Say this much about the head-butt heard around the world: It's turned people who've never told a mother joke in their lives into certified experts on trash talk.
The analysis is no longer just limited to sports commentators; pundits who wouldn't have known Zinedine Zidane from Zarley Zalapski are now weighing in on why the insults apparently directed at the French superstar were a dime a dozen. "Trash talk, like testosterone, is simply part of the game," The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente pronounced yesterday. "If you stop and fight every time someone insults you, you'll never win." On the page opposite, her paper's editorial board adopted a similar line, decrying Zidane's "singular act of selfishness and bad sportsmanship" in response to standard "verbal abuse from opponents who are equally determined to win at all costs."
Most everyone else on this side of the Atlantic seems to agree. But ironically, the flaw in their logic was inadvertently exposed by a writer who actually knows his sports.
Writing in Wednesday's National Post under the headline "Taunts Need Not Shock Jocks," sports columnist Mark Spector invoked the memory of Slap Shot - specifically of Paul Newman's grizzled player-coach, Reggie Dunlop, whose trash-talk leads to an ejection of the opposing goalie. "Hey Hanrahan, your wife's a dyke," Reggie tells him. "Suzanne's a dyke. I know. I know. A lesbian. A lesbian. A lesbian..."
It's true, as Spector wrote, that Slap Shot remains a favourite of junior hockey players everywhere. But what he neglected to mention is the scene that follows, when Reggie's team returns to its dressing room.
When they first learn what he said to provoke Hanrahan, his teammates have a good laugh (homophobia was a little funnier in the '70s than it is now). Then Reggie tells them that the goalie's wife actually is a lesbian, and the room gets quieter. They were duly impressed when they thought it was just a generic insult; that it was actually personal took it to a whole new level.
The thing about standard trash talk is that it's easy to brush off because it doesn't actually mean anything. That's why what happened in last Sunday's World Cup final can't be lumped in with what's heard on North American basketball courts and hockey rinks - because unlike what we consider trash talk, it actually meant a whole lot.
More and more, it appears Marco Materazzi called Zidane's mother "a terrorist whore." And even if that wasn't literal (it's a safe bet the French captain's mother, who was in the hospital at game time, is neither a prostitute nor a member of al-Qaeda), it's easy to see why it hit too close to home - not just for Zidane, but for any number of other immigrants toiling in Europe.
Raised in working-class Marseilles by his Algerian parents, Zidane appears on the surface to be the epitome of the immigrant success story. In fact, that tag applies to the majority of his teammates as well - a collection of players mostly from African roots cheered on by France as they brilliantly represent it on the international stage. But even at the moment they all dreamed of, they were constantly reminded that an awful lot of Europeans see them as something other than French.
Entering a match against Spain, whose coach went virtually unpunished for calling French star Thierry Henry a "black shit," players of African background were subjected to monkey chants - now common at European stadiums, along with the occasional banana-toss. All through the World Cup, journalists noted how the players being feted during the tournament would have a hard time getting a seat at a Paris restaurant any other time. And at the most pivotal point in the championship game, Zidane's opponents apparently saw it as OK to viciously attack him for being a Muslim.
This is not just boys being boys in the sporting arena, as Wente and many others contend. What makes it so much worse is that, at least in some corners of the continent, it's Europe being Europe.
Considering what greets the rich and famous as they ply their trade, one can only imagine what ghettoized Africans or Muslims have to put up with as they struggle to get by. Have trouble finding work and they're accused of bringing their adoptive countries down. Succeed and they're derided for taking the jobs of native Europeans. If Ukrainian national coach Oleg Blokhin is able to keep his job after complaining that soccer jobs are being lost to "some zumba-bumba whom they took off a tree, gave him two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league," imagine the stuff being said to immigrant factory workers.
Zidane shouldn't have snapped, of course - not because Materazzi didn't deserve it, but because it hurt all his teammates persevering through the same sort of garbage. In a sense, failing to rise above the bile let down immigrants across Europe, too. But it's a fair bet that many of them wish they could land a head-butt or two of their own.
