By now, virtually everyone in the world has seen the dramatic replay of the great French midfielder, Zinedine Zidane, headbutting Italian defender Marci Materazzi in the chest, and knocking him to the ground during the World Cup Final Game last Sunday.
On Monday evening, this headbutt incident was shown on almost every American network news channel. The talking heads jumped to conclusions and universally condemned Zidane; indeed, one network's anchorman actually called him a "louse." It's oh-so-typical that the mainstream media were too lazy to ask journalistically obvious questions, much less provide answers: "Why would professional soccer's equivalent of Michael Jordan do such a bizarre thing in his very last game? Was there was any reason for his red-card foul?"
And yet the answers to those questions could very well uncover important mitigating circumstances. For instance, my European friends tell me that a respected professional lip reader was retained to analyze the World Cup Final Game on videotape. Unsurprisingly, the lip reader discovered that Marco Materazzi had intentionally provoked Zinedine Zidane on the field by calling his sister a "prostitute," and him a "terrorist." Furthermore, Materazzi knew that Zidane is ethnically Algerian. In the context of Zidane's North African racial heritage, Materazzi's insults took on the additional dimension of extremely provocative racist slurs, which explains why Zidane suddenly snapped.
There is one more fact that points to mitigating circumstances. Materazzi almost certainly stooped to the gutter level of hurling racist insults in order to provoke Zidane, thus hoping to get France's best player ejected from the game. Of course, the World Cup not only officially condemns racism but also regards any unsportsmanlike utterance of a racist slur during a game as a very serious offense. The Italian team should not have been rewarded for this ugly winning-through-racism tactic. If the referee knew that Materazzi had been using provocative racist taunts, he could not have exonerated Zidane for his retaliatory headbutt, but he should have ejected Materazzi on a red-card foul too.
Therefore, I for one was happy to learn that some ameliorative justice was done when the World Cup officials ignored Zidane's ejection for the red-card foul, and honored him anyway by awarding him the Golden Boot as the World Cup's best player.
The Peoples Voice.org..
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