4. The tragic hero. The World Cup final in Berlin in 2006 was the last game Zinedine Zidane ever played. He had already won the tournament once, spurring France to victory in 1998. After that, he was more than a footballer. In a country where Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front made it to the run-off in the next presidential election, Mr Zidane—the son of an Algerian warehouseman—became the face of a more tolerant France. Crowds in Paris chanted for him to be president.
The match in Berlin was heading for a penalty shoot-out; Mr Zidane, France’s captain, had already scored one in the game. With ten minutes to go, an Italian defender muttered something to him (about his mother, Mr Zidane alleged; only about his sister, the defender maintained). Mr Zidane headbutted the Italian in the chest. He was sent off. France lost the shoot-out.
This implosion was a tragedy in the purest sense. A tragedy, wrote Aristotle in the fourth century BC, depicts the fall of a great but flawed man, and hinges on a peripeteia, or sudden reversal, like the Italian defender’s slur. For Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French intellectual, the meltdown represented the “suicide of a demigod”—a tragic hero of whom too much has been demanded. Watch the scene closely, and there is indeed something oddly composed in Mr Zidane’s demeanour as, jogging away from his opponent, he hears, stops, and turns back to meet his fate.
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