Cristiano Ronaldo Is Unbreakable

Cristiano Ronaldo’s cover is officially blown. Up until now, the Portuguese-born Manchester United star was able to successfully perpetrate that he was just another run-of-the-mill flesh-and-blood earthling who merely happened to be the best soccer player in the world. But after walking away unharmed from a hellacious car crash at the Manchester Airport, his secret is finally out. He’s not a mere mortal at all. He’s a superhero.

Evidently Ronaldo drove his Ferrari straight into the wall of a tunnel at high speed, totaling his $150,000 speedster. So what does he do? He gets out and takes a bus to practice. I suppose, if he’d wanted to, he could have flown or just ran to practice really fast like The Flash, but at that point he was probably thinking that no one was onto him yet, so why sell the swindle? Afterwards, like a true superhero, all he seemed to care about in regards to the crash was the demise of his Batmobile. Superheroes love their vehicles.

There was (as in all good superhero movies) only one witness to the crash, some fish-and-chips punter named Jody Lomax (good name for a British onlooker bloke, right?) who expressed shock at seeing Ronaldo just get out of a car and walk away from a crash that caused his left front wheel to blow off and be recovered 200 yards behind where the Ferrari came to rest.

Mr. Lomax, I gather, hasn’t put two and two together yet, but I have to say it all makes perfect sense to me, and it answers a question that I’ve been asking myself about superheroes for years now: why is it that, blessed with all these righteous superpowers, they always choose to fight crime for a living? Why don’t they play professional sports and slay millions of honeys and just generally live large? Why are they all such self-sacrificing underwear-on-the-outside-wearing pansies?

Up to today, I thought the only superhero who got it right was the Soul Brother Number One known as Chocolate Thunder, who used his awesome size and flying abilities from Planet Lovetron to great hedonistic effect in the 70’s (click here to read my interview with Brother Chocolate, or as he asked me to call him, “Choc”).

Now, however, Ronaldo turns up as unbreakable, and we find there is another superhero-athlete in our midst. Man ain’t from Portugal. He’s from some strange soccer planet in a galaxy far, far away where everyone is incredibly good at soccer. He probably wouldn’t even be that good at soccer if he was still on his home planet. Back on Soccertron, he’d probably be just good enough to play on his local gym’s indoor team on the weekends. Luckily for him, there was some freak occurrence that hurled him into orbit at birth and he ended up being raised here on Earth, where the general soccer-playing IQ and aptitude is infinitely lower than it is up there. He’s like General Zod in Superman II, a small-time crook up on Krypton and a ten-megaton warlord down here on the third star from the sun.

By the way, allow me to point out that I sincerely doubt that Ronaldo is the only superhero currently masquerading as a professional athlete. There’s Tiger Woods (half man, half tiger), who pretty obviously thought that people were getting too close to discovering the truth about him and so he went to the trouble to cook up this “knee surgery” ruse. There’s Michael Phelps (half man, half manta ray). My own take on Phelps is that he’s at that early Clark Kent phase right now where he doesn’t even know himself that he’s a superhero yet. In like the next year or so, I imagine he’ll stumble upon that weird crystal castle in the North Pole that will explain everything and then he’ll probably forget about swimming altogether and get with the crime-fighting program.

Finally, of course, there’s the man-panther who doesn’t even bother to pretend he’s not a superhero, and for that much, let me tell you, I have infinite respect for Mr. Usain Bolt. Find out what you are and be that, is what I always say.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.