Guy, my little friend from school whose cubby hole is near mine, asked for me to form an opinion for him on the Beckham confrontation with a fan. First, a recap.

Here’s my take: Beckham’s career was stalling out in Europe so he and Posh Spice decide that they’ll move to Hollywood and take over. He’ll draw hundreds of thousands of fans to games and she’ll be the next Desperate Housewife. As it turns out, she’s a no-talent hack who can’t get a job and Becks find that his team is awful, primarily due to the fact that MLS has a salary cap that European leagues don’t, so if you sign one superstar then the rest of your team is necessarily shit. He fills away stadiums the first time he plays in them, but that soon wears off and it’s back to playing in front of 6K people in Kansas City on Wednesday night, and David’s effort level drops considerably.

Along with this, the Galaxy sign Ruud Gullit to be the new manager, a move allegedly engineered by Beckham’s marketing group. Gullit is a former world-class player for Holland, but oddly enough he’s been a pretty lousy manager (see my posts on Gullit’s appointment when it happened). The season nosedived and it became clear the team was going nowhere, and either Gullit jumped or was pushed out of the job by the Galaxy management. Miffed, Beckham mails in his performances on the field.

Somewhere along the line David realizes that if he gets first-team football with a respectable European club, he has a shot of making the England World Cup squad going to South Africa next summer. Rather than doing the charity work and glad-handing with the Galaxy as he promised, he requests (and is granted) the opportunity to play with European powerhouses AC Milan in Italy in the off-season. He proceeds to shoot the lights out in his earliest appearances, showing that he’s not washed up but rather he wasn’t too keen on burning too many calories for LA. Rather than coming back for preseason training with the Galaxy, Beckham requests (and receives) a loan extension so he can finished Milan’s season, effectively meaning he missed about half the Galaxy’s season. He also repeatedly requested (and was denied) a permanent move to the Italian club.

When he returned to the US last week, he’s all “What’s the big deal? I asked for a chance to play with a huge club and it was granted. Now I’m back and I’m all about the Galaxy.” This may sound nice, but it glosses over a lot discord he caused by jerking the team around, not trying very hard, and generally doing his best to find an escape clause in his contract rather than touring the US to build the sport in this country. Many die-hard Galaxy fans realize that while Beckham may be good for media attention for the league and selling shirts to no-nothings, he’s actually cancerous for their team and fear that his presence will disrupt the decent season they’ve put together in his absence. Since Beckham is first and foremost about image, he doesn’t want signs that say “Judas” and “Go Home Fraud” tarnishing his reputation and he lost his cool.

That’s a somewhat colored, but I feel pretty accurate, summary of the last couple years. I am also of the opinion that Beckham is a very good looking man who has rocks for brains, and who has turned his life over to money-men charged with wringing as much cash from his image as possible and they’ve done a good job. Like I said, David is pretty simple (if you listen to his interviews, you can tell they’re totally rehearsed answers that don’t always match the questions) and very sheltered (as most global celebrities are) so, like Nicole Ritchie or Paris Hilton, he doesn’t understand it when people react poorly to him acting on his totally self-centered sense of reality. Unlike those two harpies though, I think Beckham is a genuinely nice guy who likes kids and likes the idea of working towards making soccer a dearly-loved sport in America, but he’ll drop that in a split second if it’s not in his immediate best interests.

So fraud? Sham? Judas? Traitor? I would say those are strongly worded but pretty accurate adjectives that describe this professional athlete’s relationship with the league he’s been contracted to for the job he swore he’d do, even if he’s quite different from the typical egomaniac jackass athletes like Ocho Cinco, Randy Moss, or Terrell Owens. However, if brings his star playing power to this much-improved LA team, I think all would be forgiven (which is what FSC’s Nick Webster said already, though I think he lets Becks off too easy).

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