It started with a Glasgow kiss. When Portugal footballer Luis Figo shoved his features into the face of the Netherlands midfielder Mark van Bommel during a foul-tempered World Cup match in Nuremberg last month, it was the catalyst for a sporting summer of ifs and butts that touched new lows on Sunday with the frankly certifiable sight of a jockey headbutting his own horse.
The rationale, if reason applies at all, goes something like this. If Figo had been sent off -- as per competition guidelines -- rather than merely given a yellow card, then Zinedine Zidane might have thought twice before planting his balding pate in the chest of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the final. And if the image of Zidane's assault had not burned itself with such immediacy into the planet's collective consciousness, Paul O'Neill might never have reacted to being unseated moments before the start of the 3.10 at Stratford last weekend by unaccountably nutting his unsuspecting mount City Affair square on the nose.
Their eventual fourth-place finish did nothing to quell the outrage, and in the UK, a nation of animal lovers, it comes as no real surprise that City Affair has received much more sympathy than Materazzi, even after equine lip-readers were drafted in to make sure the gelding hadn't accused O'Neill of being the offspring of a terrorist whore.
"City Affair didn't flinch," one impressed onlooker told one tabloid. "O'Neill was wearing a helmet, but appeared to come off second best."
And, in what can only be interpreted as a crucial life lesson for Materazzi, the Independent declared: "City Affair stared back with a magnificent blend of apathy and mockery."
O'Neill, meanwhile, was left to apologize for his "stupid mistake": "I've never done anything like this before. I wouldn't be here unless I loved horses."
Fortunately for City Affair, O'Neill's butting technique was as unconvincing as his remorseful declaration of devotion.
"An effective headbutt can be performed with a forward, rising, sideways or backwards motion," says Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, which, alarmingly, has a whole entry devoted to the subject.
"Ideal targets include the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones, the hinge area of the jaw, the temple, and the top edge of the eye socket," Wikipedia said.
Without wishing to turn a family newspaper into a manual for street fighting, it is obvious that O'Neill's tame thrust into his steed's snout failed on all counts.
In fact, just about the only thing O'Neill did correctly was wear protective headgear.
"The human skull is a particularly vulnerable area," says Roger Mugford, an animal psychologist from Chertsey in southern England. "It's wafer-thin compared to most creatures and so isn't a very good weapon at all. Species such as stag, deer and cattle lock horns and use their heads as organs of conquest and dominance, but horses never do."
In other words, O'Neill might just have perpetrated the most pointless headbutt in history. And there have been a few.
Scientists traditionally believed it all began 65 million years ago with Pachycephalosaurus, a dinosaur whose name translates as "thick-headed lizard." Recent findings suggest that Pachycephalosaurus' headbutting tendencies might have been exaggerated, but the idea that our predecessors suffered from a similar affliction might at least be of some comfort to the likes of Figo, Zidane and O'Neill.
Since then the headbutt has been largely limited to ruminants and grown men who have overdosed on testosterone, adrenaline and alcohol.
"It's all part of the mating game," says Mugford, referring primarily to rams in the field rather than 20-something blokes at closing time. "The successful ones have harems to protect against large bachelor herds of unsuccessful males fighting their way back in. A ram's skull has been thickened over the course of time to accommodate this bizarre form of courtship."
In the less teleological world of Homo sapiens, the common headbutt has rarely needed courtship as an excuse, particularly in the world of sport. Dennis Rodman, the basketball star who strutted his stuff last year on Celebrity Big Brother UK, was banned for six matches in 1996 after taking a tete-a-tete with a referee too literally, and later apologized -- tongue presumably in cheek -- for being "a bad boy."
The Everton striker Duncan Ferguson was once sent to prison for acquainting his forehead with that of Raith Rovers' Jock McStay while playing for Rangers. And the excuse used by Mike Tyson for chewing off part of Evander Holyfield's ear during the infamous Bite Fight in 1997 was that Holyfield had headbutted him.
Even cricket -- a sport that regards verbal insults as, well, just not cricket -- has come close. During a scratchy one-day match between England and Sri Lanka in Adelaide, Australia, in 1999, Darren Gough responded to being shoulder-charged out of the way by Roshan Mahanama with a half- headbutt that connected with fresh air. Both poachers quickly turned gamekeepers. While Gough went on to wow grannies with his foxtrot in a BBC TV show, Mahanama earned his crust by disciplining cricketers in his role as a match referee for the International Cricket Council.
Sometimes, the thwack of skin on bone can be heard in the strangest places. The American man of letters Norman Mailer once butted Gore Vidal, after Vidal had prophetically accused him of being a violent man.
Wesley Willis, the giant Chicago-born musician, used to employ the headbutt as a friendly greeting. Cradling a fan's head in his hands, he would exhort, "Say rock!" The fan would then reply, "Say roll!" before being treated to a series of brow-beating collisions that left Willis with a permanent callus on his forehead.
And when Gerard Depardieu allegedly assaulted a paparazzo in Florence, his response left as little room for doubt as the act itself.
"So my head delivers a single butt, which means two teeth less, and to tell you the truth, I'm pretty satisfied," he is reported as saying.
Zidane, meanwhile, is in danger of making the transition from international soccer star to verb in record time. Just as "to bobbitt" came to mean the act of cutting off your partner's penis after Lorena Bobbitt applied a kitchen knife to her husband John, so recent headlines suggested that the verb "to Zidane" (we're not quite ready for the lower-case Z) has developed an automatic recognition factor in fewer than three weeks.
Yet it could all have been so different. Because until Materazzi was "Zidaned," no one had managed to turn the headbutt into a symbol of our times quite as graphically as Robert Carlyle in his role as the psychopathic Begbie in Trainspotting. Zidane at least spared us the special effects by aiming for the chest. Begbie, pint spilled by accident, went for the jugular.
"There is one thing I'll never miss," wrote the Scottish poet Frank McNie. "The sickening sound ... of a `Glasgow kiss.'"
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