Yeah, baby! Italy! Italy! Italy!
Now, I'm not Italian. The closest I come to being Italian is through my sister-in-law, but it seems like a lovely country, I once briefly dated an Italian guy, and hey, who doesn't love the food? My rooting for Italy at the beginning of the match was much more a function of rooting for the non-French team, but by the end of the match, I was genuinely thrilled for our compadres who hail from the country shaped like a boot.
Yep, I wasn't rooting for the French team for reasons that have nothing to do with the French team, but then Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi, and that clinched my distaste for the French in this World Cup.
My nephew Nick had plans to watch the match today with some of his other soccer pals. He's been very invested in the World Cup for the past month. And when Zidane was ejected, I thought, "Well, this is a good teaching moment for Nick." But it's a good teaching moment for all of us.
At the end of the day, all you have is your name, your honor. Zidane might be one of the best players to ever take to the pitch, but today, the world isn't remembering his career so much as it's clucking its collective tongue and saying, "What a shame." No, I can't understand the emotion he was feeling, the fever pitch of a World Cup on the line, his last professional match. But if everything is a choice - and it is - no matter how angry or tired or sad he was, he could have chosen to walk away.
He stood there and made a decision. He made a choice, and he chose poorly. What a shining example of poor sportsmanship. What a sorry footnote to a storied career.
But enough about France's bad boy. (Though I noticed one of the French players, after receiving his second-place medal, taking it off as he walked toward the camera. Petulant ass.)
As for the World Cup trophy, itself, I might just be an ostentatious American who's used to the Stanley Cup and the World Series trophy, but the World Cup, well, it kinda looks like an MTV Movie Award, no?
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