Joe Palca - Annoying

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, Sorrisi e Canzoni (“Smiles and Songs”) to give his side of what happened.

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} 27 4. Francesco Facchinetti, “Sarà un campionato super, parola nostra,” Sorrisi e Canzoni , August 24, 2007, http://archivio.sorrisi.com/sorrisi/personaggi/art023001038259.jsp .

Zidane told a different story. In an interview with the newspaper El Pais , Zidane said that Materazzi made a slur against his mother. “Things happen on the pitch. It’s happened to me many times, but I could not stand it there,” Zidane is quoted as saying. “It is not an excuse, but my mother was ill. She was in [the] hospital. This, people did not know, but it was a bad time.” {28} 28 5. Diego Torres, “El fútbol empieza en la calle,” El Pais , March 1, 2010, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/deportes/futbol/empieza/calle/elpepidep/20100301elpepidep_18/Tes .

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 Science . {29} 29 1. “A Possible Mendelian Explanation for a Type of Inheritance Apparently Non-Mendelian in Nature,” Science 40 (December 18, 1914): 904–906. At the time, no one knew that someday there would be organ transplants, but Little’s work laid the groundwork for understanding organ rejection.

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 immune systems are identical, there will be no rejection. If you test a particular drug or treatment on mice of one inbred strain, any variability that you see as a consequence can’t be blamed on genes. Something else has to be the cause. Having this kind of genetically level playing field has been extremely useful for researchers. Some of the strains of mice that Little developed are still being used by researchers today.

In 1922, at the astonishingly young age of thirty-three, Little became president of the University of Maine and three years later got the same gig at the University of Michigan. At Michigan, Little demonstrated quite an ability to irritate people. He annoyed the university regents and the governor with his outspoken views on birth control (he was for it), euthanasia (he was for it), and eugenics (he was for that, too). His tenure as university president lasted only a few years.