On Zinedine Zidane
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When I think of the football legend Zinedine Zidane a particular play often comes to mind. In it, a long ball is given to him as he is running towards the corner of the field. The ball is behind him and as it descends over his shoulder he suddenly turns and jumps at the same time, accepting the ball on his chest and sending it lightly upwards like a bubble of soap. A lesser player would have stumbled backward from the ball’s velocity, but Zidane, spinning, finds his footing by delicately tapping the ground with ballerina’s feet. At this point the ball is nearing the ground and instead of merely settling it, Zidane cuts it backward with the outside of his foot and retrieves it, sending his marksman running the wrong way. In short, in a split second, he managed to cradle a ball hurtling from the heavens, rob it of all its kinetic energy, and roll it calmly in the opposite direction, which, it should be noted, is exactly what he did with his own body. Taking the ball so well on his chest would be enough to draw acclaim—but it is the cutting back of the ball when it was not necessary that wraps up the entire play with a big beautiful bow.
This play reveals something of the nature of football and those who watch it. If you go to youtube.com and type in Zidane’s name, you will find countless highlight reels of him, all of which showcase this magical play. What you will not find is what happened afterward: did the play lead to a goal? Did it somehow play a part in his team’s victory? What was its purpose? The answers to these questions are irrelevant and have been lost to time. It is not the Immaculate Reception, which led to an improbable last-minute victory, nor is it Christian Laettner’s turnaround buzzer shot, to name another heralded moment in American sports. I think it is unique to football that such a play, a blossoming of physical grace, which, like a flower in an unidentifiable forest, unfolds with no temporal or statistical context, is etched in the minds of fans of Zidane and football in general. It shows that a kind of artistic excellence is of paramount importance, and so while the cutting back of the ball is perhaps not practically necessary it is aesthetically vital. Zidane is admired not solely for the tournaments he won and the amount of goals he scored (which are plenty but do not top any list): like other great footballers he is revered for the way he moves—because of how he plays.
This is an aspect of football that is lost on most of my American friends and relatives. The most common word thrown around when a football game is on is “boring.” Others include: “Nothing ever happens”; “Why can’t they score”; “You can’t blow a fart at one of these guys without them falling down and screaming in pain”; and “That’s it? A tie? A friggin tie?” Of course, in between these comments a whole game has been played, a game of nonstop movement with only one break in the middle, and yet all that occurred might as well have been played on a different television set in another room for all that is appreciated by the average American viewer. It is not to say that football is an acquired taste or requires a certain level of sophistication to “understand” it—a quick acquaintance with any British football hooligan would be enough to dispel this notion. Rather, by its very nature, its lack of so-called action, and its peculiar history, football has developed its own criteria of excellence that is foreign to every other team sport. It has less to do with victory, toughness, or statistics—what I would argue are the most valued benchmarks of American sports—than with beauty.
Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” I think great trophy-less athletes like Charles Barkley and Cal Ripken, Jr. Patrick Ewing would concede the point with a painful twinge of regret. As would any great footballer. But Lombardi’s maxim, so applicable when discussing the American mentality of sports, does not encapsulate how football fans view the game. In fact, it would be difficult to find another sport whose fans so glorify teams that have suffered ignominious defeats at the hands of lesser teams. Case in point: the 1954 Hungarian World Cup team, considered one of the best of all time. Led by Ferenc Puskás, their greatest player, and known as the Mighty Magyars, the Hungarians crushed every team that was unlucky enough to face them by scores that almost resembled an American football game.
Another: the 1974 Dutch World Cup squad led by Johan Cruyff, which also lost to West Germany, this time 2 to 1 in the final. Cruyff’s team is legendary because of Total Football, one of the prettiest styles of football ever invented. In it, a player who moves out of his position is quickly replaced by another player on his team, and once he has moved another player must take his place, and so on and so forth. Thus the structure of the team, while nebulous and constantly in motion, is never broken. It requires that each player keep the whole space of the field in his head. Also, each player must be capable of playing any position, defense, attack, or midfield. Facing such a team as it approaches you must be akin to facing a storm of bees. Cruyff was the centerpiece of the action, free to roam the field at will because he was confident a teammate would compensate for the gap he had created. The result was that he popped up everywhere, chipping away at his opponent from every angle, and scored fewer goals than one might expect from a center forward; but opposing teams never knew which player would inflict the damaging blow. As one player from the team said, “It was about making space, coming into space, and organizing space-like architecture on the football pitch.” Even more amazing, Dutch play was based on this theory alone, meaning the players received no top-down instruction, no arrows and X’s: they only had to keep the idea of this type of football in mind as they ran out onto the field. As Cruyff himself said, “Simple football is the most beautiful. But playing simple football is the hardest thing.”
Total Football reveals two things: firstly, in football style is king. It is not that the 1974 West German team, led by the quasi-militant Franz Beckenbauer, did not have a style of their own. To the contrary, the reason German teams are so forgettable is that their style was and has always been clearly defined: rigid, uber-efficient, disciplined, and in a word, dull. Jurgen Klinsmann caused a furor during the 2006 World Cup when as coach he tried to change the way (a now united)
Alongside the 1970 World-Cup winning team led by Pele, the 1982 Brazilian World Cup team is considered by Brazilians and many others the best of all time. The 1982 team however, more so than the 1970, represents the apotheosis of the joga bonita, the beautiful game, a term nowadays used to describe football in general but which actually began as a Brazilian philosophy of the game. If Pele is the founding father of Brazilian football, its George Washington, then Telê Santana, the 1982 coach, is its
Such a style of course requires magnificent players and
To watch the 1982 team is to witness the unfettered essence of football. If not exactly art, it is more art than sport, more dance than warfare. Telê did not rely on tactics or even a unifying theory like Total Football. He simply gave the players their freedom and the result was a combination of watching children at play and Charlie Parker improvising a sax solo. It was a daring strategy that barely flew in football never mind how other sports would have viewed it. But
In a sense it was a tragedy: a team of such superior skill, the likes of which only comes once in a generation, perhaps many generations, lost because of the stubborn ideology of one man. But it was also a reaffirmation of what is glorious about football, and Brazilians revered Telê for it. After the game, Telê embraced each player as they left the field; he then accepted responsibility for the defeat and resigned as head coach. But due to popular demand he was reinstated in 1986—and lost again. Even when Brazil won the World Cup in 1994 and 2002, with players who spent most of their time playing for richer European clubs, the Brazilian press grumbled: did its team play the joga bonita? Or did it merely win?
To be fair, the Brazilians set a different standard for themselves and expect it all, the beautiful game and the victory. And while no team has since adopted Telê’s philosophy to the hilt, there lies somewhere in the Brazilians’ genetic makeup the imperative to play with flair. Not only individual flair, not only crossovers, nutmegs, and cycle kicks, but team flair—superlative passing. For the beauty of passing lies at the heart of football. Critics always point to football’s dearth of goals when expressing their distaste for the game. Yet a goal is very difficult to come by precisely because, for the most part, it relies on a series of passes, an extended moment of like thinking between players. A goal, a good goal, is as rare and electric as the moment in which two jamming guitar players, unrehearsed and unbidden, make a harmonic chord change at the exact same time. With no timeouts, no whiteboard, no set plays written on one’s forearm, a goal requires a flash of inspired connectivity between players in constant motion, players enveloped in swirling chaos, the pattern of which, the meaning, is discernable only after the goal is scored, only when the transfiguring event has occurred, and only then can one can trace back to the spark of its origin. But for every one or two goals a game, there are ninety minutes of unfulfilled potential, dozens of incomplete bridges littering the field. I think this is where the frustration of non-football lovers lie. It is also the reason why Zidane’s chest trap is magnified to the heights of lore.
Though passing forms the fundamental structure of football’s aesthetic, assists are not recorded on any stat sheet as they are in basketball and ice hockey. Statistics are the alpha and omega of American sports, the rubric by which fans ultimately appraise any player and any team. ESPN, which everyday unleashes in all permutations and flavors an unending stream of statistical candy for the bloated masses, has only increased this trend. But even before cable television, American sports were dominated by numbers posted. When one thinks of a great athletes like Joltin’ Joe, one thinks immediately of his hitting streak; when one tries to imagine the awesome physical power of Wilt Chamberlain the number 100 comes to mind. Not that these aren’t impressive accomplishments. And a simple survey of Yankee fans will show that they prefer one clutch play by Jeter to A-Rod’s steady statistical output. But when it comes to legacy in American sports, numbers outweigh athletic ability. Worse, numbers have come to equate it. The relationship between the movement of muscle and a verifiable outcome, the connection between balance and the tick of the counter, is so heavily stressed that people actually care whether an obvious fraud like Barry Bonds may one day attain the top spot on the career home run list.
A player like Zinedine Zidane would be lost in such a mindset. There is nothing one can automatically point to when discussing his genius. Yes, he won a World Cup, yes, he won a Champion’s League Cup, the premier tournament for European clubs. But so have others and more of them. Still, he is considered alongside Puskás, Pele, Cruyff, and Maradona as one of the greatest of all time. All criterion of merit in football—“considered the greatest,” “one of the best,” “bellisima”—are subjective and based only on a loose consensus of appreciation. What then comes to the forefront are descriptions of play, sketches of acrobatics, memories of actual movement.
Zidane was a maestro of movement, both on and off the ball. And as with all things in football, his greatness was a matter of style. A style based not only on the way he never lost the ball, touching and flicking it just right, moving in and out of spaces around it, slipping his large frame between defenders and his possession; not only the way he could continually find the right pass to split the defense so that it disintegrated from a formidable fortress of men to an incoherent trail of children running after the ball; not only the way he could dominate an entire midfield by his mere presence; but in the way he languidly paced the field, watching, waiting, hawk-like, for the precise moment to strike, as if all the players sprinting madly across the field were beneath him. By the way players would fall at his legs as he calmly turned and spun around them. By the way each goal he scored bore his stamp. In the 2001 Champion’s League Final, when Zidane was playing for Real Madrid, a high ball came to him at the edge of the defensive area. Instead of controlling it and moving the ball forward for an easier shot, he volleyed it outright with his weaker left foot into the corner of the net to win the game. It was a spectacular goal, a beautiful, heedless, Telê-like way to end a game in which a whole season’s worth of work was on the line and utmost caution was called for. It is known as The Goal.
At the risk of venturing too far into hyperbole, there is something ineffable about his style; you have to witness for yourself how Zidane plays for there is literally nothing like it. But there is a signature trait in Zidane’s football, a certain attitude of aloofness towards the mere mortals scampering around him, that brought him his greatest moment of shame. There are plenty of theories as to why, in the 2006 World Cup Final, tied 1 to 1 with Italy, in the last game of his already-hallowed career, Zidane head-butted an Italian player towards the end of the match, leading to his expulsion and possibly the ensuing French defeat. If football is about beauty, then this act was sheer treachery. Zidane himself claimed that Materazzi, the head-buttee, had insulted his sister and his response was only appropriate. Henri Bernard Levy, the ubiquitous(ly annoying) French intellectual, posited that Zidane, a mortal himself, wanted to destroy the god-like pedestal the French public and the world at large had forced him to stand on. Others pointed to his spotted history of violent outbursts: he was prone to bouts of madness. These theories have some truth; but possibly, the reality lies in the opposite of Levy’s conclusion. Zidane already viewed himself as a God—that was the way he played, it was his style. And to rag it out in a dirty match in which
Zidane is lucky he was a footballer, for most fans are willing to forgive him the head-butt in exchange for the famous chest trap, The Goal, and many, many other moments of sublime physical grace. After all, that is what football is about: it is for better or worse an aesthete’s appreciation of the body. Of course, many football fans take the same illusory comfort in a Winning Home Team as other sport fanatics. But Zidane will survive that loss, just as Maradona won’t be remembered for the decades he snorted coke and drank himself to death but for the one miraculous goal he scored against
Unfortunately, it is different with other sports and their fans. In the aftermath of the 2006 final, skulking from a bar and painfully aware of the Zidane jersey I had sported for the occasion, I took some offense at the remarks I heard around me. A head butt to the chest is not exactly endearing to the American sports fan: it is absurd, laughable. And I’m sure most would agree: couldn’t he have just clocked the guy with his fist instead? Wouldn’t that have been tougher? Isn’t that what a real competitor, a real athlete, would do? Well…I’m not sure. When I watch an overweight man on the pitcher’s mound deliver a strike, I have trouble discerning what it’s worth. And when I watch a man slam another to the ground and then strut about the field like a cock in a henhouse, I have to wonder: what exactly is it that we’re celebrating?
—RS