Camus and Zidane Offer Views on How Things End - New York Times

Camus and Zidane Offer Views on How Things End - New York Times: "Camus, writing during World War II, the son of a man killed in World War I, captured a 20th-century senselessness in his story of a man driven to an irrational act for which he feels no remorse, for which in fact he feels nothing. The story of Zidane in the World Cup final is also a story of his age."
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Zidane chose his fate. We all do, or so Camus believed. Zidane chose his moment, 10 minutes before the end of his career. What he could not determine was what would happen afterward in the age of the global conversation.

Already, theories are swirling, a planetary fog of electronic opinion arising from an act virtually nobody who was there saw. Lip-readers and others claim to know what Materazzi said. Zidane's agent is promising a revelation.

Some defend Zidane, or even perceive a certain elegance in his head butt. Others recoil in horror or anger. One or two hail Zidane's cosmic joke. Jacques Chirac, the French president, thanks Zidane for what he has done for France and for showing "the greatest human qualities." Zizou wins the Golden Ball award for best player.

On my World Cup blog (blogs.iht.com/worldcupcohen), I have been deluged with mail about the incident. Jessica Torres wrote from Dallas, Texas: "Two minutes before his fall from grace I was sure he was going to go down in history as a man full of honor, grace and control and take his place with the greats. And then he re-wrote his own destiny. But his actions also made me love him more. Before he was a god. But then he showed us all that he was just a man. A man with weakness and hate."

She concluded: "I am much more affected by him than I would have been had things gone as I hoped. But, my Lord, was that head butt sexy."

Another correspondent, writing from Oakland, California, said: "I think Zidane's performance has always been about controlling rage and focusing it, in one way or another. It was, most of the time, a beautiful thing to behold."

The comment continued: "The zone out of which Zidane's football brilliance came was likely some kind of deeply personal state that he indulged and called upon. Zidane believed that he could do impossible things, or that impossible things could flow out of him if he gave himself over to this state."

Certainly, Zidane was in a place denied most mortals during the French victory over Brazil. His smile was that of a man seeing things others could not. And it is true that he could give the impression that the ball was propelled not precisely by him, but by some force emanating from him.

Camus was averse to judgment. Acts themselves, explicable or not, were all that we could know existed. Meursault felt nothing at his mother's funeral and he killed the Arab in the stunning sunlight. We may wish that the story had been otherwise - as we may wish that love not be close to hate - but the story was what it was.

Zidane, it seems, lost his head. Or perhaps he kept his head and chose to write a coda to his story that would have all the complexity of a great novel. Perhaps he sought an almost unseen act of anger that would prompt a global, virtual argument about the merits or demerits of a gesture without sense.