Le Headbutt

Three pieces on Le Headbutt.
First, the International Herald Tribune reports on Zidane’s explanation, and includes other remarks, including racist ones by an Italian.
Then, the good old Guardian reports on the power of insulting yer mum.
Then, French philosopher BHL drops a ton of verbiage on the affair – jeez, those Frogs are crazy, or at least rhetorically bedazzled.
(Read Adam Ash first, and you may not have to read anything else. BTW, let's not forget that Zidane pulled his punch. If le headbutt had landed where a headbutt is supposed to land, on the nose instead of the chest, there would've been le blood, instead of le Italian flat on his back. It was a symbolic headbutt, not a really real one. Very French, that -- very Barthes.)

1. Zidane Offers Explanation for Head-Butting -- by PETER BERLIN, International Herald Tribune

PARIS, July 12 — Zinédine Zidane, banished minutes from the end of his last game as a professional soccer player, apologized for his red card but blamed provocation as he said his belated farewell and made his excuses tonight in an interview on Canal Plus, a French television outlet.

Zidane was sent off in the closing minutes of extra time in the World Cup final after butting Marco Materazzi of Italy in the chest. The game finished, 1-1. France lost the penalty shootout, 5-3, on Sunday.

Video replays showed the two players exchanging words after Materazzi, a defender, had put his arm round Zidane while defending.

Since Sunday, lip-readers around the world have been busy trying to decode what Materazzi said, and they had come up with wildly different explanations.

Tonight, Zidane refused to specify. He did say, under pressure from the interviewer, that Materazzi had used swear words and had mentioned Zidane’s mother and sister.

“I tried not to listen to him but he repeated them several times,” Zidane said. “Sometimes words are harder than blows. When he said it for the third time, I reacted.”

Zidane argued that while he accepted that what he had done was wrong, Materazzi was to blame.

“The reaction must be punished but if there had been no provocation there would have been no reaction,” Zidane said. “Do you think that two minutes from the end of a World Cup final, two minutes from the end of my career, I wanted to do that?”

Zidane went on to apologize, several times, to “all children and everyone who saw the act.”

Zidane had said before the World Cup that he would retire after it ended.

Asked if he now felt he had some unfinished business and would reconsider, Zidane said his decision was “definitive.”

He said that the key moment for the French team in Germany was its victory over Togo in its last game in the group stage. Zidane missed that game. He was suspended after receiving two yellow cards in the first two games, both draws. France won, 2-0.

“We had not won a game in 2002,” he said of France’s disastrous defense of its title in the World Cup played in South Korea and Japan.

He did say that he would play again — but only for fun.

“I may play some amateur games with my mates in my neighborhood” in Marseille, he said.

“Merci à football,” he said as he drew a line under his playing career.

Zidane is an icon in France. The son of Algerian immigrants, he became the symbol of the new multiethnic France in a team whose multiracial make-up was criticized by far right politicians in 1998 and again before France started its surprising run to the final this time.

He was the best player on the team that won the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000. He scored twice in the final in 1998 but he received a red card in an early match in the tournament for stomping on a Saudi Arabian opponent.

His career is pockmarked with such explosions of violence, at apparent odds with his modesty and the dignity with which he has always played and conducted himself.

Tonight, he was relaxed, until the questions moved on to his red card, then he became visibly tenser. He remained as soft-spoken as ever yet he also revealed the unyielding side of his personality as he insisted that Materazzi must share the blame and the punishment.

Before Zidane explained himself, debate had continued to rage over the expulsion.

Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, said Zidane could lose his player of the tournament award, voted on by some journalists at the final.

“The winner of the award is not decided by FIFA, but by an international commission of journalists,” Blatter said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, The Associated Press reported. “That said, FIFA’s executive committee has the right, and the duty, to intervene when faced with behavior contrary to the ethics of the sport.”

Blatter said he was “very hurt” by Zidane’s violent reaction and that “to see him act like that made me feel bad, for him and for fair play.”

Zidane could also be suspended, but since he is retiring, that hardly matters.

The incident rapidly became a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists and a platform for self-publicists.

SOS Racisme, a French anti-racist body, demanded to know if Materazzi had used a racial insult.

Mehana Mouhou, a French lawyer, said he planned to mount a legal challenge to the result because he thought that Zidane’s red card was issued after officials broke the rules and watched video replays of the incident, which happened in the Italian half while the referee was ending an Italian attack by giving a free kick to France.

Mouhou said he would ask a Paris court to question the fourth official, who sits on the sideline, to see if he had watched the replays during the delay while the referee, Horacio Elizondo, separated players arguing after the incident.

“If a judge determines that illegal methods were used, the proper consequences must be drawn,” he said, The A.P. reported.

“That means that Zidane should never have been sent off and it would be impossible to predict what the match result would have been and it should be replayed.”

Mouhou said he was acting on behalf of “several soccer clubs.” He did not say which ones.

FIFA has said that the official, Luis Medina Cantalejo, “directly observed” the butt before informing the referee and his assistants.

In a poll of the French public published in Le Parisien newspaper on Tuesday, 61 percent said they forgave him and 52 percent that they understood his behavior.

The French president, Jacques Chirac , who welcomed the team on Monday, called Zidane a “virtuoso, a genius of world soccer.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, both blamed and forgave Zidane, for what he saw as an act of rebellion. He was quoted Tuesday in L’Equipe, the French sports daily, as saying that Zidane’s act was the “suicide of a demigod.” He called the butt an “interior revolt” against the “stupid ivory tower in which he had been placed in recent months.”

In Italy, Roberto Calderoli, head of the right-wing popular Northern League party, refused to retract earlier comments in which he hailed Italy’s defeat of France in the World Cup final on Sunday as “a victory for Italian identity.”

“When I say that France’s team is composed of blacks, Islamists and communists, I am saying an objective and evident thing,” Calderoli was quoted on Tuesday as saying by the ANSA news agency.

His comment, in response to a complaint to the Senate by France’s ambassador to Italy, reiterated remarks made on Sunday in the aftermath of Italy’s World Cup victory.


2. The mother of all insults
The suggestion that Marco Materazzi might have insulted ZinÈdine Zidane's mother during the World Cup final seems justification enough for the head-butt that followed. But why is it that the worst insults in the world are always about your mum? Stuart Jeffries reports (from the good old Guardian)

It was seven minutes before half time. Real Madrid were 2-0 down against already relegated opponents in May 2004, when David Beckham tackled Real Murcia's Luis Garcia. The England captain thought the tackle was clean but the linesman flagged for a foul. Leaping to his feet, the Dagenham-born galáctico unleashed a volley of idiomatic Spanish, calling the official a "hijo de puta" (son of a whore). The referee, Turienzo Alvarez, had no hesitation in producing a red card. But was that the right decision? After all, Beckham's Spanish had been so risible in press conferences hitherto that this sure-footed demonstration of his grasp of Hispanic rudery surely should have won him a round of applause.

Beyond questions of Beckham's linguistic (in)competence, though, there were cultural differences at issue. After the match, Beckham (reverting to English) told reporters: "I didn't realise what I had said was that bad. I had heard a few of my team-mates say the same before me." This is a bravura defence: in Britain, to call someone a son of a bitch or to deploy any derogatory barb that focuses on impugning the sexual integrity of the target's mother is hardly the worst thing one can say. If he had abused a fourth official at Goodison Park in an Everton-Man Utd game in the same terms, the linesman would not have got the hump; nor would the referee have seen red quite so readily. In Spain, it is different.

The Sun even drew up a list of mother insults that Beckham could deploy if he sought an early bath on future occasions. They included the rather infantile Tu madre tiene un bigote (Your mother has a moustache) and the frankly laborious Anda la puta que te pari (Go back to the prostitute who gave birth to you), but not the one that would surely have got him lynched in the Bernabeu, namely Me cago en la leche que mamaste (I shit in the milk that you suckled from your mother's breast). The Times concocted a letter of apology that Beckham might send to the linesman: Dear Assistant Referee, (Ayudante Arbitro) I am sorry that I called you a son of a whore. (Lo siento que se llamo hijo de puta .) I am sure that your mother is not a whore at all. (Estoy seguro que su madre no es una puta.) I am sure that your mother is, in fact, a respected figure within her community. (Estoy seguro que su madre es una mujer muy respetable en su comunidad.)" And so on. But neither helped him become as fluent in Spanish as his fellow English team-mate Jonathan Woodgate had become. In September 2005, he got into a rumble in the tunnel with an Espanyol player after calling him a "hijo de puta", which suggests his Spanish had developed as fast as the British press had hoped.

Beckham was pleading ignorance, not of Spanish, but of a Latin culture that would venerate motherhood so highly as to take particular offence at a misogynistic insult about the target's mother. Or so the argument goes. In some cultures if one man spoke ill of another's mother it would fully warrant him getting a face full of bald Frenchman's bonce - or worse. In Britain, such an insult would not be quite so offensive. Such cultural differences, one might well think, come from the fact that Britain got rid of any traces of mariolatry - the worship of the virgin mother of Christ - during the Reformation; only Catholic countries like those of southern Europe are encumbered with such mother worship. Hence, perhaps, the seeming sentimentalism of the mother fixation in Pedro Almodóvar's films All About My Mother and What Have I Done To Deserve This. Hence too Y Tu Mamá También, the Mexican film whose title (And Your Mother Too) sounds like the end of a vulgar insult that reflexively embroils the target's mother.

"There are certainly cultural differences in swearing," says feminist socio-linguist Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford. "In Scandinavia, the taboo words are to do with the devil. Here [Britain] they're fuck or cunt. In Mediterranean cultures it has to do with the classic relationship that exists between a son and his mother. Italians, for example, adore their mothers. One's trespassing on a sacred relationship if one insults a man's mother." (Incidentally, the devil taboo does not mean that mother insults are unknown in Scandinavian countries: in Finland, for example, there is an expression "Äitisi nai poroja!" which means "Your mother copulates with reindeer!" Sweet!)

Thus, if indeed Marco Materazzi did impugn Zinédine Zidane's mother as a prostitute or a terrorist or perhaps both (busy woman!) in Sunday's World Cup Final debacle that concluded with Zizou head-butting the Italian's chest, an ancient ritual was being played out. An Italian might well have reflex recourse to such an anti-motherly jibe, particularly when he was embroiled in the shirt-pulling petulance that overtook leading exponents of the beautiful game in the last minutes of extra time in the most important football match in four years. "It's quite important to realise that this is a ritual," says Cameron. "To say something outrageous in this way is part of a provocative ritual rather than reality. If your mother was indeed a sex worker, the insult would be very different and less potent."

The cultural differences in swearing that Cameron mentions are a little baffling. In Britain, the C-word is still potent - a taboo for many comics who otherwise specialise in transgression. The Spanish equivalent, coño, is not so offensive; indeed, its very ubiquity may well explain its lack of power to shock: it has become a relatively mild insult or at least as banal a swear word as betokening the speaker's lack of imagination. Paradoxically, in Britain we find the c-word offensive but not the disparagement of the sexual integrity of one's mother.

But are the British so immune to the rhetorical power of mother insults as we might like to think? One could easily overstate that possibility. There is, after all, a rude song by Goldie Lookin' chain called Your Mother's got a Penis. And back in the early 90s, Rob Newman and David Baddiel did a comic turn as two crusty old history professors that culminated with one saying something disparaging about the other's mother. The routine usually went like this. Baddiel's professor would introduce an abstruse historical theme for debate. Then the argument quickly degenerated into insult, and the insults would be funny because both professors would continue to speak in the formal voices of intellectual debate. "You see that piece of snot on my handkerchief," one emeritus professor would say to the other, "that's you, that is." "You see him?" the other would retort, pointing at the picture of a particularly disgusting man. "That's the man who works in your pants, that is." But the coup de grace in the escalating exchange of insults would be the following. "You see X [where X is a variable invariably denoting something foul]? That's your mum, that is." The sketch supplied a catchphrase that, for a while, was every bit as popular in playgrounds as those offered in the Fast Show. "You see that?" children would ask each other at playtime. "That's your mum, that is."

Even though Britain has been relatively immune to putatively Catholic-inspired mother insults, it has imported a great deal of the rich vernacular and idioms of African-American culture. And this means that some elements of British society like insulting a rival's mother in the way that Materazzi may have done Zidane's. In the US they say "yo mamma"; in Britain, we took that phrase and now say - or rather wannabe hip-hop badasses say - "your mum".

Right now there is a show on MTV called Yo Momma, popular in the US and the UK, that co-opts the ghetto insult face-off known as "the dozens" and turns it into what some critics have called "a fun parlour game" in which challengers attempt to best each other by coming up with the most outlandish insults for each other's mothers. It's not quite I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, but still. Here are a few insults from the show to give you the idea: "Yo momma so ugly her mum had to be drunk to breastfeed her", "Yo momma so fat, she's on both sides of the family", "Yo momma so stinky she uses Right Guard and Left Guard". You get the idea. It's a televised ritual that is sanitised to the extent that it cannot escalate into violence (as such exchanges reportedly do on occasion in real life), still less the decisive dispute-ending measure of busting a cap.

There are many other examples from African-American culture: the Pharcyde had a song called Yo Mama, which featured the charming lyric, "The sad fact is (what?) ya mama smokes crack (what?)/She got a burning yearning and there's no turning back/ Her knuckles drag down to the ground when she walk /Spit comes out that bitch mouth when she talk." In 2004, the Wayans Brothers released The Dozens, a "yo momma" game for mobile phones. And the movies White Men Can't Jump, 8 Mile and House Party have capitalised on this. White Men Can't Jump includes the purported insult: "Your mother's an astronaut", though perhaps readers might like to explain why that should be a put-down.

But why are the verbal contests in African-American culture that feature disparaging competitors' mothers called "the dozens"? In Still Laughing to Keep from Crying: Black Humor, Mona Lisa Saloy, professor of English at Dillard University, explains: "The dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans where deformed slaves - generally slaves punished with dismemberment for disobedience - were grouped in lots of a 'cheap dozen' for sale to slave owners. For a black to be sold as part of the 'dozens' was the lowest blow possible."

And today the lowest blow of all is to insult somebody's mother. Is it just a phenomenon popular in Christian or post-Christian cultures? By no means. In Mandarin Chinese, one of the worst insults is Nide muchin shr ega da wukwei (Your mother is a big turtle). It is thought to be particularly insulting to call someone a turtle egg because a turtle does not know its father and turtles are promiscuous. And the disparagement of a rival's mother is a global rhetorical tactic: even in Britain, where one might think such rhetoric lacks force, such terms of abuse as "bastard" (implying that a mother is necessary, but the lack of a known father is shameful) or "son of a bitch" (impugning the rival's mother's sexual integrity) still imply sexist contempt for mothers, even if Britons do not find such terms especially insulting.

Are such insults founded in misogyny, I ask Cameron, author of Language and Sexual Politics and Feminism and Linguistic Theory? "Of course they're misogynistic. Not just overtly. If you think about those 'yo momma' remarks that they use in playing the dozens, they're subtly misogynistic in the way they systematically erase the mother. She isn't even present when the insult takes place. She's not even important enough to be the subject of the insult." But isn't her honour being defended when men leap to the defence of their insulted mother? Some sardonic tittering comes down the phone line from Oxford by way of reply.

Why would insulting a boy's mother be so very terrible? A quick flick through some of the great works of psychoanalysis will tell you why. Freud thought the male child had an unconscious desire for the exclusive love of his mother. Anyone who interfered with that hoped-for exclusivity (such as her husband) must die. Such is the Oedipus complex, provoking a neurotic desire that includes jealousy towards the father and the unconscious wish for his death.

But the Oedipus complex, one might well think, has another dimension. What else could tarnish that unconscious desire for the exclusive love of one's mother? The answer seems to be the suggestion, couched in an insult, that your mother is sexually promiscuous. How could a mummy-obsessed boy tolerate the thought that she might have sex with someone other than him? Hence the potency of the insult and the fact that, even if Materazzi did not call Zidane's mother a prostitute, the possibility of such a grave insult might well justify to many people (probably mostly men) a physical assault on a person who had made that psychically intolerable jibe. It is, at least, a theory. True, there is also such a phenomenon as the Electra complex among girls, but there is not yet a parallel for father-besotted daughters head-butting people who speak ill of their dads. Maybe in time there will be.

Why aren't fathers the butt of insults so much as mothers? Had David Beckham said to the linesman "Tu padre es un gigolo que tiene cópula con una multiplicidad de diversos socios" (Your father is a gigolo who has intercourse with a multitude of different partners), he probably wouldn't have got a red card. Just a baffled look, and applause from those impressed by his command of his second language. "The underlying idea is you're attacking what your rival came out of," says Cameron. "That's why it's mothers rather than fathers who feature in the more potent insult. Everybody comes from their mother".


3. WORLD CUP - Zidane
The French Hero who was, ultimately, just a Man.
BY BERNARD-HENRI LEVY

PARIS--Here is one of the greatest players of all time, a legend, a myth for the entire planet, and universally acclaimed. Here is a champion who, in front of two billion people, was putting the final touches on one of the most extraordinary sagas in soccer's history.

Here is a man of providence, a savior, who was sought out, like Achilles in his tent of grudge and rage, because he was believed to be the only one who could avert his countrymen's fated decline. Better yet, he's a super-Achilles who--unlike Homer's--did not wait for an Agamemnon (in the guise of coach Raymond Domenech) to come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself, spontaneously, after having "heard" a voice calling him, to come back from his Spanish exile and--putting his luminous armor back on, and flanked by his faithful Myrmidons (Makelele, Vieira, Thuram)--reverse the new Achaeans' ill fortune and allow them to successfully pull together.

And then this valiant knight who is a hair's breadth from victory and just minutes from the end of a historic match (and of a career that will carry him into the Pantheon of stadium-gods after Pelé, Platini and Maradona); this giant who, like the Titans of the ancient world, has known Glory, then Exile, then Return and Redemption; this redeemer, this blue angel dressed in white, who had only the very last steps to scale to enter Olympus for good, commits a crazy incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the soccer ritual--the final image of him that will go down in history and, in lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.

No one knows, as I write, what actually happened on the field of Berlin's Olympic Stadium.

No one knows what the Italian, Marco Materazzi, did or said (in the 111th minute of a match that this hero had dominated with all his grace) to reawaken in him those old demons of a kid from the streets of Marseilles, the very demons that soccer's code of honor, its ethic, its aesthetic, are made to quell.

Even if we knew why; even if we knew for certain that the Italian insulted him, or cursed his mother, father, brothers, sister; even if we got hold of the black box of those 20 seconds that saw the champion destroy in a flash his legend that is a mix of secret king, a Dostoyevskian sweet man, the ideal Beur son-in-law, future mayor of Marseilles and, last but not least, the charismatic captain leading his troops to consecration; even if we knew the whole story, this suicide would be as all ordinary suicides are; no reason in the world explains the desperate act of a man--no provocation, no nasty remark, will ever tell us why the planetary icon that Zinedine Zidane had become, a man more admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela put together, a demigod, a chosen one, this great priest-by-consensus of the new religion and the new empire in the making, chose to explode right there, rather than wait a few minutes to settle the quarrel on the sidelines.

No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay in the skin of an icon, demigod, hero, legend.

The only plausible explanation for so bizarrely scuttling everything--which, remember, let a lot of time go by (the 20 long seconds following the Italian Machiavelli's undoubtedly calculated outrage) in order to concentrate itself into the outburst of a player who was out of breath and stupidly losing control of his nerves--the only explanation is that there was in this man a kind of recoil, an ultimate inner revolt, against the living parabola, the stupid statue, the beatified monument, that the era had transformed him into over these past few months.

The man's insurrection against the saint. A refusal of the halo that had been put on his head and that he then, quite logically, pulverized with a head-butt, as though saying: I am a living being not a fetish; a man of flesh and blood and passion, not this idiotic empty hologram, this guru, this universal psychoanalyst, natural child of Abbé Pierre and Sister Emanuelle, which soccer-mania was trying to turn me into.

It was as though he were repeating, in parody, the title of one of the very great books of the last century, before the triumph of this liturgy of the body, performance and commodity: Ecce Homo , This is a Man. Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the globalized crowd.

Achilles had his heel. Zidane will have had his--this magnificent and rebellious head that brought him, suddenly, back into the ranks of his human brothers.

(Mr. Lévy is the author of "American Vertigo" (Random House, 2006). This piece was translated from the original French by Hélène Brenkman.)