New York: In the shadow of Tennessee's Signal and Lookout mountains, 8-year-old Beckham has been balancing on a fence for more than three hours, gripping a handwritten note and waiting for Spain's national team to emerge.
"I love you and I look up to you," the note reads, addressed to Pedri and Lamine Yamal. "Thanks for coming to my city. I hope you win the World Cup."
As the players run onto the field, his eyes grow wide.
"Dad," he whispers, "they're real." The scene was equally incredible to his father, Jaxon McClure, a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in Chattanooga playing soccer with trash cans for goalposts, now coaches hundreds of local children and named his first child after one of the sport's greatest stars.
This summer - 32 years since the United States first hosted the world's biggest sporting competition - Chattanooga is among several cities established as World Cup base camps, where visiting teams live and train between matches.
Spain - among the favorites to win the tournament - has set up camp at a boarding school on the Tennessee River in Chattanooga; Iraq is in a mountain resort town in West Virginia with fewer than 3,000 residents; and Germany is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where cobblestone streets and tobacco warehouses share space with German flags and television crews.
A 144-foot underground waterfall beneath Lookout Mountain is lit up red and the Embassy Suites in downtown Chattanooga, where the Spanish team is staying, is adorned with la Rojigualda - Spain's red and yellow flag. Giant banners featuring Spanish players and declaring, "Bienvenidos a Chattanooga" greeted La Roja as the team arrived at Chattanooga Airport. Native Chattanoogan Skip Schwartz said so many people are wearing Spanish jerseys that "you don't know if they're from Spain, hoping to get a glimpse, or they are locals who have bought into the La Roja bandwagon."