PARIS—Beware the doldrums of March. We haven’t quite yet emerged from North America’s sporting dead zone, that period after the Super Bowl, where hockey and basketball teams are involved in meaningless midseason games, baseball’s spring training is revving up, and golf’s first major is more than a month away.

In fact, the lead story Friday morning on ESPN.com concerned NCAA college basketball. Granted, the start of March Madness officially marks the end of the late-winter sporting doldrums, but I don’t have time to worry over which mediocre teams will qualify for the tournament as indifferent #9 seeds. Call me next week when it’s time for me to fill out my bracket.

The sporting news on this east side of the Atlantic (ie. Biggie Smalls’s turf) was a tad livelier this week, with the Champions League round-of-sixteen wrapping up. Even still, today’s International Herald Tribune’s lead online sport articles—a barometer of the sporting world—address tennis, golf, cricket and the retirement of an NFL legend. I repeat: throw me a couple of Chris “Boomer” Berman’s deux-deux-deux and call me when something exciting happens.

It might seem like the perfect down-week for the Sportstrotter to tackle pétanque, the French bowling game that this column’s loyal readers have been howling at the moon—literally tearing down the HTML walls—to hear more about. But although Paris has some fifty pétanque clubs, several of which have already been profiled on Gridskipper, the pétanque-curious (Hopeful Cynic and Pat Tanzola, I’m looking in your direction) will have to wait a while, since I’ve decided that the true pétanque experience must be enjoyed only in the sunny, laid-back climes of southwestern France where the game is truly king.

But back to the retirement of that football hero, arguably the most beloved American sporting figure of the past twenty years. Yes, Brett Favre, America’s grown-up Dennis the Menace—blessed with country-blonde good looks and an aw-shucks face that sprung up after every ill-advised deep ball into triple coverage and the ensuing back-breaking interception—is calling it quits.

I’m not calling Favre the best or most talented athlete, mind you, just the most unconditionally loved. If I had a nickel for every 300-pound, bratwurst-gobbling Wisconsin sports fan that ever admitted a man-crush on Green Bay’s famed Number Four, I’d have a bag full of worthless foreign coins that wouldn’t even buy me half a croissant at the patisserie down the street. Still: sack full of nickels? Awesome.

I grew up watching Favre the Gunslinger, the guy who always seemed to be having more fun than all the other players on the field combined, no matter what the obstacle or deficit faced by his Pack. The reverence that Favre was shown this week by the chattering class (not that he didn’t deserve it—and not that a player’s retirement is the right time to bring up things like record-enabling addictions to painkillers and egomaniacal manipulation of the sports media) brought to mind another sporting hero that gets the same treatment here in France.

There’s no getting around it: the French love Zinédine Zidane. Even after what he did to them in last summer’s World Cup Final—losing his temper and headbutting away the hopes of a football-mad nation in one hideous lurch—they still adore everything about Numéro Cinq. And for good reason: the man is an absolute magician with a ball at his feet. So it was that I found myself without anything better to do Wednesday night than to decant (ok, unscrew) a nice (cheap) bottle of French (Greek) wine and head down to the local vidéo club to rent Zidane: un portrait du 21eme siècle.

This documentary by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno follows Zizou from seventeen unique camera angles for the entirety of a ninety-minute Spanish Liga match (Real Madrid v. Villarreal, April 23, 2005)—Du coup d’envoi, au coup de siflet final (from kickoff to the final whistle). Oh, and the musical score is by Mogwai, and makes the film even more appropriate for a stoned viewing. If drugs were legal. Which they aren’t (at least not until you cross a border 339 km away).

I’d heard about the project before its European release in 2006, but never found the DVD release for North America, and last summer I missed the film’s only Toronto showing I knew of, a one-night screening at Bloor Cinema. But with the way the French revere Zidane I was sure I could find it here.

At the first video store that we tried (I was accompanied by the official Sportstrotter brother-in-law-to-be, who’s studying abroad in Paris this year), Video Futur, we asked the girl behind the counter if they had the “Zidane Movie.”

“Certainment pas,” she replied.

I took this to mean one of two things:

a.) “You boys want that dumb movie about your ridiculous sports hero? God, how pathetic.”

b.) “Are you kidding? I work at the French equivalent of Blockbuster, so of course we don’t have that amazing Zidane documentary, or any other half-decent movie to speak of. I hate my life.”

Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and go with b.)

We hit paydirt at the second video store, a tiny independent shop called Clerks. After struggling to decipher the cryptic details of French A/V wiring, Mr. Zidane appeared on our television screen. Success.

I won’t reveal too much, because you should really see it yourself with a minimal suite of expectation, but a few notes:

1. I can understand why Zidane didn’t see release in North America. I truly enjoyed it, but it is extremely unconventional and doesn’t provide much narrative drive. The only ebb and flow of conflict occurs within the match, which played out about as well and as dramatically as the producers could have expected. (They basically had one take and no control over the level drama that ensued. Again, not to ruin anything for you, but I’d say they got pretty lucky).

2. Here’s what I noticed about Zidane on first viewing: He spits a lot. He hardly says a word to his teammates, but he will wander over and whisper into the ref’s ear after almost every decisive call (several people are sent off in the match). He walks like a bit of an old man when he’s off the ball. He rubs the top of his head and fixes his socks obsessively.

3. The “real time” aspect of the match/film is slightly fudged (the first-half whistle sounded with 38:55 elapsed minutes showing on my DVD player).

4. I’d always thought of Zidane as a player with great vision and determination, but watching him close-up for ninety minutes proved one thing: he has amazing ballhandling. A constant stream of cheeky back-heels and stepovers—not anything approaching the level of The Prince, Cristiano Ronaldo (whose expert finish ended Lyon’s and France’s Champions League campaign on Tuesday), but a magician nonetheless, only dressed in short shorts instead of a purple cape.

5. On a second viewing this morning, I enjoyed the film even more. Knowing what was coming, I could look beyond Zidane and pay more attention to his teammates moving in and out of the frames: Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Raul and a still-baby-faced 29-year-old David Beckham. Knowing what was coming also let me appreciate how the decisive moments in the match blossomed out of thin air. The last ten minutes are especially compelling.

The film’s end is also more telling given what we know of Zidane’s 2006 World Cup Final, but if you ask the French about the headbutt on Materazzi they’ll almost universally say “Ah, well, it was Zidane. He did what he had to do.” It would be interesting to see how America would react to Brett Favre if he’d put himself in a similar situation—something like kicking Rodney Harrison in the man-parts, behind the play, after the latter had been jawing at him. In the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. In a tie game. And Rodney Harrison was playing for the new expansion team, the Paris Puntaloons. Sadly, we’ll never know how this particular scenario, and the public’s reaction to it, would have played out, because beloved Brett Favre has hung up his cleats.

Until his inevitable 2009 comeback season, that is.

Photo credit: jesseducation

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Posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 3:54 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.