The Spectacle of Zidane
Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi has become something of a Rorschach test. In the face of his rash and perhaps inexplicable act, we pass judgment and attempt to find meaning. But, in the end, our accounts of his behavior reveal more about ourselves than they do about the incident itself.
The snarky fan of pop culture greets the headbutt sarcastically, seeing it as an opportunity for cheap laughs.
The reserved soccer purist hails it as tragedy, and bemoans the disgraced end of Zidane’s career.
The French-leaning fan awaits explanation — one that will come, apparently, later today. [update: here it is]
And the fan of the beautiful game rues the violence of the act, and condemns Zidane for a moral and ethical failure.
Of all these reactions, I find the last one — made in this case by Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise (though she is certainly not alone in her assessment) — to be the most grating, because it abstracts the incident from the specific context in which it occurred.
Although one might be hard-pressed to get Americans to agree, soccer is a violent sport. As fans, we tend to see the shoves, pushes, elbows, and spikings that routinely occur during games as aberrant acts, distateful sidenotes to the “real” action on the field.
But much of the game, at least on the professional level, involves that kind of physical contact. There is a game within the game, and it is one that all soccer players play: how much physical contact can one get away with without being called for a foul or receiving a card? Like it or not, moments of brute violence are part of the fabric of the sport.
Was Zidane’s headbutt so different from other acts of violence in the sport that he should be singled out for failing as “a captain, a sportsman, and a human being”? Think of Wayne Rooney stepping on Renaldo’s groin. Or think of a subtler foul — Peter Crouch’s goal against Trinidad & Tobago. Take a look at the video. Was Crouch’s violent hair-pull categorically less violent than Zidane’s headbutt? Or was it only less visible, less dramatic?
The difference, I think, has more to do with the position of the spectator and the nature of the spectacle than it does with the moral worth of the players involved.
To condemn Zidane as a human being is to turn a blind eye to the true nature of the game as it is played, rather than as it should exist on some Platonic level of existence.
Update: Here’s a terrific response to Lindsay’s posts, by Helmut at Phronesisaical, that addresses them on a philosophical level: Some thoughts on verbal taunting and violence. Helmut writes:
If we’re using a notion such as proportionality to think about the relation between verbal abuse and physical reaction, it’s simply unclear that there are not proportional degrees of verbal abuse and physical violence. Lindsay wants to draw a clearcut line there by abstracting from context. This move works only in the cool confines of the academic classroom.
Go on and read the rest.
