The superstar athlete, David Beckham turns 45. In celebration of his birthday, VMAN is opening our archive to release #VMAN03: the next installment of our Collector’s Club. Beckham is a symbol of modern-day stardom. David Beckham was the first English football player to win league titles in four countries: England, Spain, the United States and France. In a span of 20 years, he has built a career playing for some of the most successful clubs in the world: Manchester United, Real Madrid, AC Milan, LA Galaxy, Paris Saint-Germain and the England team, which he captained for six years. Beckham has also made a name for himself in the world of fashion by working with world-leading brands including Adidas, Diageo, H&M, L’Oreal, Tudor and Sands. For more archival issues like this, head to our Collector’s Club now complete your collection of VMAN!

Read below for the full cover story.

David Beckham is in a casino in the north of England. He walks past the gaming tables and slots and heads straight for the vending machine—into which he methodically deposits a small fortune in change, retrieving can after can of soda. After fifteen minutes or so, a  teammate approaches. “David what are you doing? Come back here with us.” 

“Leave me alone,” Beckham says, visibly annoyed. “Can’t you see I’m winning here?” 

The joke is a lot funnier when Beckham tells it and he’s laughing at himself. ” There are loads of jokes about me,” he says proudly. “Some people have the idea that I’m not very intelligent, so a lot of them are about that. And about my voice. Apparently, I’ve got quite a high-pitched voice.”

For the record, Beckham’s voice is very far from gruff, and it rises dramatically when he gets excited. But as far as being dumb, forget about it. You don’t get to be one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world without having something between your ears. Beckham has built his career on a combination of athletic talent, charisma, plenty of marketing savvy, and a seemingly endless drive to succeed.

It’s sometimes difficult for American audiences to understand just how big a celebrity Beckham is all over the world, since soccer is only now beginning to draw the crowds and enthusiasm in the States that it has long attracted abroad. The obsession with his life goes far beyond conventional sports fanaticism. Picture Michael Jordan, Justin Timberlake, and Princess Diana rolled into one, and you get an idea of the kind of fame Beckham enjoys-or, to hear him describe it, endures. “I’ve had so many stalkers,” he says. “Funny stalkers, scary stalkers, every kind of stalker. One woman turned up at my place every day for about two weeks and just left different pairs of underpants for me in the mailbox. Luckily, they were always brand new. Another time, a woman suddenly started running next to my car in the middle of the night, knocking on my window. It turns out that she had taken a taxi from her hometown, which was 400 kilometers away, in order to do that.”

Beckham’s love/hate relationship with the media began in the 1996-97 British soccer season, when he scored a goal from the halfway line and became an instant hero. During the World Cup in France ’98 he was sent off from a second -round elimination match against Argentina for kicking an opponent; after England lost the game, he was vilified to the point where soccer fans hung effigies of him outside pubs. He made amends by leading his team to victory in the European Cup the following year, and by the time he married Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams in March 1999, he could do no wrong. As if starring in a postmodern fairy tale, the couple got matching tattoos and sunglasses, moved to an oversize pad nicknamed Beckingham Palace, had two sons, Brooklyn and Romeo, and became international idols. Last year, Beckham decamped from England to Spain to play for Real Madrid after signing a deal worth around $40 million.“

“Madrid was a big move for me, and I love it over here,” he says. “I’m on the same team as the best players in the world. But the hard thing is I never get left alone. It’s even worse than in England. I get followed everywhere I go. For the past nine months I’ve had four cars full of paparazzi tracking me. I literally can’t d o anything on my own.” Things aren’t likely to change anytime soon—a couple of months ago Beckham missed two crucial penalty kicks during the European Championship. As a result, Portugal ousted England in the quarterfinals, and he once again became the object of particularly pointed scrutiny.

It’s not, however, as if Beckham is averse to the spotlight. After all, this is a man whose every haircut makes the front page, who published an autobiography before turning 30, who has inspired designers like Dolce & Gabbana, and who isn’t afraid to wear a sarong in front of hordes of photographers. And then, of course, there’s the recent matter of Rebecca Loos, the publicity-hungry assistant turned-vixen who has kept the English tabloids abuzz for most of the year. Loos claims to have had an affair with Beckham after he arrived in Madrid. As she has explained to the press in several well-paid, teary-eyed interviews, h er secretarial efficiency induced her not just to sleep with her boss but also to save for posterity a detailed log of his personal text messages.

Beckham, whose cross-generation appeal depends in great part on his image as a family man, flatly dismisses the allegations. “Obviously, the press will say whatever they want,” he says. “At the end of the day, the important thing is that my family and I are very strong. Victoria and I didn’t get married to be together for a few years and then split up. We married for life and that’s the most important thing. We can take it all, because there’s no way in the world that we will ever split up.” 

David Beckham was born May 2, 1975, in Leytonstone, a suburb of London. He has two sisters: one is a wife and mother, the other a hairdresser. Religion has never mattered to him, though his family belongs to the Church of England and one of his grandparents was Jewish. What set Beckham apart as a kid was his compulsive need to play soccer. “I was pretty much a loner,” he says. “All the other lads would be going out on the weekends while I stayed behind prac­ticing for a match. Even now, I have three or four close friends, and that’s it. It’s almost impossible for me to make new friends now. I’ve realized that throughout my career, a lot of people wanted to become friends with me with other motives.” 

Beckham’s is the classic story of an independ­ent, gutsy kid done good. At age 11, while he was a student in Essex, he won the Bobby Charlton Soccer Skills Award. He started training with Manchester United when he was 14 and was signed on as a professional at 18. By all accounts, he is one of the most naturally gifted and dedicated players ever. An experiment conducted while he was at Manchester United showed that he ran an average of 8.8 miles per game-far more than any of his teammates. Some of his kicks have been clocked at close to 100 miles per hour.

But Beckham’s status as a pop icon goes well beyond the soccer pitch. “In England there was a television show once about how black I am,” he says, clearly relishing the idea. “And I was recently named father of the year in Spain:’ There’s also the considerable influence he wields over average Joes with a fondness for chest waxing-those over-pondered metrosexuals who feel validated by Beckham’s love of shop­ping and grooming. “I’m quite proud of that, actually” he says. “If I’ve helped change some attitudes in society, then that’s a big honor.”

It’s not surprising that Beckham, who is at an age when most soccer players are considering retirement, already has plans for his next chapter. “I don’t want to be a manager or a coach. I’m going to open up soccer schools all around the world”  he says. “The first ones are in London and Los Angeles.” America is Beckham’s final frontier-the one place he hasn’t truly cracked-and one senses that his Los Angeles project is a way of testing the waters stateside. He has established high-profile connections during previous visits: Usher, Justin Timberlake, and P. Diddy are all pals. 

“America used to be the only place in the world where I could be anonymous, but that is changing;’ he says. “The last time Victoria and I were there we stayed at a friend’s house and we practically couldn’t leave because of the press outside. It was like being in a state of siege. We finally managed to sneak out one night and go somewhere by our­selves for a few days.”

The tug-of-war between the supposed need for a more normal existence and the addiction to recognition and everything that comes with it is Beckham’s-and every modern celebrity’s-catch-22. “I wake up at 10 a.m., feed my dog, train for a cou­ple of hours, go to lunch, and then come back home;’ says Beckham, as if he were just another suburbanite. “I try to spend as much time as possible with my kids. I try to keep them away from envi­ronments where they will be photographed, and I make sure they lead as normal a life as possible. I was brought up around perfectly normal people, and I actually enjoy things like grocery shopping. It’s just that I can’t do it anymore. I’ve had fame for so long now that I’ve kind of forgotten what it’s like to do stuff like that.”

At the end of the photoshoot for VMAN, Beckham instinctively grabs a few test Polaroids, signs them and hands them to the photographer’s assistants. As he is leaving, the studio manager asks him for an autograph and he courteously obliges. Then he rushes outside, followed by his entourage and a few bodyguards who scan the street like hungry hawks. As Beckham hops into a car, it’s hard to tell whether he will ever feel relieved to elude the four cars of paparazzi that have trailed him since he landed in Madrid, or if finding them waiting for him at every turn of his life is, in fact, a deep comfort.