Tutti Pazzi Materazzi
What is it with the World Cup champions’ eagerness to drop trou? Last summer five greased-up members of the Azzurri set hearts aflutter (and left little to the imagination) by appearing in Dolce & Gabbana underwear ads on signboards across Germany. Now, eight months later, their most notorious team-mate is spontaneously stripping into his black D&Gs before a stunned audience in a stylish Milan studio. It’s hard not to stare. Then again, he wants you to. “See, it’s the World Cup trophy!” says Marco Materazzi, pointing to the eight-inch-long tattoo on his left thigh, one of the two dozen (and counting) that decorate much of his chiseled 6’4” frame. “I got it three days after the final.”
“I’ve got one too!” adds his wife of 13 years, Daniela, rolling up her right sleeve to reveal a mini-Cup, to say nothing of her own array of body art.
Their two-year-old daughter, Anna, giggles nearby. Last July her daddy played a central role in the iconic sports moment of the young century: the thunderous head butt he received in the chest after verbally provoking French superstar Zinédine Zidane during the waning minutes of the World Cup final. A global cottage industry has grown around the head butt seen round the world — chart-topping pop songs, best-selling books, a blizzard of digitally altered YouTube clips — and if history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, the man they call the Matrix would rather embrace the farce.
This is the same player who scored a goal and converted a penalty kick in the World Cup final, but also gave away a penalty and instigated the head butt. He also set a Serie A record for goals by a defender (12, with Perugia in 2000—01) but later drew one of the longest misconduct suspensions in Italian history. And he recently scored on a bicycle-kick goal only to garner more attention for absorbing another head butt, from Sampdoria’s Gennaro Delvecchio.
Yet like Benigni, the Oscar-winning Italian comic actor (Life Is Beautiful), Materazzi has also tried to mine humour from misfortune. Last fall he put out a book for charity, What I Really Said to Zidane, listing 249 possible provocations. (Sample: “French philosophy hasn’t been the same since Foucault died.”) Materazzi also filmed an ad for Nike spoofing the head butt in which he subjected his barrel chest to an onrushing linebacker, a police battering ram and a speeding monster truck. Lately, the Materazzi laugh track has given rise to a new chant across Italian stadiums: Tutti pazzi per Materazzi! (All mad about Materazzi!) Sometimes, though, he can’t hide his frustration and fear over the lack of closure to the Zidane episode.
Among Materazzi’s manifold tattoos is an Italian saying that begins on the back of his left arm and ends on his right: If you can solve a problem, why worry? and if your problem can’t be resolved, what’s the use of worrying anyway?
But what if the resolution to his most public problem remains elusive? What if Zidane never accepts his invitation to meet in person, exchange apologies and finally lay their feud to rest? Eight months after that fateful night in Berlin, the Matrix can’t shake his sense that history will remember the head butt more than any other event of last year’s World Cup.
“The United Nations wanted to take separate pictures of us and then bring them together, but I’d be even happier to do it for real,” Materazzi says through a translator. “I’ve apologised to those I have offended. I think (Zidane) should also apologise for what was done, and for what I have gone through as well. If we were to do it through the UN, everyone would see it. I’m more than willing to do this as a real act of communication for the world and for peace.”
Zidane’s response? “It’s in the past,” he told French television’s Canal Plus last autumn. “Things happened the way they happened. We have to live with it.”
Perhaps. Materazzi, however, has one big advantage. While Zizou has retired, the Matrix is still out on the field — and thriving. The scene at the Stadio Domenica in Verona on a gray mid-February afternoon is a microcosm of Italian soccer. Nine days after a carabiniere died from an explosive device during a riot outside a stadium in Sicily, the government has reluctantly allowed Serie A to resume play while enacting strict security measures that will force many matches to be played behind closed doors until stadiums are brought up to code. “Very, very sad,” Materazzi says. “Without the fans, no sport is possible.”
Has any nation ever had a more bizarre 12-month stretch of soccer? On the one hand the Azzurri won their fourth World Cup last July, and Materazzi’s Inter Milan reeled off a record 18 straight wins in Serie A. On the other hand the Italian league has been laid low not only by the tragedy in Sicily but also by a corruption scandal last year that resulted in, among other penalties, the relegation of Juventus to the second division.
When Valencia knocked out Inter in the Champions League round of 16 last month, it seemed like business as usual when the Nerazzurri engaged the victors in an ugly hissy-fit brawl after the final whistle.
The only surprise was that Materazzi wasn’t one of the central figures. Just two years ago Italian columnists were labelling Materazzi an “animal” and a “delinquent” for his thuggish on-field acts: a wild studs-up challenge on then AC Milan star Andriy Shevchenko in 2003; a punch to the face of Siena’s Bruno Cirillo in 2004 that drew Materazzi a two-month suspension. These days, though, those misdeeds are largely forgotten. “In the past he was seen as a bad guy,” says Daniela, with whom he has two sons (Gianmarco, 10, and Davide, 6) and Anna. “People asked me, ‘Does he hit you at home?’ But after the World Cup, Marco became an idol. Now they say, ‘You’re lucky, you have the ideal man.’ But I was lucky to have Marco before, and nobody appreciated that.”
Including, at times, Marco’s father, Giuseppe, the coach of Rome powerhouse Lazio. It was Giuseppe who advised the teenaged Marco to give up soccer and try basketball, the sport of Michael Jordan, who sparked Marco’s fascination with the number 23 — Materazzi’s jersey number as well as the date on which he was married. And it was Giuseppe who cross-examined the young couple when Marco was mired in the third division at age 21: How do you think you’ll live on the money he’ll make playing soccer? Says Daniela, “Nobody believed in him as a soccer player except for me.”
Materazzi was a late bloomer, reaching Serie A at age 24 and making his first national-team appearance at 27. He attributes his fortitude to having to cope with his mother’s death from breast cancer when she was 39. Materazzi cherishes his memories of Anna, who would drive her three sons as far as 300 miles from their home in Bari every weekend so they could see their father play during his pro career. “She died 11 days after my 15th birthday,” says Materazzi. “It’s never easy to lose your mother at 15. You have to become a man quickly.”
Materazzi’s most arresting tats are on his back, where a giant pair of angel’s wings surrounds his name and those of his wife and daughter. “I made a promise,” he says. “If I was to have a baby girl, I would call her the name of my mother, and I would have tattooed wings of protection, as if the shadow of my mother were there to protect us.”
Based on his own experience, Materazzi maintains, there’s no way he could have insulted Zidane’s mother — as Zidane insists he did. “Everyone’s got a mother, and you never know what her destiny has been,” Materazzi says. “You could be attacking the heart of a person, and that’s too much.” Ultimately, any lingering resentment he harbours from last July isn’t toward Zidane. “What hurt me the most was the media, especially the British,” he says. “They offended my image by saying things that (Zidane) then said were not true. I didn’t deserve that.”
For all the benefits of winning the World Cup — becoming an Italian cult hero, meeting Jordan, taking the microphone at a Rolling Stones concert! — there were significant drawbacks for Materazzi. Like, say, joining the growing list of public figures who’ve been targeted by Islamic extremists.
Several anonymous letters, written in French, began arriving last summer at the training ground of Inter Milan. “They were saying they wanted to see me so they could kill me,” says Materazzi, almost whispering, as if he doesn’t want the words to reach Anna, who’s kicking a soccer ball nearby. “I reported the threats to the police because they were related to religious issues” — his erroneously reported anti-Muslim insults to Zidane. “One of my (French) team-mates, Olivier Dacourt, got worried.”
And you didn’t? “I laughed it off. I don’t believe there are people who can be that evil in life, really.”
In the storm of post-World Cup media coverage, even reputable publications were quick to allege what Materazzi said. The Times of London hired an “expert lip reader” who concluded that he had called Zidane “the son of a terrorist whore.” Meanwhile, The New York Times quoted Zidane’s relatives speculating that Materazzi had called Zidane a “terrorist” or a “son of Harkis,” an insult to a Frenchman of Algerian descent.
The reality, Materazzi now maintains, had nothing to do with Franco-Algerian relations. “I was pulling his jersey because I was afraid he’d score a goal on me,” Materazzi says. “But when he looked at me, I found hate in his eyes. He looked me down from my head to my feet and said, ‘OK, the jersey is yours, and I’ll give it to you at the end of the match.’ All I said was, ‘I’d prefer your sister’.”
Although Zidane confirmed to FIFA investigators that the insult wasn’t connected to race or religion, the media damage had been done. “I was scared,” says Daniela. “The (British tabloid) press quoted Zidane’s mother saying she wanted (Marco’s) balls on a platter. We have a lot of Muslim friends, and they told us to be careful because this can be an instigation.” She held her breath when Inter visited Bahrain for a game in January. “Every time I touched the ball, the whole stadium was whistling and booing me,” Materazzi recalls. “They were obviously influenced by what I had not said.”
With unbeaten Inter rolling towards the Serie A Scudetto, Materazzi wants to move forward. And if Zidane were to walk into the room? “I would hold out my hand,” Materazzi says. “In life you should never have enemies. He was my enemy in one sports struggle, but that’s it. Let’s meet and take pictures.”
He shrugs again. Smiles. If Zizou and the Matrix could finally make up, wouldn’t life be beautiful?
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