The Real lord cometh

Football is, for once, far from my mind as I sit at the bar of Nairobi University’s faculty of medicine interviewing a young Kenyan doctor engaged in pioneering research into HIV and Aids.

The doctor, thrilled to be part of a committed group of Kenyan scientists developing a vaccine for the killer disease, says: ‘I feel so great about working in this unit. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. In fact, it’s just the way Beckham must be feeling about playing for Real Madrid.”

Not more than five seconds later my mobile phone rings. It is José Angel Sanchez, the director of marketing at Real, a man I had met once, a month or so earlier.

‘Real Madrid Television is doing the exclusive interview with David Beckham in Madrid on Tuesday,” Sanchez says. ‘It is going to be broadcast the world over. We want you to be the interviewer.” I am, to say the least, thrown. This was two weeks ago, on a Thursday. On the Saturday I was due to fly to Rwanda and from there to South Africa and Angola for another week of work, doing stories on the great dramas that assail the continent for El Pais.

I tell Sanchez that he has put me in a jam, but I would think about it and call him back. Then I consult my Kenyan doctor, who is as stupefied as I am at the cosmic connection his words had elicited.

‘So what should I do, doctor?” I ask. ‘My friend,” he replies, ‘when the train comes, you must catch it.”

I phone Sanchez and say I will be catching the train. I have one condition: that Real Madrid make a donation of some sort — signed shirts, balls, money for coaching, whatever — to the development of football in Rwanda.

He agrees immediately, as he and Florentino Pérez, the Real president, had done when I broached the subject with them in May.

I have a bit of a thing about this, having seen the miraculous role football has played in doing the impossible in a country so poor and so damaged: reconciling Hutus and Tutsis barely 10 years after one of the most savage slaughters of innocents in history.

I fly west on Saturday morning to Rwanda, where the first thing I see upon emerging from the airport in Kigali is a giant billboard of Beckham in a Manchester United shirt advertising a local product in French, and then spend the weekend going from mud hut to mud hut deep in the geographic heart of Africa, listening to the most harrowing and hopeful stories I have heard in 20 years covering international conflicts.

Back in Kigali, the capital, on Sunday night, I find myself sitting at a bar with a brigadier general who had been at the head of the guerrilla forces that seized Rwanda, stopping the genocide shortly before the Tutsi population was wiped out in June 1994.

‘So,” says the brigadier general, sipping a rum and Coke, ‘there is a question that has been troubling me these last two weeks: in what position do you think Beckham will play at Real Madrid?” I tell him I would try to get back to him on that one in a couple of days’ time.

Next morning, at the crack of dawn, I am on a Rwandair Express flight to Nairobi, from where I take Kenya Airways to Amsterdam, then KLM to Madrid. At 11pm I collapse into a lush bed at the five-star Fenix Hotel into which Real had had the goodness to book me and the bloke on the Kigali billboard.

At 12.45am the first phone call comes in. For the next 48 hours every radio journalist in Spain (but not in Catalonia, where they pretend nothing is happening) calls to ask, first, what it is like to have been anointed the Chosen One and, second, how it feels to be seated at the right hand of ‘El Lord Ingles”.

The interview with Beckham is pushed forward to Wednesday morning, an hour before what is to be his rhapsodic presentation as a Real player at the club’s basketball stadium. He arrives barefoot, like Christ.

We natter a bit about [his son] Brooklyn and raising bilingual children and Nelson Mandela and I tell him about the first time I had seen him — 10 years earlier with his United teammates in Tembisa township in South Africa, when he was a scrawny blond kid whose right foot had a special way of making contact with the ball.

What really breaks the ice and my nerves (for I have never done anything quite like this) is when, a minute into the interview, he laughs at my first joke. Or rather Roberto Carlos’s joke.

I quote to him a line the Brazilian had given a journalist in São Paulo the day before. ‘I’m so glad there’s finally going to be two good-looking guys at Real Madrid,” the Spanish press has quoted him as saying. ‘I’ve felt so lonely in such an ugly team.”

Beckham does not have much of a comeback to that, except to remark that Carlos is indeed a remarkably handsome fellow and one he would far rather play with than against. He then speaks with a fan’s enthusiasm about the joys of watching Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo play, what a mighty football brain Raul has and how much he is looking forward to playing alongside Luis Figo.

As to the great question of our time: ‘In which position would he play?” — no joy. That would be up to the coach, he says, and besides, he would have to fight for his place like everybody else. On Sir Alex Ferguson, Beckham does not say ‘no” when I ask him whether his Dad had spoken for him when he said the Scot had driven him out of Old Trafford.

Instead he shifts into automatic pilot mode, not budging from his line that the United manager had been like a father to him and so forth.

And, of course, he is looking forward to living in Spain with his family. But he sounds as though he means it. And I believe him when he says — in reply to a question about whether he had been rather brave in choosing Real when he could have gone somewhere such as Barcelona, where he would have been a big fish in a smaller pond — that he has no pretensions to being the star of the team, that winning his place and putting passes through for Ronaldo to score would be reward enough.

A message, all in all, tailored to score a massive public relations coup in Spain. Even the bare feet, whether he has intended it this way or not, conveys an important subliminal message to the wary element among Real fans: that, never mind all the images of him being fêted in the Far East like the Pope, his feet remain on the ground.

That, never mind the pretty face, it is his feet that define who he is.

All of which, taken together during his 30-hour stay in Madrid, achieves its desired effect, most notably among all those who meet him at Real. Again and again — be it the team doctor, the security people, the directors, the marketing types or my colleagues at Real Madrid TV — the consensus is that he is an extraordinarily nice, warm, polite young man.

And just a little shy, providing that touch of fey vulnerability amid such wealth and good looks that drive young hearts in Madrid, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok into raptures of longing and delight.

The government of Thailand, it was reported recently, has offered money to Real to play a match there during their exhibition tour to Asia this month, which means Thailand’s leaders have judged that a visit by Becks and the galacticos would help them to consolidate their grip on power.

A friend of my Rwandan brigadier general, a man high up in the government there, phones me on Thursday to see how the interview had gone.

I say it had gone fine and that I plan finally to wear a badge someone gave me years ago that reads: ‘Your 15 minutes are up.”

Then I ask him, given that Rwanda will be having its first elections since the genocide next month, whom his president would rather share a vote-winning photo opportunity with right now: the president of the United States or David Beckham. The Rwandan government man laughs. ‘Beckham,” he says. ‘Not the slightest doubt about it.” —