Sometimes it's okay to dock your cap and admit your own shortcomings.
And so it is time to say that, of all work class guys called David born on the outskirts of East London in the mid-1970s, I am not the most culturally important.
I am absolutely not the most famous such David, neither the handsome nor the richest, nor the best in football.
Like a knight of the empire and the godfather of metro sexuality, as a style icon and one half of the colossal global brand Beckham, as a Treble-winner, a balloon d'Or second and a member of the 100-Cap Club of England, Sir David Galactico Goldenballs Beckham Beckham Beckham Beckham rode us.
Around 13 years I once played against Beckham for Romford Royals against his Ridgeay Rovers in the Echo Junior League.
He already had a reputation, was in the books of Tottenham and – although he played an age group above – he noticed.
If my memory is correct, we were tone and Beckham scored from a long distance.
Although our keeper had been postponed vertically and the goal posts were complete.
I am pretty sure that of the other 21 children at that pitch, none of us was included in the list of the king's birthday, none of us was paid for millions to pose in our lower rooms, none of us married a Spice Girl and none of us wore the Olympic torch on a speedboat during the opening ceremony in London.
In my late 1920s I spent three weeks touring Asia after Beckham and his new teammates after he had moved between Manchester United and Real Madrid, the two most famous football clubs on earth.
Throughout China, as well as Japan and Thailand, I have never experienced hysteria.
In Tokyo it felt screaming and the swift 40 years earlier as the highlight of Beatlemania.
This newspaper sent three of us on the trip for the season-two reporters and a photographer.
It cost a bomb but was worth every penny because everything about Beckham was front page or news on the page.
One night in Hong Kong, a group talked to us with Beckham at the Bar-We hoped to have a good sit-down interview that never came out.
That was the night he was photographed and looked nice with his personal assistant Rebecca Loos, who claimed an affair with Beckham.
But although I have treated much better football players than Beckham, I have never experienced anything like the stratospheric levels of his fame in 2003.
Beckham is knighted for services on football and charity and, ok, he has done enough for both.
But also he could be entangled in Hermelijn for his services to the male care industry that he almost invented or to tattooing tattoo, or what we used to call hairdressers.
A few weeks ago a 16-year-old named Felix, the son of a good partner, asked me how good Beckham had been.
After he grimas that these almost requirements were now a historical figure, I replied that he was a very good football player who was great in a few things-direct free kicks and intersection.
I told him that few athletes had seen their reputation so wildly-of the halfway through line in Selhurst Park that launched him, to the Red Card for the kicking of Diego Simeone at the 1998 World Cup, which saw his image hung by a pub, to score of the last free-free rick.
But I also mentioned Beckham's impact on Felix and children like him – indeed, on almost every man in Great -Britain who was born after him – is much outside the scope of one of the important things he has achieved on a football field.
Felix goes to the gym, he uses 'products', he makes a difference what he looks like, he is concerned about which suit he will wear to the school promom. And all his friends are the same.
I was not something like that, and neither were one of the children I grew up because we were (just about) pre-Beckham.
After Beckham broke, the English boys from the working class would never be the same again.
Beckham changed the way in which the English looked out, the way they acted and the way they thought.
Before people were on the internet called “influencers”, Beckham was the influencer.
He is not particularly intelligent – although he is not nearly as thick as often pronounced – and despite being in public interest for 30 years, he has rarely said something interesting.
He is polite, decent and has a nice line in self -contempt, but he is hardly charismatic.
He has never pronounced any political loyalty, nor for any cause a strict campaigner.
And he may not have been the best football player who followed the Chingford Foundation School – Harry Kane has a claim on that.
Yet his impact on our daily lives has been wider than every politician.
Although heterosexual – quite productive in all respects – Beckham enjoyed his status as a gay icon.
He wore a sarong, had an angel tattooed over his back and changed his hairstyle every fourteen days.
None of these things seem unusual for the generation of Love Island, but before Beckham Hetero, work from the working class, did not work.
The Mul of Chris Waddle 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, u con, he disadvantages.
But he undoubtedly played an important role in making homophobia unacceptable.
His impact on society has been more good than bad.
Going to the gym is healthy. Being proud of your appearance is good to a certain extent – although I fear that many more boys now suffer from the same “body image” obsessions that have been playing girls for decades.
And whatever you think of the Honors system – I am personally not a fan – this knighthood means the world for Beckham.
After missing in 2017, leaked e -mails suggested that he referred to the Honors Committee as a “couple C *** s” -and although he claimed that he had been hacked, this showed an authentic expression of the expression in Eastern London.
But after having become Sir David this weekend, Beckham claimed: “I could never have imagined that I would receive such a real humiliating honor.”
Like most of us, Beckham consists of many contradictions.
It seems to me that if you are going to have a Honors system, it would feel strange for Beckham not to ridden.
Because Beckham – more beautiful than ever at 50, despite denying the use of “Brotox” – is just everywhere.
From his role as co-owner of Inter Miami at the club World Cup, to stripping nude in an advertisement for designer seams, to the family who leaves the Beckhams only second to the royals in national consciousness.
For me, the Beckham phenomenon can best be summarized by its role in the World Cup campaign of England 2010.
He was then 35, his international career over and played Major League Soccer for Los Angeles Galaxy.
Although Beckham was neither a player nor a coach, the English manager Fabio Capello-Mestal did not use one for Frippery-Hem to hang around the Dugout who looked clever and stylish in a three-piece suit, just David Beckham.
No other Englishman of his generation was ever paid to do something like that and certainly no other David born on the outskirts of East London in the mid-1970s.