Wayne Brown, Contributor
SO THE World Cup ended last Sunday, not so much with Italy triumphant as with the shock of Zidane abruptly headbutting the Italian defender Materazzi to the ground and being sent off.
Zidane, the personification of the 'beautiful game', of whose performance against Brazil Roger Cohen would write (in the International Herald Tribune) that he was 'in a place denied most mortals', his smile 'that of a man seeing things others could not', so that it seemed 'the ball was propelled not precisely by him, but by some force emanating from him'! Zidane who, having pre-announced his retirement, was within minutes of having a packed stadium rise to bid him farewell, and us watching billions speed him to his rest - irrespective of whether France won or lost - now suddenly red-carded and sent off in disgrace!
What the hell happened there?
Well, something had happened, that much was obvious - something not even the replay cameras had caught. Materazzi must have said something to Zidane, something so insupportable as to elicit from the great player the ultimate act of self-immolation. But what?
Someone disconsolately recalled Maradona's 'hand of God' goal and opined that Zidane had just hurt himself in the eyes of the world as Maradona had. But one knew at once the two things were quite different. Maradona's handed goal had been cynical; it degraded the game, and was in fact the progenitor of today's demoralising 'dives' and writhings, those ploys by which players 'play' the referee, not each other, and counterfeiting trumps skill. Zidane's headbutt was the opposite: a sudden, inutile explosion of violence that could only redound to his disgrace and his team's disadvantage.
WAITING FOR AN EXPLANATION
The world waited for Zidane to explain.
"[Materazzi] pulled on my shirt several times and I told him that we could swap shirts at the end of the game if he wanted to," Zidane said in a live interview on French television last Wednesday. "He then said some very harsh words, which he repeated several times, words that were several times harsher than acts. They were words that touched the innermost parts of me. Very personal things, my mother, my sister. So you hear it once, you try to leave - and that's what I did. You hear it twice, and the third time - that's it. I am a man before anything else. I would have rather received a punch in my face than to have to hear that."
I am a man before anything else.
I read that and began to understand the complicated woe I'd felt, watching the Algerian's electrifying headbutt. To be sure, it was woe, for Zidane's headbutt broke through the skein of the World Cup final as utterly as if a bomb had gone off in the stadium. For what's sport but the channelling and codification of violence? And this had been naked violence.
But there'd been something other than woe as well, something that responded galvanically to the towering and heedless authority with which Zidane did what he did.
In his piece cited above, Cohen quoted an email he received from a woman in Dallas. "Two minutes before [Zidane's] fall from grace," she wrote, "I was sure he was going to go down in history as a man full of honour, grace and control ... And then he rewrote his own destiny. But his actions also made me love him more. Before he was a god. But then he showed us all that he was just a man ... I am much more affected by him than I would have been had things gone as I hoped. But, my Lord, was that headbutt sexy."
Sexy!
Well, I cannot claim to have found it 'sexy'; but I think we, the Dallas woman and I, were responding to the same obscure recognition; and, three days later, Zidane himself gave it words. I am a man before anything else.
Consider the larger context.
We live in the apotheosis of science, and the price has been the steady erosion of our anthropocentric sense of the universe. And if that progress is a macrocosm of the evolution of a single human life, from birth and the omnipotence of infancy, through adulthood's much diminished yet stubborn sense of self-worth, to old age's understanding of its growing irrelevance and the death it owes to life, it's no less demoralising for that.
LIMITATIONS OF ORGANIC LIFE
The body blow dealt to our species' sense of its centrality by Copernicus and his heliocentric universe was neither the beginning nor, certainly, the end of our diminution. Soon, a tremendous acceleration of technological achievements would increasingly demonstrate the limitations of organic life, from the 1854 charge of the Light Brigade (whose cavalry was mowed down by Russian artillery and guns as its members rode unarmoured 'into the valley of death') to World Chess Champion Kasparov's recent defeat by the insentient calculations of a software programme.
And, as human beings, we learnt those lessons hard. A generation of Europeans died in the trenches of the First World War, pitting flesh, bone, and such human values as courage, loyalty and honour against the lethal, stuttering cynicism of machine guns.
So it was that, a decade later, Superman, a cartoon intended for children, quickly turned into a runaway hit among adults seeking refuge from their lost sense of mattering in its fantasy of hidden quasi-omniscience in human form: Clark Kent. And so it was, too, that some of the most poignant movies of the late 20th Century expressed the same nostalgia, the same grief, at the arrival of a world in which courage, loyalty and honour might no longer prevail. The Last Emperor. The Last of the Mohicans. The Last Samurai.
For such virtues were bound up with our sense of our specialness. When, in the 13th Century, the vastly outnumbered Samurai nonetheless fought off the Mongol invaders with the help each time of typhoons that wreaked havoc with the Mongol fleet, those storms became known as the 'divine wind'. Clearly, the gods looked with favour upon the Samurai virtues!
But that, alas, was then. The Macmillan Treasure of Relevant Quotations, published in 1978, is a 650-page book, with quotations on most subjects under the sun, from 'Ability' and 'Abnegation' to 'Youth' and the 'Ziegfeld Follies'. But it is silent on 'Honour'.
And that, Zidane says, is what his headbutt was about: honour. He was a man before anything else. And a man doesn't walk away from obscenities being hurled at his mother, or his sister - no, not even if the price of defending their honour is his own dishonour.
Yet it is not so simple. Two worlds clashed in that moment, in that stadium in Berlin. They were the pragmatic world in which we live today, and the world of immemorial reverences, from which we've come. They are not reconcilable; and Zidane perplexedly realised that as he talked.
"I know this is something that one should not do. I want to say that loud and clear because it was watched by two billion people and by millions of kids. I want to apologise to them. But I can't regret what I did because it would mean that [Materazzi] was right to say what he said. I have taught my kids to respect people and I have taught them that they deserve to be respected in return. I couldn't let something like that be said without any reaction."
So. Something one should not do, but had to - this from Zinedine Zidane, a Frenchman, Algerian-born: one, perhaps, of football's last Samurai.
