LET'S DANCE: Get out your red card + dance. |
One of my painter friends had to watch the World Cup final with only one eye. He’s been an artist temporarily without depth perception since undergoing surgery a few days ago in order to correct a detached retina he suffered years back during a college soccer match but which was only recently diagnosed.He didn’t notice Marco Materazzi pinch Zinedine Zidane in the moments before the two exchanged the words that led to Zidane dropping Materazzi to the pitch with a head-butt worthy of a Glaswegian pubcrawler, the Italian falling to the earth with the flair of an extra in a World War II film.
In fact I’ve yet to read a sportswriter’s account of the incident that rewinds the tape further back than their verbal exchange; so far nobody seems to have noticed Materazzi’s tit-twister through the fabric of the French master’s soon to be enshrined jersey.
Materazzi’s imperceptible pinch was the real masterpiece of the tournament, even more important than his successful penalty kick. It operated at the subtlest level of play, where the kinesthetic and the psychological are impossible to separate, where the most acrobatic and newsworthy physical act is not necessarily any more consequential than the almost unnoticeable act that any kid could perform. It was thus something of a victory against the mythology of sports heroics that imagines certain players to be something other than humans capable of and indeed more than likely to swap slaps, pinches, and punches when they think big brother isn’t looking. For a moment, Materazzi was the master in the relay of gestures and passages that makes a match; he placed a bet on the promise of an act that his adversary would complete in a manner that confirmed Materazzi’s assessment of him, and so could activate Zidane’s own history of spectacular illegal play, whose most notable moment prior to this one was the counterstrike (also allegedly in response to verbal taunts) he performed when he landed cleats-first on Saudi captain Fuad Amin during the 1998 World Cup — another red-card moment.
So the picture woven by sportscasters all throughout the match of the classy cool-headed leader playing brilliantly (including that missed header late in the game, an almost impossibly perfect play which Buffon had no hope of stopping if it hadn’t come straight at his own head, and which was in my and my one-eyed painter friend’s estimation the moment that set him up to fall to Materazzi’s pinch) in what was ostensibly his last international match, having every move assessed with respect to posterity as soon as he’d made it, was unraveled by that elegant gesture of disrespect.
Artist Iain Kerr, a member of the collective spurse and a professor in the Maine College of Art’s MFA program, notes that what opens up for us in the moment of Zidane and Materazzi’s encounter is something much more interesting and provocative than a series of assessments of athletic greatness. “Bodies touch. Nations touch. Cultures touch,” he says. “Between those gestures, words, and brushes, that led up to this event — one man walking backwards and the other forward — a billion people reached out across North Africa into Italy and back. A head to the chest. The violent poetics of bodies. The violent poetics of this moment. Great players invent styles at the edge of rules — by producing variations — unsubsumable variations that the referees are in constant scrutiny of.”
