After being head-butted in the World Cup final, once-infamous Marco Materazzi is the toast of Italy. Now, if only he could make peace with a certain Frenchman

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	Materazzi has turned the ill-tempered shot from Zidane into a laughing matter. Bob Martin/SI

By Grant Wahl

Nothing falls down more easily than an Italian soccer player -- with the possible exception of an Italian soccer player's pants. What is it with the World Cup champions' eagerness to drop trou? Last summer five greased-up members of the Azzurri set hearts aflutter (and left little to the imagination) by appearing in Dolce & Gabbana underwear ads on signboards across Germany. Now, seven months later, their most notorious teammate is spontaneously stripping into his black D&Gs before a stunned audience in a stylish Milan studio. It's hard not to stare.

Then again, he wants you to. "See, it's the World Cup trophy!" says Marco Materazzi, pointing to the eight-inch-long tattoo on his left thigh, one of the two dozen (and counting) that decorate much of his chiseled 6'4" frame. "I got it three days after the final."

"I've got one too!" adds his wife of 13 years, Daniela, rolling up her right sleeve to reveal a mini-Cup, to say nothing of her own array of body art.

Their two-year-old daughter, Anna, giggles nearby. Last July her daddy played a central role in the iconicsports moment of the young century: the thunderous head butt he received in the chest after orally provoking French superstar Zinédine Zidane during the waning minutes of the World Cup final. A global cottage industry has grown around the Head Butt Seen Round the World -- chart-topping pop songs, best-selling books, a blizzard of digitally altered YouTube clips -- and if history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, the man they call the Matrix would rather embrace the farce.

Cross Dennis Rodman with Roberto Benigni, and you'd get something resembling 33-year-old Marco Materazzi. Like Rodman, he's a tattoo-covered hardman whose flamboyant (some say dirty) antics have often overshadowed his surpassing skills. This is the same player who scored a goal and converted a penalty kick in the World Cup final ... but also committed a penalty and instigated the Head Butt. And who set a Serie A record for goals by a defender (12, with Perugia in 2000-01) ... but later drew one of the longest misconduct suspensions in Italian history. And who recently scored on a bicycle-kick goal ... only to garner more attention for absorbing another head butt, from Sampdoria's Gennaro Delvecchio.