Ahead of the Euro, Nike released a wonderfully cinematic six-minute ad featuring Cristiano Ronaldo. You know it's art because it has a title – The Switch.
The précis: Ronaldo smacks heads with a ballboy. They trade bodies. The kid learns how totally freaking awesome it is to be Cristiano Ronaldo. And something something value of hard work something.
That's the sales pitch: These shoes will not only make you great; they will make you happy.
In real life and at the moment, it seems rather less fun to be perhaps the best soccer player in the world. The Portuguese has been trailed here in France by slipshod results and hand-wringing about his mental state.
Asked if his player was depressed, Portugal manager Fernando Santos fumed: "After the first match your stories were that Cristiano was all smiles, and now it is that he's not smiling."
Just to prove how jolly and/or relaxed he is, on Wednesday morning Ronaldo grabbed the microphone away from a reporter asking him how he felt ahead of an elimination match with Hungary and tossed it in a nearby pond.
Ronaldo walked on without saying anything. The reporter didn't look very surprised.
The answer would be saved until the evening when Ronaldo had one of the better games in the history of this tournament.
Doubtless, most of the world outside Portugal was hoping he'd fail. As they say, Ronaldo inspires feelings. You cannot be ambivalent about him. He won't let you. Just when you think you can separate the art from the artist, he'll come out with something like his now-notorious comment about Iceland's "small mentality" and you'll hate him all over again.
But that is only possible when he's playing averagely. When Ronaldo locates his best game, all you can feel while watching him is awe.
He is a self-absorbed twit as well as one of the most remarkable team athletes who have ever lived. The two ideas can co-exist. Just barely.
Part of the appeal is the heartlessness – toward his opponents, his colleagues and occasionally himself. Why else do you think he says so many silly, hurtful things when the usual boilerplate would do? So that he can be publicly lashed. It's a form of self-abnegation: "Oh, you think I'm bad? I'll show you how bad I can be."
He only seems happy when he's winning, which is the thing to remember. He's not bothered about how. All he wants is for everyone else to get out of his way.
There are none of those phony appeals to fellow feeling and lifting up the lowest man. If Ronaldo were a Borgia, I imagine he'd have his least talented teammates killed. He certainly looks at them that way.
At the outset, he was shooting visual daggers at his forward partner, Nani, after the latter failed to pick him out on a pair of rushes. Nani didn't seem to notice. I assume that's the only way you can play with the guy without punching him.
Hungary took a lead. Ronaldo pulled it back with an inch-perfect pass to Nani, who went against his every instinct and put it on the net rather than a hoarding 20 yards wide.
Hungary scored again.
Ronaldo dropped in on goal, turned, picked a hard-hit cross out of the air with the back of his trailing heel and redirected it into the net. It looks easy in slo-mo replay. It is incredibly, incredibly difficult. For all but a few dozen people alive, impossible. And few of them would try it in a game this big.
With that, he is now the first person to score in four Euro tournaments.
Hungary scored again. It was now 3-2. Portugal stood to be humiliatingly eliminated.
Three really was too much. Laying back from the play, Ronaldo had a good old hissy fit. He flung his arms about. He screamed at the ground. If he'd been in a grocery-store aisle, he would've dropped to the floor and begun kicking cans off the shelves.
This sort of petulance would be completely unbearable if he wasn't willing to fix the problem himself.
Ronaldo got the tying goal with his head. Another beauty.
The final few minutes of the game were – and I use this term in the clinical sense – madness. Up and down. Absolutely no coherence or organization. Just a bunch of people running at each other as if zombies were attacking from both ends of the stadium.
Iceland was simultaneously playing Austria. They were also tied.
The permutations of Group F's finish and who would play whom in the knockout round were changing with each new scoreline. People in the press room had begun blurting out numbers and names, half of it incorrect and most of it misleading.
This must be what it's like to work on Bay Street.
I thought that if both games remained draws, Portugal would play Croatia in the round of 16. A Dutchman corrected me: "They'll play England."
Are you sure?
"Yes. I have an English friend and he's online right now having a heart attack."
Two hours earlier, Portugal would've seemed like a decent option for any top side. Not great, but not a disaster.
Now that Ronaldo had summoned up his darkest, most effective self, this team is a nightmare for anyone.
Austria was the only side in the group without options. It had to win. The Austrians pressed the entire team up in the dying moments. Iceland countered and scored a winner on the final play of the game.
With that, Portugal draws Croatia after all. What a disaster. For both teams.
Ronaldo would have had no idea. His game ended about a minute before Iceland's late tally. His teammates were slapping hands with the Hungarians. He was busily screaming at God knows what or whom. Once again, he was screw-faced and angry at the world.
In fairness, why would he celebrate a historic individual performance? He hadn't won.
That's the guy you should be afraid of. As the ad suggests, there are two Ronaldos. On Thursday, we saw the one is tired of whining and has decided to do it by himself.
Cathal Kelly