Zidane compared to Achilles

I expect this to be my last posting about l’affaire Zidane. In fact, I promise that it will be unless Zidane comes back into the news in some unforeseeable way. I am writing this one because I can’t resist talking about the comments of the noted French intellectual Bernard-Henry Lévy.*

The heading of his column is "Zidane, from Homer." He opens the column with:

Here is one of the greatest players of all time.

Here is a legend.

A worldly myth, and unanimously celebrated.

Here is the providential man, the savior...like Achilles bearing a grudge and enraged, brought about the defeat of his own (his own team).

Better still: here is a super-Achilles...

Later in the column he calls Zidane "the man more admired than the pope, the dalai-lama and Nelson Mandela all rolled together...an icon, a demigod, a hero, a legend." He even invokes Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky in describing Zidane.

After such a hagiography, Lévy goes on to chastise Zidane for his behavior by saying, "that incomprehensible act, insane,..the last recollection of him in the annals of football will be, not as having gone out in a blaze of glory, but having been sent to hell."

His final words are: "Achilles had his heel. Zidane will have had his...(which) has brought him down to the level of his human brothers."

* Lévy is a regular columnist for the French weekly magazine Le Point; this column appeared in its 7/17/06 issue. It is apparent that he wrote the column before Zidane gave his story in interviews on 7/12/06 as to the head-butting event in the World Cup championship match. The above translations from the original French are by me.

I don’t care for the over-used phrase "over the top," but it certainly applies to Lévy’s rhetoric.