By Brian Beutler
I've been fascinated by this headbutting business too, and so I've been looking at all that YouTube has to offer. What I found was this three second slow-motion clip. Maybe you guys see it differently than I do, but after watching (and then rewatching and rewatching and...) this clip, I've gotta say, the headbutt doesn't look nearly as powerful as it did on first showing.
What's more, take a look (as you did the JFK assassination video) at Materazzi's head. What I would expect--after a frontal assault on his chest--is for his body to move backwards and for his extremities to compensate (momentum conservation for you science folks) by lurching forwards. What's more, you'd expect the severity of the lurch to correspond to the severity of the initial insult. And indeed, you can see but the tiniest eensiest bit of forward Italian head motion before it, out of nowhere, FLINGS back wildly and Materazzi's entire body crashes to the floor. That means there was an invisible headbutter, or that the dude was acting in accordance with the way the Italians played roughly all World Cup: skeezily.
I suppose you could argue, boringly, that his head had to fling backwards because it had to catch up with his body eventually, and the elasticity of his neck made it happen violently, but what fun would that be? Either way, Zidane deserved the red card and got it. But, like I've said several times to my friends now, this isn't exactly like demented, desperate Tyson biting Holyfield's ear off. I just wish, for the sake of a guy--a passionate athelete who'd had his temper under control for years--that he still had another season's worth of professional footballing in him, because then this incident would be a hiccup, instead of the difinitive disgrace of his career.
