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with athletic naked women, I would also be very uncomfortable, although in my case this would be because my eyeballs had fallen out of my head and rolled across the floor from staring so hard.
    But here’s the problem: One of the sports my wife covers is soccer. It happens that there is a business group seeking to bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami and build a stadium here. It further happens that the leader of that group—as you have probably guessed—is none other than: Danny DeVito.
    No, that’s who I
wish
were leading the group. But of course it has to be David Freaking Beckham. As I write these words, he has spent the last few months ardently wooing Miami. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s David Beckham in Woo Mode, attending government functions, meeting with civic groups, talking with students, rescuing babies from alligators, stopping hurricanes with his bare hands and just generally being handsome and charming and hugely popular in the greater Miami area.
    This wooing process included a big downtown reception, to which Michelle, as the
Miami Herald
’s soccer writer, was invited. The good news was, she couldn’t attend, because she was at the Sochi Olympics. The bad news was, she arranged invitations for me and our fourteen-year-old daughter, Sophie. Michelle thought it would be, quote, “fun” for Sophie to meet Beckham. That’s right:
My wife
deliberately arranged for her own daughter, who is female, to physically meet the world’s leading sex symbol
.
    So Sophie and I went to the reception. Many Miami dignitaries were there, including the mayor, and everybody was very excited. I knew this because people actually got there early, which
never
happens in Miami. This is a Latin town, and we operate on Latin time. If you’re invited to, say, a July Fourth picnic scheduled to start at noon, you are considered on time if you arrive any time before Thanksgiving. Miami people are late to their own
funerals
.
    But everybody arrived early for the reception. We stood around for twenty minutes in a fairly dignified manner. Then David Beckham came through the door, wearing a suit, and suddenly the dignitaries turned into a mob
,
swarming toward him as if he were the last lifeboat on the
Titanic
. I’ve never seen anything like it—all these alleged adults acting like teenage girls, desperately wanting to get next to Beckham, be photographed with him, touch him, and ideally bear his children. And those were the
men
. The women were even more aggressive.
    Among those swarming toward Beckham was Sophie, who managed to get next to him for a photo. I am also in this photo, sort of:
    Â© Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com
    That’s me, off to the left. I’m the one Sophie is clearly not even vaguely aware of. She wouldn’t have noticed if I had been actively on fire. She is totally focused on David Beckham, Hottest Man on the Planet, who has his arm around her, causing her to beam with a look of ecstatic radiant happiness that I will never cause to appear on a female face.
    Not that I am bitter!
    In the photo I’m smiling, too, because that’s what you do when your picture is being taken. Also I was happy for Sophie, because this was a big deal for her. But the truth is, when I look at that photo, this is what I see:

    â€œBut Dave,” I hear you saying because you will NOT SHUT UP, “so what if your daughter was thrilled by the opportunity to meet this handsome, charming international superstar with a much nicer suit than yours? At least your wife was safely in Russia and thus wasn’t there to be swept off her feet!”
    No, that happened a couple of weeks later. After Michelle got back from Russia she received an email from one of David Beckham’s public relations people about setting up a meeting between him and Michelle. The email contained the following statement, which I am not making up:
    I think David Beckham was thinking of