The Michael Ballack/Becker-Spiegel Gay Affair, Part III

If you've been following the hullaballoo over the ridiculous gay-baiting comments made about the German national team (die Mannschaft) by Michael Becker, the agent of star player Michael Ballack, then you might enjoy taking this a bit further.

Briefly, as noted here, a Der Spiegel article reported the comments Becker made, which included such inane things as referring to specific (but unnamed in the article) players as "gay" or "half-gay" (whateverthehell that means). But his real problem seemed to be the exciting style of play of this newfangled, diverse team. That in itself signified homosexuality to this professor of humankind. But as other commentators have pointed out, Becker was likely trying to talk down the new world of German football because his star client, Ballack, is every bit the representative of the old style of German football: disciplined, slow,  and unexciting.

So, it's disciplined, slow and unexciting, versus disciplined, fast and exciting and "schwul"? Well, I think the German Volk have spoken, and it's wildly in favor of the gay boys, er, the allegedly gay players, no, wait, the almost completely straight players who have been insulted by Becker as playing "gay" football.

Now, leaving aside the ancient squabble of whether gay should even be an insult, it seems inescapable that Becker was insulting the team on purpose. But here's what astonishes little old gay me: Ballack is still the official captain of the team, even though Phillip Lahm filled in for him during the World Cup; so Ballack potentially will take the field in training and competition with those players at some point, and does he really need his ancien regime agent sowing discord and ill will among his team. A team captain is supposed to lead the team, defend it vigorously. But I think each player will likely be looking at Ballack when he comes to the locker room before his first get-together with them, and they'll see Becker-Ballack.

That can't be good. And that's on top of the bad press Becker has caused for his client with the general fans. I don't know anything about Ballack's private beliefs, but I've never heard of him being bigoted. He has always been quite popular, as far as I know. He might be old-style, but I don't think of him as a bad guy. He should get a new agent to make sure others don't begin to think so.

Anyway, in the spirit of lightening up this soap opera-ish tale, I'll note that my favorite tweet that I saw on the topic was to the effect of: "Michael Ballack's manager calls German national team 'gay'; homosexuals say,' Please let it be Podolski!'"

I rather like that. And not just because Podolski wears a game shirt that's a size or two smaller than other players would wear, so it shows off his well-muscled torso. It also just reminds us not to lose our sense of perspective. Becker might represent the old-style football figure who talks dumb and tough and offensively; but Germany has moved on, which is shown by the way the country has wildly embraced this team. At about the same time as the Spiegel article came out, there was the cover story in Stern magazine (see photos above and below) celebrating this team. The German national team includes players from Turkey, Brazil, Ghana, Bosnia, Poland, Spain, Tunisia, Nigeria, and of course good ol' Deutschland. And it might be the most popular team in German history that didn't actually win the Cup.

So I decided to do Becker's job for him, and I paged through Stern's article, which features many of the players with large photos and short bios. Is Mesut Özil gay? That'd be neat. What about Cacau? Very cute, especially in the photo showing him in traditional German clothes. Jérôme Boateng and Marko Marin? Cool, yeah, sure, make them gay. Serdar Tasci? Yeah. Sami Khedira and Mario Gomez, or Piotr Trochowski or Mirslav Klose? Wonderful. Thomas Müller, Dennis Aogo, or Bastian Schweinsteiger? Nice to contemplate. Lukas Podolski? Please let it be Podolski!

The Der Spiegel Article on Ballack's Agent's Gay-Baiting Comments

In a blog post yesterday, I noted that German soccer star Michael Ballack's got a new headache: An agent who doesn't know when to shut up and keep his silly thoughts to himself. Agent Michael Becker apparently went on and on about how various members of Germany's third-place World Cup team were gay.

You can read the entire Der Spiegel article, translated into English, here (or, in German, here). The article frankly makes him sound less menacing but probably dumber than Mel Gibson, who's getting a lot of deserved heat over the latest flare-up in his long history of anti-semitic, anti-gay, misogynistic, racist rants. But Mel (who, let's be honest, is probably suffering from some mental problems) at least generally knows to shut up about his crackpot beliefs when the camera's running. (No, not always, but generally. It's usually chalked up to extreme inebriation when he gets on a hate rant. I personally don't think the drinking is an excuse; not everyone who gets drunk thinks that Jews are warmongers or that ...  oh, hell, I'm not going to repeat all the crap that man says.)

Anyway, in the Spiegel article by Alexander Osang (which is quite good and worth reading in whole), Becker is reported to be acting as if his anti-gay attitude were the norm:

He talked a lot about people who were envious of his client, because they were supposedly mediocre, ugly, untalented, bureaucratic, provincial, unmanly or gay. He told me some unbelievable stories, which I wrote down on my pad of paper. Becker didn't seem to mind, perhaps because he assumed that they would never make it into print anyway, or that they were already common knowledge. A few days later, on the sidelines of a farewell match for footballer Bernd Schneider at Bayer Leverkusen, Becker told a group of agents and journalists in the Bayer clubhouse that there was a former player on the national team who was about to go public with the names of "the gay combo." I expected my fellow journalists to be all ears, but they seemed relatively blasé about Becker's remark. It seemed that every sports journalist was already familiar with the alleged homosexual conspiracy swirling around German coach Joachim Löw's team.

And this:

[Becker] told me, beaming, how Elton John had sung the German national anthem at Ballack's wedding. When I asked him whether he thought that a player whose nomination to the team had come as something of a surprise was gay, Becker said: "He's half-gay." When he said that, I realized that all of this was somehow synonymous with something Becker could no longer understand. It was something that was light, non-ideological, dance-like, beautiful, joyful, and easily confusing for someone whose life had revolved around pecking orders and hierarchies until then.

Mel Gibson's agents dumped him after his latest escapades. (I agree with Joy Behar on her cable talk show yesterday, when she said that Mel's films won't be funded now by Hollywood studios, so Gibson's only hope is to fund more of his own films – which he can afford to do, but which won't result in the agency getting a percentage fee. So no points for bravery or integrity to his former agents.)

Now I'd like to see Ballack give Becker the boot.

Read Part III of the saga.

From WEIMAR WORLD SERVICE

The New Newsweek

The redesigned (and redefined?) Newsweek magazine debuted this week, and there are many welcome developments in it.

No longer a Time clone, the revamped magazine also avoids making the mistake of being an Economist clone. That had been one of my big worries when I heard that the magazine was going for a smaller audience and refocusing on being a thought leader, like The Economist. We've already got an Economist; we don't need two of them. Newsweek's traditional strength is as a trusted new source with high standards that gets the inside story. I think they've built on that strength in the redesign, for the most part.

There are a lot of columns -- a bit of overkill, in my opinion, but not fatal. (Let's not bicker about whether "overkill" isn't inherently "fatal," okay?) There are the expected voices of Fareed Zakaria (the man who's single-handedly dedicated to calmly reminding Americans that the rest of the world exists and that it's okay) and George Will (the man who's single-handedly dyspeptic). There's also a religion column that features public relations specialists telling the pope how to improve his street cred; it's a weak article that misses the point of organized religion, as does most religion reporting (and no, I'm not Catholic). More interesting to me was, opposite the religion column, a full-page advertisement from the United Methodist Church. That raises the important question: The Methodist Church has money?

I could have done without four pages devoted to inane chatter with American Idol contestants. Leave that to People or In Touch Weekly. But more welcome (and more useful and important) are a lengthy article on futurist Ray Kurtweil, a profile of a man with Asperger syndrome, and a report on an African warlord. Add to that the expected newsweekly content (a report on George W. Bush returning home after leaving office, an interview with President Barack Obama, in which we learn that he can do the Vulcan hand salute), and you get a magazine worth reading while you put your feet up and dig in.

The editors and publishers of Newsweek have understood the most important thing about revamping a magazine for the internet age: A print publication needs to be wordy; designed for readers, not lookers; provide in-depth material that people are unlikely to read online; be high-value, not cheapened low-value.

I used to do weekly counts on this blog of the numbers of pages in Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and Focus, as a way of noting how few pages and how little substantive content American news magazines were delivering, compared to the thick and substantive German newsweeklies. The new Newsweek doesn't come in at a table-thumping 170-something pages, like Der Spiegel (which is actually a relatively thin issue of Der Spiegel), but at 96 pages (including covers), the May 25, 2009, Newsweek is worth a look.

News magazines, part III

During a visit to Borders yesterday, noticed:
Der Spiegel: 202 pages
Focus: at least 220 pages
Newsweek: 98 pages
Time: less than 80 pages
Still think you're getting your money's worth from American news magazines?

Thin News Magazines, Part II

From a visit to a newsstand store yesterday, some additional evidence supporting my previous posting:

Newsweek: about 68 pages
Time: about 70 pages
Der Spiegel: about 250 pages
Focus: about 250 pages

(page counts are approximate, due to unnumbered inserts, cover counts, etc.) So, which do you think provided more news this week?

Selling Short

For years we've been watching American media deal with media consolidation, closings of magazines that didn't meet public companies' margin needs, and assimilation of online media into the print/video-dominated world. Lots of jobs have been lost because of this, and many grand old magazines have been butchered because they didn't meet some half-baked ideas that people don't want intelligent content anymore.

But sometimes it helps to break out of our provincial worldview here in the United States and see that we're being sold a bill of goods. American magazines have been getting thinner and thinner for years, yet UK publishers roll out giant, high-gloss mags filled with ads and edit pages.

Or look to Germany for another case in point. Here in the United States, our news weeklies publish every week and deliver us – what? 68 pages? 72 pages? maybe 88 pages when they stuff in an advertorial? Newsweek recently revamped its design and laudibly promoted the fact that it would target READers. And how many pages were in its first redesigned issue – the one that should draw extra ads because of the publicity surrounding the redesigned mag? I believe it was something like 68. How many pages did Germany's newsweekly Der Spiegel have that week? 206. (Not the same issue that's pictured here; I picture what's available.) And Der Spiegel's not the only game in town in Germany; its competitor, the newsweekly Focus, was also over 200 pages. In fact, Der Spiegel and Focus (as well as Stern, a news/features/personality weekly magazine read by somethinglike one out of every nine Germans) are larger than 200 pages almost every week; on their "thin" weeks, they're only about 140 pages, which would be banner, bumper issues for an American newsweekly.

So if Germany can produce big weekly newsmagazines, why are we being sold short here in the United States with thin magazines that act as if they don't have enough content to fill a 100-page magazine? They add an awful lot of fluff about celebrities to accompany their often very good political and national news reporting. But Der Spiegel puts out a desk-thumping huge magazine every week, with few celebrities in sight, with lots of excellent (and deep, and famously well-researched) news on politics, national events, international events, commentary, trends, and even extremely readable history. (I still remember filling a cross-country flight reading a great report on the Enlightenment "revolution" in Prussia.)

American magazines can do better. They can also deliver a better value to their readers. Until they do, I'll find that value in the European press.

Nein, Danke

A rather jaw-dropping story from the great German newsweekly Der Speigel. It seems French President Nicolas "Speedy" Sarkozy is getting, well, odder as the weeks go by. He recently met with German Chanceller Angela Merkel and her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (a recent speaker at The Commonwealth Club of California, BTW) and offered nuclear weapons. In Der Spiegel's priceless reporting, "Both the chancellor and her foreign minister were speechless. The idea of possessing nuclear weapons is taboo in Germany. Sarzoky's predecessor Jacques Chirac cautiously brought up the issue 12 years ago, but he quickly realized it was pointless to pursue it."

Sort of a faux pax of Bushish levels, isn't it? As the above quote indicates, the offer itself is not unique; it was made "cautiously" 12 years ago by Chirac. But it strikes me that it's important because it shows Sarkozy doesn't really understand his neighbors – and his most important neighbor, at that.

Put me in the camp that thinks Germany needs to reasses its defense and security needs and procedures, and adapt itself to a new world in which the country's heartfelt revulsion toward the crimes of the Nazi regime have left it admirably restrained. But that restraint has also arguably left it vulnerable to foreign and domestic threats.

But even with that said, Sarkozy seems to display a tone-deafness when trying to figure out how to treat his neighbors. High hopes for Sarkozy's self-defined role as a reformer could be dashed if he doesn't ascend a steep learning curve.