Word: materazzi
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Nearly 72 hours after French soccer star Zinedine Zidane closed his illustrious career with an ignoble ejection for head-butting an Italian defender, Zidane told a still-agonizing French public what had provoked the most notorious head-butt in the history of the game. Exactly what button had Marco Materazzi pushed to cause Zidane to forsake his teammates, and the still obtainable victory in Sunday's World Cup final, and instead to opt for the hollow satisfaction of corporal payback? What hateful words could have detonated the violence that provoked Zidane's ejection, and helped deny him and France...
...cannot say I regret my act, because that would mean [Materazzi] had the right to say what he did," Zidane nonetheless insisted. "No one has the right to say such things...
...Given the ugly spate of racist incidents that have marred professional play in Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe over the past year, it isn't surprising the first explanations of what prompted Zidane's violent reaction painted Materazzi as a foul-mouthed bigot. The English daily The Guardian led things off with a translation of an audio feed picked up by a TV camera, and depicted an escalating exchange in Italian ending with Materazzi calling Zidane a "(expletive) Muslim, dirty terrorist". Other media analyses relied on lip-readers scrutinizing video images, and came away with interpretations ranging from...
...Materazzi acknowledged he talked trash to Zidane, but said there was no racism, Islamophobia, or "yo mama" aspect to it. "It was the kind of insult you will hear dozens of times and just slips out of the ground," Materazzi told the Italian daily La Gazetta dello Sport. "I didn't call Zidane a terrorist and certainly didn't mention his mother." For his part, Zidane has only told intimates that the comment that set (and sent) him off was "very serious," but that he regrets the brutal reaction that marked the end to the last game of his long...
...What will happen when Zidane answers the burning question? Probably nothing. Polls show 61% of French people already forgive Zidane for the head-butt, while 52% say they understand his violent response. Those numbers will probably increase once the exact words Materazzi spoke are known. Meanwhile, even after seeing the head-butt, sports writers voted Zidane the Cup's best player and awarded the Frenchman the tournament's Golden Ball - a superlative their peers denied Zidane in 2001 voting for best pro player in Europe, after he broke a bone in a rival's face with an earlier head-butt...