To all you English speaking people...

The world is not perfect or else you would be speaking French and make my life that much easier...then again if everyone spoke French I wouldn`t be in Japan teaching English...anyways...so here is my translation of an article I find really good on the Zidane story (yeah yeah I know it`s old)

Here it is....

Written by Dany Leferriere
Translated by Francis-Louis Fortin

I did not sleep much of the night to try to understand the gesture of Zidane, especially that the opinions resembled each other as if this match was looked only by one person. The more numerous we are, the more we tend to make the same comment. I always doubt a crowd which speaks with one voice. And this voice was sorry for Zidane. An end of career makes indignant for this great champion. It is odd, but this comment seemed to me far too middle-class. In fact people were not really sorry for Zidane: they spoke only for themselves. Zidane was only one character of this fairy tale which they told each evening before sleeping. Hardly a month ago, Zidane was only an old tired player. Today, it is a deposed knight. In the old bloodier fables of the Grimm brothers, an end with a red card was acceptable. But today, in this strange time when all the humans seem to have drunk during their childhood of the milk of Disney, an end which is not pink is unacceptable. All must finish well. We must love our heroes. Before arranging them in the wall cupboard of the good memories. Then what remains for Zinédine Zidane itself? Zidane, it is an exemplary father of family, a discrete man who carried out a career without fault - these are these qualifiers that one stuck to him like medals. It is perhaps true, but with the detriment of what? What did it have to swallow during this long career before this fateful moment? What did it have to undergo without anything to say before taking again in hand his life? To become again the young proud boy who played in the streets of Marseilles? That which one could make fun with impunity neither of the mother nor of the race? Marseilles, it is not a joke. The Front National is not far. And Zidane is a child of this time. He never believed in the adulation of crowds - this monster which kills those that it likes. At one time, he knows that he will be find himself vis-a-vis a man whom he left behind for a long time for glory and the money and this man, it`s himself: Zinédine Zidane. I do not believe that this Italian player said to him more than he cannot hear. Simply, it felt that it was the moment. His last match, the final of the World cup, at the last moment. It was now or never. If not his soul would have been sold forever. Do not speak of dignity to him any more. Dignity, it is precisely the gesture of Zidane to recover a little of his honor. It was his moment. He gave everything to his team. That, he did it for him. Eight seconds on a career of almost twenty years. Because if it's not now , it will be never. In any event he was tired, and the team could go without him. I believe that certain moments in life which belong only to whom lived them. And to nobody else. The moment where one refuses to play, it is always a stupid moment in the eyes of others. Because what is worth the image of the pride claimed by the community vis-a-vis the intimate pride of the individual? Because we are several to watch the game, we believe that it is more than a game. The gesture of Zidane, it is the intrusion of heavy reality in the game. Zidane does not play any more. he breaks the code with a blow to the head. I remember the gesture of Charlebois when of a stroke he launched his drums to the face of the French public. In France, they were astonished by such a behavior. In Quebec, Charlebois became overnight an icon of the counter-culture. We felt something of liberation in that gesture. For Zidane, it will be the same thing. The young rappeurs surely will introduce into their video clips the eight seconds when Zidane left the game to enter their choking reality. he joined, for once, him, Zidane, whose coolness (in French we say cold blood - as an opposition for someone who has hot blood for a hot temper) was legendary, those which cannot behave in public. His/her brothers of street who still have hot blood.