the Italians are no champions

"How could he let his team down like that and not be focused on the win?"
"Would Michael Jordan do that with a championship on the line?"

Two good questions asked by friends while watching the World Cup, but I don't give a fuck, Zidane is brilliant, the Italians are weasels. Zidane has been provoked before, earned many a yellow and a few red cards in his career, including during important games, this was something worse for him and for those of us who have gloried in his brilliance. This was a setting of a sun obscured by smoke, clatter and disquiet.

Flip Bondy, that moron of the sportsdesk, suggested that Zidane is a thug, a genius who, "as we all know" has the "problem genius has, which is that it lies too close to madness". Or some nonsense like that. Reductive and idiotic, as most such pronouncements will be.

Zidane is no freak. No hot-head. Never been arrested for hitting his girl or getting in a fight at a diner, or any of the other sad et ceteras that mar football and baseball. Never cut off his ear. Unlike the Italians, he has never been accused of being in the fix. No, he is the rarest of things, a poet. Look at his play, so precise, so sound, so exact and so beautiful, with an unerring sense of tempo - never have I seen such balance in sport. A thug? No, that's somebody who looks to provoke, to shift the balance from competition to aggression - an instigator. If you win not on your strengths but on another's vulnerability that lies outside the zone of competiton, then many will refuse to call you champion. Instead, I can only call the Italians opportunists.

Many, if they bother to read this, will disagree with me for saying this, but I don't care. If Zidane was provoked, and he most certainly was, you can talk all you want about the mental part of the game and the keeping focus or et cetera all you want - it's bullshit. If the game is all that matters then it is also all that matters in the measuring - on that then, Italy would have no prize. You cannot say the same for Jordan or the Bulls. Can you imagine asking of Michael Jordan what ethnic slur he used to get a player out of his groove? Or ask him if the constant elbowing and nipple tweaking was what put the Bulls over the top? Nipple tweaking. Sure, Zidane should be above being taunted about his Algerian heritage, should be above the constant elbows the Italians rained upon him and the nipple tweaking as well. After all, his game has nothing to do with that drivel, his game is the poet's verse, the composer's tempo. Why resort to more vulger tones and shades? Why abondon the beautiful for the prosaic? The game is not all for Zidane, it's that simple. Perhaps the game was all for Jordan, who knows? But this much is true, it took the Italians insults, wheedling, and harassment to "win" the World Cup. To degrade yourself for victory is to lose the victory its meaning. Nipple tweaking. If you need to resort to a constant stream of hate and nipple tweaking to achieve victory, just take it, set fires in celebration and leave.

A friend of mine asked me if Jordan would ever give up a championship to defend his own honor? No, I replied in a text message, but so what? Without honor, victory is meaningless. As much as I love Jordan, and I do, Zidane to me represented something deeper, if both of them with the distillation of process into art, then Zidan's distillation was more complex, less about the black and white of victory and defeat that drove Jordan so and more about the music that makes the whole thing.

The saddest thing about this World Cup is that a poet of the beautiful game resorted to the mundanity of violent response too often inspired by hate, insult and tawdry ambition. WIthout his poetry Zidane is simply one of us, another guy getting angry at somebody on the highway who's cut him off. Zidane is better than that, the Italian "Champions" are not. Any libation from that tarnished cup will be bitter, and if drunken to the lees, fatal. For Zidane, the bitter aftertaste will be the knowledge that when it was most necessary, he ignored what was through him, the music of the spheres.