Whoops. You mean the fans want something on the field for that $6.5 mil a year? And by “field” we mean the one in California, not the one in Italy.

On the other hand, this is hilarious (and I’m lifting it its entirety from MLS Rumors because my own version of that book that comes out on Tuesday has yet to arrive. But I’m not bitter.)

Here is an excerpt from Page 156 from “The 19 Takeover”, Chapter 9 of Grant Wahl’s “The Beckham Experiment”

As he took his seat, Gullit flagged down Galaxy press officer Justin Pearson, “Justin, could you get me an espresso, please?” When Pearson returned from the café counter, he had bad news: They didn’t serve espresso.

Gullit frowned. He wasn’t in Europe anymore. He was in America, a fact highlighted by what was availble at the café, the Special of the Day advertised on a nearby sign: CHILI-CHEESE DOG. If there was a defining metaphor for Year Two of the Beckham Experiment, this was it.

Could Europe and America coexist on the Los Angeles Galaxy, especially after Tim Leiweke had dropped millions of dollars on high-priced Europeans (David Beckham, Ruud Gullit, Terry Byrne) whose arrivals had turned the worlds of the team’s ruling Americans (Landon Donovan, Alexi Lalas) upside down?

Yet Gullit vowed he was going to adjust. Not to chili-cheese dogs, mind you, but to the peculiarities of MLS. “I have to adapt myself to the American way,” he said. “I’m not going to put myself in a position that I know better than the rest. I can’t. I don’t want to be a wise guy and tell them I want to change this and this. I have to accept it.” Already, however, the transition had been difficult — and the source of the predictable worlds-colliding unintentional comedy. Just days after Gullit had taken over, Lalas tried to explain to him the rules of the MLS expansion draft, which called for each team to submit a list of twelve protected players. The first year San Jose Earthquakes could select one player from each team who wasn’t protected. (The Galaxy ended up losing Gavin Glinton.)

“Ruud, you can protect twelve players,” Lals told him.
“No, I want to protect them all,” Gullit replied. “I don’t want to lose any of them.”
“Okay, Ruud, I understand what you’re saying, but the rules are you have to protect twelve.”
“Why would I not protect them all?”
“Well, you can’t.”
“Then the player should just refuse the transfer!”
“Number one, it’s not a transfer. Number two, this is MLS, and you can’t refuse that. There’s very few players with no-trade clauses.”

Gullit threw up his hands in disgust. He felt the same way about the MLS salary cap and roster limits. As preseason training neared, Gullit wanted to bring in new players, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been in the Premier League. “This trading thing, it’s so complicated,” he said.
“It’s like a stock market. If you want a player, then you have to get rid of another player to get under the salary cap.”