Achilles was the most handsome of the Greeks who fought Troy, but he had a weakness. So, too, on Sunday night in Milan, not even the brand he has built around himself could protect David Beckham from the rupture in his heel that spells the end of his career as an elite footballer.
Beckham the international sportsman probably passed into sepia when he pulled up lame for AC Milan on Sunday night. The club are being awfully sweet about his prospects of returning to fashion city when his long rehabilitation is over. They will miss his product-shifting lustre. But the World Cup will have passed by then. The machine of his fame endures – but his body has broken down.
The list of what Beckham has meant to us since he emerged as a lone flash cockney in the Manchester United golden generation of the early 1990s is a testament to his gift for transcending his skills on the football field, where he will be remembered as the best crosser and dead-ball specialist of his generation, but not a player in the same class as the one who replaced him in the United No 7 shirt: Cristiano Ronaldo.
In no particular order, Beckham, who will be 35 in May, has been cast as alternative royalty, gay icon, an effigy swinging from an East End pub, tattooed spiritualist, kiss-and-tell victim, masculinity re-inventor, wounded bird and symbol of the inflated hopes invested in a crop of feted – but underachieving – England one-man corporations.
He has played a humble Bobby Moore wannabe, a Beverley Hills exile (an infinitely nicer Vinnie Jones, with talent), a proselytiser for "soccer" in America, an OCD-confessor (the neatly lined-up Coke cans in the fridge), a crotch-thrusting billboard model for expensive pants and an incessant attention-seeker, an addiction that warps most celebrities but has not corrupted Beckham's always agreeable nature.
A publisher once asserted that a biography of David Beckham would be a biography of Britain. She meant that it would tell the story of how footballing fame could be industrialised by fusing it to the adjoining worlds of pop and fashion, and then constructing retail messages that would be adjusted as the narrative rolled along. Beckham is not obviously machiavellian – but he is a master of control.
His last act on an English pitch may turn out to be one of high political cunning. Last week, when Milan played Manchester United in a Champions League tie at Old Trafford, Beckham rewarded the home fans for their warm greeting by bending to the turf to scoop up a green and gold scarf: the symbol of resistance to the Glazer family, the American owners who have loaded the club with more than £700m of debt.
This looked like a rare foray outside his safe corporate haven, until reporters asked him to explain why he had wrapped the scarf round his neck. Beckham said: "To be honest, it's not my business. I'm a United fan and I support the club. I always will. It's nothing to do with me how it's run. That's to do with other people."
This was him working both sides of the street. In one hour he had ingratiated himself with United's angry supporters and become their international symbol of defiance, while taking care not to offend the Glazers with his disavowal of interest in the club's ownership. Even before he ripped his achilles tendon on Sunday, there was speculation he might end up as a global ambassador for the club where he made his name and which he still loves.
His final incarnation was as the fighter who lost his starting place with Real Madrid and England but grappled his way back to prominence after semi-retiring to LA Galaxy in the mistaken belief that his time at the top was over. The low standard of America's Major League Soccer was such a culture shock to him that he resolved to reclaim his old place in the European hierarchy by joining AC Milan part-time to impress Fabio Capello, the England coach, and restore his fitness.
Milan's chief executive, Adriano Galliani, gave the game away on Beckham's motives when he said today: "For two consecutive years he came to play for us for one reason only – to stay fit for the World Cup and to further his England career." But some things lay beyond even Beckham's talent for bending balls and scripts. It was playing for Milan that finally wrecked his aim of overtaking Peter Shilton's record for England caps.
"It's broken, it's broken," was Beckham's lament when pain erupted in his heel and he limped into the second-half of his life: a transition that awaits all footballers, who fall into varying states of grief, renewal, success and disarray when the whistle blows on their artificial existence as demi-god.
The scarf-wearing cameo at Old Trafford suggests Beckham will prosper in all sorts of spheres should he wilt in the face of the task ahead. After six months of physio and fitness work, he could return to be an even slower bit-part player for Milan and a blitz-marketeer for football in America, but his England career is surely over: a loss that will cut bone deep.
His best friend at United, Gary Neville, is also thinking of retiring in the summer, but on his own terms, not under a surgeon's knife. Neville says: "Whatever I do in the next 25 years, I can't imagine it's going to be as enjoyable as the last 15-20 years. It can't be.
"I can't think of anything that would ever replace the coming into work and the enjoyment of being around these people, like-minded individuals who want to be as successful as they can and be the best they can at what they're doing. I suppose that's something we've had bred into us since we were 16."
Beckham was there, at 16, when United were administering those lessons to Neville, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs. He is a footballer, first. Everything else flowed from that.
