Word: materazzi
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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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...
...Zidane the transgression in deference to his more heroic profile both on and off the pitch, some pundits are bound to insist Zidane's final on-field act will forever compromise what would have been a legendary status. Earlier media analyses of what had preceded the bust-up depicted Materazzi's comments as Islamophobic or racist in nature - with one suggesting the Italian had called Zidane a "(expletive) Arab, Muslim terrorist...
...revelation that Materazzi had, instead, got Zidane's goat with the kind of insults commonly used in sandlots, playgrounds and professional arenas around the world to bait rivals will doubtless strike many observers as undeserving of the Frenchman's dramatic, self-defeating reaction - especially at such a crucial time for his team and soon-to-be-terminated career. Especially given Zidane's comments earlier in the interview acknowledging neither he nor his teammates had experienced any problems with the Italians or Materazzi prior to the exchange that ended with Zizou's expulsion...
...grabbed my jersey and I told him to stop," Zidane, 34, explained. "I told him if he wanted my jersey, I'd give it to him after the match." There would be no after for Zidane, however, once the insults he says Materazzi directed toward his mother and sister worked their dark magic. "He said it once, and I walked away. But you hear it a second time, a third time... I'm a man, and I reacted to them. Those words were harder than acts...