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