It is written that in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. In seven stupendous days, He formed the plants, the animals, the seas, and the skies. And as proof of both His divine power and His inestimable sense of humour, God created public relations, the world’s true oldest profession.

Advertising and self-promotion are as natural to humankind as breathing. Everyone will, at some time in their lives, seek to advance their own situation by placing their actions, no matter how petty or contemptible in the most positive available light. Whether it is a teenager dueling with a parent over the extension of a curfew, annual salary negotiations in one’s employment, or an initial public stock offering, each scenario demands salesmanship and a burnishing of every available positive attribute to achieve success.

Long before the Shopping Channel and eBay, Stephen Leacock observed that advertising is the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to make money from it.

As the media and the Information Age exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of truth in advertising became a poor joke. Tobacco companies were no longer believed when they claimed a cigarette product to be zestful and fun. The manufacturers of motor vehicles that sat on a mechanic’s hoist longer than in the owner’s driveway were the objects of scorn. Official government projections of unfettered economic fortune made excellent landfill. Simple public relations were no longer sufficient and the spin man was born.

Part missionary and part mercenary, the spin man rose to prominence in lock step with the digital sweep of computer networks and the Internet. It is a term derived from the ball sports – baseball, billiards, and cricket among them – where the imparting of the correct rotation on a ball, like an idea, is the difference between success and failure. The spin man became a mid wife with the birth of every marketing concept. No longer did corporate interests wait to assess public reaction about new products or ventures – the spin, positive, negative or counter, was there from the start.

Public relations mortals can be spin men; its graduate degree fraternity is the spin doctors. No step is too outrageous, no press release too separated from the truth, if it will advance a client’s interest.

I have a theory about why we accept the role of the spin man in every facet of our lives. We live every day in an unbreakable dichotomy – we want to believe that what is offered for our consumption really can perform as it is advertised. We wish desperately in our hearts to find everyone to be as moral as we perceive ourselves to be. In the same burst of synaptic energy across our brains, we remember the countless lies and cheats that we have encountered, and we vow never to be fooled again. Back and forth, hope versus experience, with hope usually winning a temporary victory.

How we view our sports heroes…

As sport has moved relentlessly from a pure athletic contest into a commodity for media consumption, spin doctors weave their magic. Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa are not willing participants in a huge steroid scandal that taints their major league home run records; they are all-American dupes of sophisticated and unscrupulous people. Tens of millions of dollars in endorsement contracts hinge on such acceptance by the baseball public. We were told that the acquitted O.J Simpson would search forever for his wife’s killers; and he has done so, one Southern California golf course at a time – his personal sports memorabilia remains a wonderfully hot trading commodity.

The most masterful sport spin work in recent years occurred in the just completed World Cup 2006. The Cup Final, watched by over a billion people on television, and followed in the newspapers and across the Internet by at least a billion more, was won by a tough and wonderfully determined Italian side in a heart stopping penalty kick shoot out with France. Great sporting moments speak for themselves, with no embellishments necessary. The spin was reserved for Zinedine Zidane, the French hero known as Zizou.

Zinedine Zidane – Zizou

Zizou is one of the greatest players ever to compete in international football. He scored two goals when the French beat Brazil in 1998; he is a brilliant tactician and much admired as an on-field leader. When Zizou turned and drilled his Italian opponent, Materazzi, in the chest with a terrific head butt as the Final moved through extra time, the soccer world stopped as Zizou was sent off. The television replays were as certain as the night following day. The blow seemed crude and senseless and the world looked for an explanation to excuse or better still, to vindicate the man who represented modern France, its powerful multicultural symbol that had risen from Zidane’s impoverished Algerian immigrant roots in Marseilles to the heights of great wealth and renown.

The spin work started before the victorious Italians had received their trophy. Materazzi must surely have said something to Zizou. Lip readers were retained to view the replay footage. Materazzi called Zizou a terrorist, said one. Another stated unequivocally that Materazzi called Zizou’s mother an Algerian whore and his sister something worse. In the days that followed, the head butt delivered by Zizou continued to be the story of the Final, trumping the Italian achievement that was three years in the making. And of the fourteen prior occasions when Zizou was sent off during an international match? A fact of very little consequence…

Zizou is a hero. Zizou has a 10 year endorsement contract with Adidas that pays him tens of millions of dollars. Zizou is not a demi–god to the football world, he is an undoubted deity. The tarnishing of Zizou’s permanent reputation would work a corresponding damage to the world’s most prominent sport. The spin given to Zizou’s absurd and incomprehensible foul is in retrospect an easy one. The official ruling by football’s governing body FIFA was the suspension of Zizou for three matches and a fine of approximately 6,000 dollars. As Zizou has officially retired, the suspension is no hardship. Zizou publicly acknowledged that Materazzi said nothing to him of a racial nature. Materazzi was suspended for two games and fined, apparently for his language directed to Zizou on the pitch.

Zizou apologized to all of the children of the soccer world, but not to Materazzi.

There are several incontrovertible conclusions that flow from the work of the FIFA spin masters. One is that for the first time in the history of high level sport, a player, Materazzi, was suspended for simply trash talking an opponent. Deliberate kicks to an opponent have attracted lesser sanctions than Materazzi’s vulgar language. The second is the sainted Zizou has now enhanced his reputation in the face of the most selfish and self-absorbed action I can ever recall in a match of such significance. Zizou drilled Materazzi with his head because he felt like it. At that instant with a world championship in the balance, he saw himself as bigger than his team – of which he was captain – bigger than the game, bigger than anything. “I can do what I want, right now, because of who I am” – is that not the most obvious message that resounded from the collision between Zizou’s head and Materazzi’s sternum?

The final and inescapable result of the Zizou controversy and its public relations massage is that the global soccer public excused him. The President of France patted his shoulder and called him a hero. FIFA awarded him the Golden Ball, symbolic of the best player in the World Cup. Adidas stated that the rich endorsement contract with Zizou would continue to run until 2014. The soccer world absorbed the spin, as artfully applied as the bend given to one of Zizou’s famous free kicks, because it wanted to believe that its god was somehow a victim, and not a coarse and callous perpetrator of a sporting wrong.

I fell in love with Zizou in 1998 when he dissected a wonderful Brazilian team to take his ‘Bleus’ to the pinnacle of soccer greatness. I am in the minority now, one of the embittered few who has elected to see past the spin veneer. If Zizou would admit that he was simply wrong to have ever responded to school yard taunts, he would remain a hero with me, all the more attractive for admitting his very human error. FIFA, Adidas, and the adoring French nation would say that I am wrong.