Most Hollywood marriages end in divorce, with the survivors often wondering whatever possessed them to hook up with such a jerk/twerp/scumbag/cheapskate/psycho. Athletes and movie stars are drawn to one another until the moment they realise that everything they have in common - fame, money, self-absorption, an all-consuming paranoia about their short shelf lives - are precisely the elements that tear marriages apart. Joe DiMaggio - baseball's biggest star while Americans were fighting on Iwo Jima - broke up with Marilyn Monroe just nine months after their wedding, in part because DiMaggio didn't like all the attention his wife got.
Despite playing the most glamorous position in American sports - centre fielder for the New York Yankees - DiMaggio, retired at the time of the wedding, hated being in the spotlight and failed to understand that his bride didn't. On their honeymoon in Japan, the pair were wildly greeted by 100,000 US soldiers. 'I've never heard so many people cheer,' said Monroe.
'I have,' DiMaggio replied. Other liaisons ended with similar results. Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh were two of the many starlets escorted around by baseball's Ralph Kiner in the late Forties before he wised up and married a tennis player called Nancy Chaffee.
Halle Berry's acting career started to take off just about the time baseball player David Justice's Major League career started to end, and that was the end of that. Mike Tyson's marriage to actress Robin Givens ended, after allegations of domestic violence, with a Valentine's Day divorce. Even Sheryl Crow's relationship with Lance Armstrong did not last.
Sometimes, the entire Hollywood industry falls in love with a famous player. This has happened with several sportsmen - Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan are just two of those with their own stars on the Walk of Fame - but none, perhaps, is as loved as Muhammad Ali. His self-generated star power was so great that Hollywood acolytes flocked to him; in his 1971 fight against Joe Frazier, aka 'The Fight of the Century', Burt Lancaster was the match commentator and Frank Sinatra was the fight photographer.
He was never a great actor, but he didn't need to be (he was generally playing himself in biopics) and even now, at the age of 65, he is revered by Hollywood's finest as a star far greater than their own - witness the standing ovation he receives when he turns up to the Oscars. Even as we speak, Hollywood is engaging in one of its ill-advised dalliances. This, too, will end badly.
When David Beckham arrived in Los Angeles, a city that cares so little about sports that it does not even have an NFL team, the luxury boxes were filled with Tom Cruise, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, and assorted stars of Desperate Housewives. Now, ferried from one grim American town to the next, he will make crisp but futile passes to second-tier players who cannot put the ball in the net; and as it becomes apparent that Beckham neither is nor ever was the best footballer in the world, and that 32-year-olds with dodgy ankles lack the enduring appeal of a DiMaggio or a Jordan, Hollywood will surreptitiously re-evaluate its affection and the stars will slip away. Hollywood is smitten by Beckham today because Beckham is believed to be one of those stars whose fame transcends his sport.
But Hollywood has also fallen for him because the once-dominant Los Angeles Lakers basketball team stinks and front-running Hollywood, forever requiring a sure thing to bet on, mistakenly thinks it has located that sure thing in Beckham. Unfortunately for the Englishman, he is not much of a scorer in a country that hates low-scoring sports. This is the main reason soccer has so little mass-market appeal in a nation that already has too many teams, too many leagues, and too many ageing metrosexuals.
Throughout its history, Hollywood has made many, many attempts to capitalise on athletes' fame and transform them into movie stars. Those who do succeed tend to do so through typecasting: the glamorous ice skater Sonja Henie, an Olympic gold medallist in 1928, 1932 and 1936, made several well received films just before the Second World War, usually playing a glamorous ice skater. She became one of the best-paid actresses of her time.
But elsewhere, the terrain is littered with athletes' corpses: long-forgotten football players, punch-drunk boxers, flabby gymnasts, paunchy wrestlers. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who walked off with seven medals at the 1972 summer Olympics, never got his career off the ground; despite talk that he might be hired to play James Bond, Spitz on camera turned out to be a pure stiff and that was the end of that career. OJ Simpson, one of the greatest American football players ever, failed as a dramatic actor (The Cassandra Crossing, The Towering Inferno), but had more success as a buffoonish cop in the Naked Gun comedies.
After that ...
Well, anyone seeking a perfect example of why sports and Hollywood don't mix need look no further than OJ. The industry has had even less success with other American football players. Quarterbacks are among the most high-profile sportsmen in the US, but determined efforts to transfer their fame into another field, and turn players such as Roman Gabriel (in the Sixties) and Joe Namath (in the Seventies) into actors, resulted in some of the worst films ever made (The Undefeated, C.
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