The Beckham Press Conference

David Beckham held a press conference today in Hoboken, New Jersey as he prepared to make his 2009 MLS debut with the Los Angeles Galaxy as they take on the Red Bulls on Thursday evening. In attendance at the press conference was Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, whose book The Beckham Experiment was just released in stores on Tuesday of this week. Also present was This Is American Soccer’s Adam Spangler, an excellent writer himself. Both were Twittering the conference and I found myself glued to Twitter following along with their tweets this morning. Beau Dure from USA Today also had an interesting comment which I included. This is Twitter at its best.

Here is the transcript:

@TIAS Off to Hoboken for Beckham press conference. (What is) More
likely to happen-Becks says something interesting or goes after
@GrantWahl ?

@GrantWahl Driving up to Beckham press conference in Hoboken (12:15 pm
ET). This should be fun.

@TIAS From press conference: Beckham reaffirms he wants to stay
involved with MLS after playing days.

@GrantWahl At DB press conference–asked him how he can justify saying
fully committed to MLS when he’s parttime player this year and (he
hopes) next.

@TIAS Beckham takes dig at Wahl, asks Wahl if his question is for his
next book or SI.

@GrantWahl DB responds asking if this is “official” interview for my next book.

@GrantWahl I tell him whether it’s official or not, it won’t be as
interesting as the (The Beckham Experiment) book.

@GrantWahl Not a lot of reflection or share of responsibility for
two-year fiasco with LA: (Beckham responds) “I never see that I should
be doing things differently.”

@bdure_usat  @GrantWahl won’t be “taking journalism lessons from
Beckham.” My take: Becks should read this if he wants to rebuild
image. http://c0ppe.tk

Great stuff with lots of drama!

By the way, you really need to read the link that Dure gave in his tweet. It’s Wahl’s latest piece for SI concerning Beckham and what he might want to do to improve his image.

Earlier Becks had done a soft interview with NBC’s today show. I hesitated on actually linking the video, but I thought it was interesting to see Beckham’s general attitude concerning his play for the Galaxy.  By the way, a word to Beckham: The honeymoon is over dude. You need to start playing some real football.

Click here (if you dare) for the link to the video.

I added this late Wednesday evening.

Grant Wahl has some S.I. footage of the press conference with Wahl basically saying the same thing he had in his book and in the article that Beau Dure links to. You can hear Wahl ask the question and watch David Beckham skirt around that question.