SOMETIMES it’s OK to doff your cap and admit your own shortcomings.
And so it’s time to say that, of all the working-class blokes called David born on the outskirts of East London in the mid-1970s, I’m not the most culturally significant.
I’m definitely not the most famous such David, nor the most handsome, nor the wealthiest, nor the best at football.
As a knight of the realm and the godfather of metrosexuality, as a style icon and one half of the colossal global Brand Beckham, as a Treble winner, a Ballon d’Or runner-up and a member of England’s 100-cap club, Sir David Galactico Goldenballs Beckham edges out the rest of us.
Aged around 13, I once played against Beckham for Romford Royals against his Ridgeway Rovers in the Echo Junior League.
He already had a reputation, was on Tottenham’s books, and — though he was playing one age group above — he stood out.
If my memory is correct, we were tonked and Beckham scored from long range.
Although our keeper was vertically-challenged and the goalposts were full-sized.
I’m pretty certain that of the other 21 kids on that pitch, none of us was included in the King’s Birthday Honours List, none of us has been paid millions to pose in our undercrackers, none of us married a Spice Girl and none of us carried the Olympic torch on a speedboat during the London 2012 opening ceremony.
In my late 20s, I spent three weeks touring Asia following Beckham and his new team-mates after he had moved between Manchester United and Real Madrid, the two most famous football clubs on Earth.
Across China, as well as Japan and Thailand, I’ve never experienced hysteria like it.
In Tokyo, the screaming and swooning felt like the height of Beatlemania 40 years earlier.
This newspaper sent three of us on the pre-season trip — two reporters and a photographer.
It cost a bomb but was worth every penny because everything about Beckham was front-page or back-page news.
One night in Hong Kong, a group of us chatted to Beckham at the bar — we were hoping to have a proper sit-down interview which never materialised.
That was the night he ended up being photographed looking cosy with his personal assistant Rebecca Loos, who alleged an affair with Beckham.
But while I’ve covered many better footballers than Beckham, I’ve never experienced anything like the stratospheric levels of his fame in 2003.
Beckham has been knighted for services to football and charity and, OK, he’s done plenty for both.
But equally he could be ennobled in ermine for his services to the male-grooming industry — which he pretty much invented — or to tattoo parlours, or what we used to call barbering.
A few weeks ago, a 16-year-old called Felix, the son of a good mate, asked me how good Beckham had been.
After grimacing that this near-contemporary was now a historical figure, I replied that he was a very good footballer who was great at a couple of things — direct free-kicks and crossing.
I told him few sportsmen had seen their reputations swing so wildly — from the halfway-line goal at Selhurst Park which launched him, to the red card for kicking Diego Simeone at the 1998 World Cup which saw his effigy hanged by a noose from a pub, to scoring the last-gasp free-kick against Greece which secured England’s qualification for the next World Cup.
But I also mentioned Beckham’s impact on Felix and kids like him — indeed, on pretty much any man in Britain born after him — has been far beyond the scope of any of the significant things he achieved on a football field.
Felix goes to the gym, he uses “products”, he cares what he looks like, he’s bothered about what suit he’ll wear to the school prom. And all his mates are the same.
I was nothing like that and nor were any of the kids I grew up with because we were (just about) pre-Beckham.
After Beckham broke, working-class English lads would never be the same again.
Beckham changed the way Englishmen looked, the way they acted and the way they thought.
Before there were people on the internet called “influencers”, Beckham was THE influencer.
He is not particularly intelligent — though he is nowhere near as thick as often made out — and despite being in the public eye for 30 years, he’s rarely said anything interesting.
He is polite, decent and has a nice line in self-deprecation but he is hardly charismatic.
He has never expressed any political allegiance nor been a strident campaigner for any cause.
And he might not even have been the best footballer to have attended Chingford Foundation School — Harry Kane has a claim on that.
Yet his impact on our everyday lives has been more wide-ranging than any politician.
Though heterosexual — by all accounts quite prolifically so — Beckham revelled in his status as a gay icon.
He wore a sarong, had an angel tattooed across his back and changed his hairstyle every fortnight.
None of these things seem unusual to the Love Island generation but before Beckham, straight, working-class English blokes didn’t act like this.
Chris Waddle’s mullet had remained unchanged for years.
Beckham’s later work as an ambassador for Qatar — where homosexuality is illegal — suggests a certain cynical opportunism in his earlier actions.
Icon, you con, he cons.
But he did undoubtedly play a major role in making homophobia socially unacceptable.
His impact on society has been more good than bad.
Going to the gym is healthy. Taking pride in your appearance is good to a point — although I fear many more boys now suffer from the same “body image” obsessions that have plagued girls for decades.
And whatever you think of the Honours system — personally I’m not a fan — this knighthood means the world to Beckham.
After missing out in 2017, leaked emails suggested he referred to the Honours committee as a “bunch of c***s” — and, although he claims he was hacked, this did display an authentic East London turn of phrase.
Yet, after becoming Sir David this weekend, Beckham claimed: “I never could have imagined I would receive such a truly humbling honour.”
Like most of us, Beckham is made up of many contradictions.
It seems to me that if you’re going to have an Honours system, it would feel weird for Beckham not to be knighted.
Because Beckham — prettier than ever at 50, despite denying the use of “Brotox” — is simply everywhere.
From his role as co-owner of Inter Miami at the Club World Cup, to stripping naked in an advert for designer drawers, to the family feud that leaves the Beckhams only second to the Royals in the national consciousness.
For me, the Beckham phenomenon is best summed up by his role in England’s 2010 World Cup campaign.
He was 35 by then, his international career over and playing Major League Soccer for Los Angeles Galaxy.
Though Beckham was neither a player nor a coach, England’s manager Fabio Capello — not usually one for frippery — employed him to hang around the dugout looking handsome and stylish in a three-piece suit, just being David Beckham.
No other Englishman of his generation has ever been paid to do a thing like that — and certainly no other David born on the outskirts of East London in the mid-1970s.
