Zidane

If you watch the World Cup, maybe you saw this. Zidane of France's football team received a red card for attacking another player in Sunday's game. Yeah, okay. It's unexpected, but it isn't really all that surprising either. Still, up through the game's conclusion, the announcer on the particular channel I was watching wouldn't stop mentioning Zidane's "vicious attack".

Yeah, they used that same wording about four times. They also wouldn't shut up about "what a disappointing way to end a career" it was. Isn't that going a bit overboard? Sure, I understand that violence is less than tolerable and that an attack like this is contrary to the idea of letting everybody have a good time with sports (the ability to keep this in mind is known in some cultures as "good sportsmanship"). Where's the empathy, though? I don't see any in the use of the word "vicious; nor is there any pity in the word "disappointing", which at best implies that Zidane has failed spectacularly in some way.

I admit that I made fun of the matter when discussing it with some friends here. We said things like "What an idiot!" and "What was he thinking?", and now I feel guilty for it. In the comfort of my dorm room, Zidane's attack seems like a very irrational act. What's to say, though, that I wouldn't have lost control and rational thought in the heat of the moment of a similarly high-pressure, high-stakes situation? I'm only human. There's no way for me to say for sure what I'd do until I'm actually faced with something parallel. However, even if I somehow knew that I'd never attack someone like that, I still wouldn't feel comfortable disparaging Zidane, and especially not with words such as "vicious" and "disappointing". Tearing people to pieces for their mistakes simply isn't something I enjoy doing.

In case you didn't like that one bit, a less serious and more Mathcamp-y entry is on the way.