In sports and in life, there are times when the provocation is intentional, executed with the specific goal of putting you off your game. It’s the art of “trash talk.” Conmy says it’s one of the most common ways that athletes try to create a small advantage over their opponents at a level where any advantage could mean the difference between a win and a loss. Trash talk spans a wide spectrum, according to Conmy, but all flavors of trash talk have a common purpose: to distract and annoy.
At one end of the spectrum are players who simply try to divert the attention of their opponents. “Some of them, their entire aim is to just be very funny, very gregarious, very entertaining, and get the player opposite them to stop thinking about the skills that allow them to perform well in the game,” says Conmy. In the middle of the spectrum are people who don’t say anything intrinsically annoying, but whose constant prattle becomes annoying during the course of a match. Conmy knew a soccer player who continually discussed cheese with the player he was guarding, from the first minute on. “He’d say, ‘Do you like cheese? I like cheese. What kind of cheese do you like? I like cheddar.’ And on and on and on. Imagine that for ninety minutes! And then there are the trash talkers who try to insult the other player,” he says. “To take his natural aggressiveness and push him over the edge.”
Into that last category falls Marco Materazzi. His trash talking elicited a shocking explosion from one of the best soccer players in the world, an explosion witnessed live by television viewers around the world.
The scene was the finals of the 2006 World Cup: Italy versus France. Materazzi was a star for the Italians. His victim was Zinedine Zidane. Both France and Algeria claimed Zidane as a citizen, but the tall midfielder chose to play for the French national team. He’s one of only four players ever to score in two World Cup finals. Tough, tall, and creative, he was one of soccer’s superstars. In 1998, he led the French to victory over Brazil. In 2002, however, injuries prevented him from making much impact for his national team. That year, France exited the tournament in the first round without managing to score a single goal. In 2004, Zidane decided to retire from international soccer.
In 2006, the French coach coaxed the thirty-four-year-old Zidane into joining the national team one more time. It turned out to be a shrewd move. Zidane displayed the same magic that had carried France to the finals eight years earlier. In a crucial match against Spain, he set up one goal and scored another himself. And in the quarter finals, he set up the winning goal against Brazil. Before the final, he was awarded the Golden Ball, which was given to the best overall player in the competition.
The 2006 final was held on July 9 at the Olympistadion in Berlin. France and Italy were both strong teams. Both had stifling defenses and dazzling strikers. France struck first, when Zidane hammered a penalty shot that bounced off the crossbar and into the goal. Twelve minutes later Materazzi evened the score, heading home a corner kick from Andrea Pirlo. After that, both teams had opportunities, but neither could break through. At the end of regulation time, the match was tied 1–1. Zidane nearly won it for the French in overtime with a header that Italian goalie Gianluigi Buffon just managed to tip over the crossbar. Then, a bit later in the overtime period, it happened.
Zidane and Materazzi were jogging upfield together when they appeared to have a verbal exchange. Zidane went a few feet ahead, then turned around and head-butted the Italian player with such force that Materazzi was knocked off his feet and landed on his back.
The referee missed the incident, but a linesman saw it, as did hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world. After being informed of the incident, the referee strode up to Zidane, pulled the red card from his pocket, and held it up to Zidane, indicating that he was expelled from the match and could not be replaced. The Italians weren’t able to capitalize on their one-man advantage, however. The match ended at 1–1, but the Italians prevailed in a penalty shoot-out.
What did Materazzi say? How long had he been pestering Zidane during the match? And why did a veteran player like Zidane succumb to the provocation? “We don’t know what was going on throughout the course of that game,” says Conmy. “Who really knows how much Materazzi said to him. That’s ninety minutes, that’s almost the whole game. Materazzi could have been in his ear from minute one, being abusive and offensive. Eventually, it just became too much.”
According to press reports, Materazzi chose an Italian TV listings magazine,
Materazzi admitted that he had grabbed Zidane’s shirt as they were both trying to get to the ball. According to Materazzi, the Frenchman told him, “If you want my shirt that badly, I’ll give it to you at the end of the match,” to which Materazzi replied, “I’d prefer your whore of a sister.”{27}
Zidane told a different story. In an interview with the newspaper
Regardless of the precise nature of the trash talk, it clearly worked spectacularly well. Conmy says that world-caliber athletes need to have a quick trigger, to be able to perform at an exceptional level. This may put them at a higher risk for getting annoyed. “They very much walk a thin line,” says Conmy. “The problem with that thin line is if something just pushes you over, just presses your button a little bit too much, that’s where we see these levels of violence or anger.”
Conmy knows that sometimes athletes feel as if they just have to respond to the abuse. “If they’re going to do it, once they’ve done it, I’d like them to get centered as quickly as possible on what they’re doing, which is playing the game, whatever game that may be.” Getting centered will also help you deal with the annoying driver behind you or the annoying music in the supermarket.
Unfortunately for Zidane, after the outburst there was no more game to center on. Yet on some level, he must have felt good to have shut Materazzi up. That’s because there’s a little more to this than simply having something get between you and your goal. The whole point of a sport is that you have another team full of people who are actively working to keep you from your goals, and that’s not annoying. They’re supposed to be doing that. You expect them to be doing that, but you don’t expect a plague of midges to join them.
A lineup of pesky Cleveland hitters could have been predicted. It’s only when you find your world—and your expectation of how you might move through it—suddenly out of sync with your reasonable assumptions that things become annoying.
On any given day, there are some eight hundred thousand mice living on campus at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine.
You wouldn’t know it to look at the place. As you drive up to the bucolic campus on Route 3, less than a mile from downtown Bar Harbor, it’s not as if you see tiny white critters darting among the trees. If you sniff carefully and are familiar with the smell, you can get a faint odor of a laboratory animal-care facility, but that’s it. The cluster of buildings and lawns could pass for a small college campus or maybe a midsize independent research institute (which it is) but not a place that harbors hundreds of thousands of rodents. Nonetheless, if you want to know just about anything about a mouse, from how its immune system works to how its genes control the number of teeth it has to what really ticks it off, the Jackson Lab is a good place to come.
The lab was founded in 1929 by a scientist named Clarence Cook Little, better known as C. C. Little. He was an interesting character from an old Boston family and a direct descendant of Paul Revere.
While he was a graduate student at Harvard, Little wrote a paper proposing that genetics was a crucial factor in whether a transplanted organ would be rejected. The paper was published in
When Little was in his twenties, he also began to develop strains of genetically inbred mice. Inbred strains are useful, because each mouse from a particular inbred strain is genetically identical to every other mouse from that strain. You can transplant skin or an internal organ between mice of the same strain, and because their
