The Silent Magician
Stern.de
By Rüdiger Barth/Giuseppe Di Grazia/Fabrice Jouhaud
translated from German by Magician10
2003/2004?
It’s the eyes that you never forget. The eyes of a Berber, green and luminous, under nearly adnate brows. They seem to look to the bottom of your soul.
Zidane is a shy man, but he might know of his impact and that’s why his eyes are probably always searching: due to politeness. He’s peeking for something incessantly.
Close-by the best player of the world looks a lot younger than on television, more vulnerable. It’s maybe because you can’t see his tonsure, the hairstyle of monks. The most touching thing about him though is his smile. He smiles often. It transforms his serious face, it fits him well. His playmates in Madrid – and in the French national team – call him „Zizou“. It sounds almost endearing: Sisou.
On Tuesday he and Real are guests at the “Olympiastadium”, in the last sixteen of the Champions League they will meet Bayern Munich. For them it’s a chance to save an until then kinky season, for Madrid it’s an annoying hurdle on the way to the almost naturally expected entering into the finals.
Zidane drinks his mineral water in the cafeteria that belongs to the old grounds of Real and where the basketball players are accommodated. The top scorers are whispering during the workout. They recognize Zidane but they are too shy to accost him. After our talk he will stand up and walk over. “How are you doing?” he will ask and the faces of the men, who are one head taller than him, will shine.
Zidane is familiar with these reactions. Even at the star ensemble of Real. David Beckham for instance – on the pitch some sort of luxurious adjunct of Zidane – worships his idol like a little boy.
Ronaldo still gushes about a surprise visit of Zizou when he was in a Parisian hospital years ago due to a knee operation. Only the Portuguese Luis Figo is keeping a distance. He was the first big coup of Real’s president Florentino Perez at the transfer market back in 2000. And he’s jealous of the Frenchman who was welcomed by the fans in an even more enthusiastic way only a year later. Figo hasn’t overcome the reduction yet. He’s rarely searching for a talk. But on the pitch even he admits the genius of the other.
Zidane’s most remarkable ability is probably this one: To inspire the admiration, the protective instinct and the proudness of all his teammates. They do everything for him, by free will. Many of the best players before of him, rulers like Di Stefano or Netzer, were not more than respected by their teammates, some even feared and definitely also hated.
Zidane is loved.
He doesn’t conduct his teammates and still he guides a team due to his intuitive, determined, artistic style of play. He never has to lay something out, he only needs to be Zizou. He doesn’t need an exuberant ego for that, for something like this you need something much bigger, greater: the assurance to be able to count on yourself. “In life” Zidane says and scratches his chaplet. “I try to be small. It’s important to me to be a great person on the pitch.” He rarely ever critizises others. For a long time this attitude was considered a deficite of character, now even his critics admit that he’s got dignity.
His failures at the beginning of the 90s are long forgotten. He shined in the 1998 World Cup final, also at the 2000 European Championships and in 2002 he shot Real Madrid to winning the Champions League against Bayer Leverkusen. During his five years at Juventus Turino he learned how to win; but he felt chocked by the systematic thinking there. It wasn’t till Real that he started to blossom out.
Those who have given up hope that the beautiful game is still alive, just have to watch Zidane. Zidane is highly inventive when he’s in possession of the ball, when he tries to escape from encirclement by other players. The way Zidane does that, hardly another player before him could. The fast turning, the tricks, the astounding sudden gaining of space, the shadowlike way he plays,
It’s like he’s bursting open the corset soccer is stuck in, gasping for air. Zidane hides the ball under his sole and absconds.
Those who know him since a long time say that Zidane has become stronger since he’s with Real Madrid. In the most glorious soccer club of the world he isn’t the one with the most media attention nor is he the most charismatic (I don’t agree with that, just had to point that out *lol*) of the giants that are each estimated being worth 7 million Euros a year. But Zidane is the only one who’s really inviolable. In private even club president Perez admits that the spectators are rather going to the stadium for Zidane than for any other player.
He keeps away from the Jet-set of Madrid. He spends a lot of time in his house, in which he included a highly modern fitness room. His favorite thing to do is to play with his three kids. (now for)
“Thank god they have a mother who reminds them of their homework” he says laughing.
One never sees him in the night clubs and not in the tabloids either. His havens in Madrid are restaurants: an Asian, an Italian and an Argentine one, where he never orders raw meat. Glamour is different. But he has always been like that.
In the room of the young Zidane there were only two posters hanging on the walls. One of Enzo Francescoli, the man from Uruguay who directed Olympique Marseille at the end of the 80s, and one of Djamel Zidane. He was at the 1982 WC with Algeria, prepared one of the goals with whom the underdog defeated Germany 2:1. A fabulous left-footer. He wanted to become like them. As elegant as Francescoli, as wily as Djamel. The prepubescent Zizou received a jersey from the Olympique star that he still calls “my sanctum”. And he named his first son Enzo.
Zinedine rarely visits the homeland of his namesake Djamel – and the one of his parents. He grew up in La Castellane, a problem area of Marseille, where he was born in 1972. There you can find lots of concrete, battered concrete. A couple of trees, not many. In exchange there are lots of “beurs”, French-born children of Maghrebian immigrants. Unloved descendants from the former colonies in North Africa. The people here call Zidane “Yazid”, like he was called during his childhood. He still phones his father Smail nearly every day. “Mon papa” he calls him full of humility and respect.
This Dad still collects every article about his son and calls him in order even after the slightest lapse. “His opinion is crucial” Zinedine tells us. And full of fondness he adds: “I had the best upbringing of the world. I didn’t own much but for my heart I got everything.”
Smail, a factory worker with a salary just a bit over the poverty level, often didn’t know how to nourish his wife and five children and that’s why he also accepted a position as a night watchman.
He preached the school of minorities – don’t attract attention and if you do, only with achievements. The Trinity on the premises of the Zidanes was: work hard, be modest and respect your fellow men. For Zidane his upbringing is the only explanation why he became what he is today, as a human being, as a soccer player. It doesn’t sound exciting enough for the most exciting player of our time. But it might very well be the truth. There’s no marketing strategy behind it, it’s not like the staged lifestyle of the Beckhams.
Even today, when his parents visit him in Madrid, they take command. His mother is the boss. “It’s pointless to tell her, that she should have a rest. She takes the kitchen into possession.” He explains. „ She prepares the food I used to eat when I was little. It’s important to me that my children get to know all of that.” The two big sons visit the French grammar school in Madrid, where they are signed on by the maiden name of their mother, a Spaniard who grew up in France. Zinedine drives them to school almost daily and collects them later. He is the only father who’s allowed to enter the school grounds with his car.
As a boy he left La Castellane for a boarding school in Cannes when he was 13. […] Zinedine cried his eyes out at night because an unexpected homesickness gripped him. He worked out obsessively, so that he’d be too tired at night to think much about home. But on the pitch he was ahead of everybody. But when he was stopped by fouls, he remembers the rules of the streets: If someone hits you, hit him back. Sending-offs accumulated.
In an interior report from these days it says: „because of his impulsive nature he will get nowhere.“
Guy Lacombe, then chief of the boarding school, talked to him:
„If you want to play the avenger of the fair ones, then you will have to watch
soccer eternally from the outside.” Lacombe advised him to clean the locker room
after every training when he needed to calm down. The next day everybody left
the booth altogether. Only Zinedine didn’t. He took a bucket and a cleaning rag
from a chamber and polished the showers. He prescribed this lesson to himself
for an entire month.
Nevertheless he couldn’t overcome this weakness – maybe his only
one – till today. His feelings dam up until they burst out uncontrollably and if
someone only annoys him long enough, he loses his head. He got send off in the
Spanish cup not long ago because of a slap in the face and during the 1998 WC
his irascibility made him miss half of the preliminary round.
But in the final he won France the World Cup title. A “beur” of all things made the “Grande Nation” happy. Millions of people were celebrating, Zidane became the nation’s favorite. He still is, as a poll in the magazine „Le Journal du Dimanche“ showed. And in a country that fears another push from the right wing at the next regional elections in March. Zidane declines all offers to use his enormous popularity for the integration of immigrants. “I am a sportsman, not a politician“ He says. „The only idol I want to be is the one on the pitch.”
He took a stand only once: In 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the “Front
National”, reached the second round in the presidential election against Jacques
Chirac, Zidane expressed his disgust against the right wing extremist views of
Le Pen. For civic duty, as he carefully underlined, not because he is a Muslim.
Zidane slips back and forth on his chair. He doesn’t want to talk about that.
Also because he is self-concious.
In his opinion he lacks general education, he often has the
feeling that the French intellectuals rather tolerate than admire him. He is
bright enough to realize that.
“Simplicity is the height of intelligence” Zidane says. He smiles.
After the training Zidane stops at the entrance of the sports centre and waits
for Malik. For his best friend, with whom he grew up in La Castellane. Who lived
with him in Turino for a while and who spends every free minute in Madrid. When
Malik is back home, back in Marseille, he drives a truck that empties the
garbage cans every morning.