Football's men of letters generate serious pen and ink
David Beckham has done the unthinkable and reversed the effect of the lesser known "Tyson's law" to win a recall to the England side.
Harry Pearson
May 31, 2007 11:54 PM
David Beckham's latest tattoo declares "Hate me as you fear me". By rights it should say "Hate me as you stare at me trying to work out if that's a T, an L or something in Pushtu that means purity". Because these days Beckham is just about the most widely read man on the planet, the JK Rowling of body-art. If people are reading over Becks' shoulder it's only because they are on a sentence that starts at his scapula and ends at his clavicle. One thing is for certain, Posh Spice need never take a book to the beach if her husband is with her. There's enough on his right arm alone to keep anybody going through a summer holiday. Other men have Love and Hate tattooed on their knuckles. You suspect Beckham has War and Peace tattooed on his chest and half of Anna Karenina too for good measure.
If nothing else Beckham's deserved recall to the England side demonstrates that he is one of the few men around capable of reversing the effects of Tyson's Law. Tyson's Law states that tattoos increase as sporting performance diminishes. It is named after Mike Tyson. Once the most feared heavyweight on the planet, the iron one's Didier Drogba-style dive down the rankings was accompanied by more and more visits to establishments with names like Sink Some Ink and The Naughty Needle. Nowadays Tyson is a walking Rosetta Stone and incapable of beating anyone, including himself (a fight even Don King has failed so far to promote despite the obvious poster strap-line: "Tyson v Tyson. It's Id against Ego!").
Christian Vieri of Italy is one footballer that suffered the Tyson effect.
The burly striker began his international career like a rampaging bull and ended it, at Euro 2004, looking like a man who'd gone to a fancy dress party as the Oxford English Dictionary. His performances in Portugal were to be found under L for listless.
The bulk of Vieri's tattoos are words written in Kanji. The Italian forward claims to have picked these out because he liked the look of them without knowing what they meant. Luckily they turned out to be power, peace and thunder rather than seepage, pie and trumpet. Another of Beck's team-mates, Sergio Ramos, meanwhile, is said to have half a dozen tattoos on his arms that are written in "Elvish". Quite what they say I am not sure but it is probably something profound from the lyrics of Viva Lash Vegash.
Profundity, you see, rather than simple decoration is definitely something today's footballer is looking for when he pops into Crazy Sid's Piercing Parlour and leafs through the designs book. At the last World Cup Iván Kaviedes of Ecuador flaunted an inscription on his wrist that declared "If you don't know me, don't judge me". To which the obvious response was to get a tattoo of your own reading "I don't know you, but I would judge you're the sort of silly twat who thinks that is, like, really deep, man".
The question that must be asked is: who are these tattoo messages aimed at?
In the case of Chelsea's new boy Steve Sidwell, the answer is clear. The midfielder has his wedding vows tattooed on his back. These are self-penned lines of devotion to his wife, Krystell, that declare: "From day one you have been the rock by my side". Whether Krystell is likewise tattooed is not recorded, though perhaps her own sacrifice for love is simply to have held her tongue when her husband compared her to a large inanimate lump with moss growing on it rather than smacking him in the chops. Sidwell's core audience is clearly Krystell, but what of some of the others?
A couple of years ago Beckham's erstwhile colleague at the Bernabéu, Jonathan Woodgate, confessed to having had a 42-word inspirational message tattooed on his back. Since it was plainly not visible to the centre-half himself - unless he did that thing women do when they stand with their back facing the wardrobe mirror holding an open compact case in front of their face and saying "Can you see my knickers? I can see my knickers. Can you see my knickers?" - we can only speculate who it was designed to inspire. Clearly somebody who needs a bit of a morale boost when gazing at the Middlesbrough and England defender's naked shoulders, but who could that be? Mark Schwarzer? Steve McClaren?
At one time a tattoo might have given the footballer a psychological edge, unnerving opponents. That is because at one time the only people who had tattoos were broken-nosed blokes who'd been in the navy, or Durham E Wing.
Nowadays everybody has tattoos. Once a tattoo said "Armed with a chair-leg in a prison riot" now it says "IT consultant with a tracker mortgage and 13 monthly payments left on a Mondeo Zetec". Even the young woman who works behind the counter in my local chip shop is engraved like the second engineer on a Clyde steamer. Mind you, the young woman in the chippy could in all likelihood batter most footballers as swiftly as she does a Dutch Smokey.
