With a beige jacket slung over his shoulders in a manner reminiscent of a JC Penny model, Zinedine Zidane went on French TV yesterday and broke his silence about what made him savagely headbutt unsuspecting Italian defender Marco Materazzi during overtime of Sunday’s World Cup final: A joke about his mother and sister.

See, now why can’t Barry Bonds come out and conduct an interview like this? It’ll help your legacy, Barry. Zidane is already back in the good graces of his forgiving countrymen. Sure, the rest of the world will classify Zidane as a rabid animal for the remainder of his time on this earth, but the French love him, and that’s really all that matters. And if the United States can forgive Paris Hilton for her homemade sex tape, and Ty Cobb for being a racist, and Babe Ruth for being a drunk, you know millions of baseball fans can find it in their arctic hearts to give you a pass for juicing.

In a wide-ranging interview, Zidane profusely apologized to children, denied that Materazzi called him a terrorist, and then floored us with this one: He would rather be punched in the mouth than subjected to your mom jokes (Materazzi countered that he lost his mother at 15, and would never utter such lunacy).

“He (Materazzi) pulled on my shirt several times and I told him that we could swap shirts at the end of the game if he wanted to,” Zidane said in the live interview.

“He then pronounced very tough words, words that hurt me deeply, words about my mother and my sister. At first, I tried not to listen to him but he kept repeating them”, Zidane said.

“I knew it was my last game and I knew there were only 10 minutes to play but things happened very swiftly,” he said.

“I am a man before anything else.”

Without further adieu, here are our three favorite Your Mom jokes:

* Your Mamma is so ugly, she went to the bathroom and scared the shit out of the toilet.
* Yo mama’s so fat that her senior pictures had to be aerial views!
* Yo Mamma’s so stupid that when I told her we needed gas for the car, she farted at the gas tank!

What’s really gnawing at us is this: Who advised Zidane on the jacket over the shoulder look, J Peterman?

We’ll Meet Again (World Cup Blog)
Materazzi admits insulting Zidane’s sister (Independent Online)