CAN WE FORGIVE HIM?(The Talk of the Town)(soccer player Zinedine Zidane's response to insulting Italian during World Cup game)

"And why? And why?" the French announcer moaned in some mixture of bafflement and misery last week, after the great Zidane walked away, paused, thought better, or worse, of it, and then went back and rammed his forehead into Materazzi's blue chest, leading the World Cup to its painfully ambiguous ending. It may be that the final score in penalties would have been the same without that geste, but the blow certainly changed the flavor and meaning of the French ascent: from something entirely wonderful and unexpected--a climb to glory--to something painful and all too human: a fall from grace.

American journalists, using that heavily facetious sacre bleu! tone that they still favor when they are discussing something as queer as foreigners, have already covered the incident with enough larksome analysis to make it into a kind of byword. (Overheard at a Central Park soccer match: "You hold their shirts and I'll insult their sisters, and we'll take care of the rest!") But, for those involved, it was about as far from fun as anything could be. People in France have been thinking hard about why Zidane did it, and what it means, and have thereby been honoring the national belief that it really is not possible to think too hard about things. (People who tell you that it is possible to think too hard about things are always the ones who aren't good at thinking about things in the first place, just as people who tell you that you can make yourself sick from too much exercise are always the ones who don't exercise at all.)

The first theory was that Zidane was not a dignified paladin who had uncharacteristically submitted to a sudden rage but in fact an angry man who, for once--or, rather, once again: a trail of red cards follows him--let it show. Just as all architects who are any good are megalomaniacs, all athletes at this level are fuelled by anger when they play; even the seemingly disciplined ones tend to be driven, demon-ridden people who act out in unpredictable, self-destructive ways.

This point led to a larger question for French fans: can you forgive him, and can you still treat him as a hero? And this came to turn on what, exactly, it was that Materazzi, the annoying Italian, was supposed to have said to provoke Zidane. The press and the football ...