The connections between sports and literacy are far from
obvious. Watching sports events, as a spectator in the stadium,
or in front of the television, does not require the literacy we
associate with libraries, reading and writing, and school
education. One does not need to read in order to see who is
fastest, strongest, or jumps the farthest or highest, or throws
or catches the best. And one does not really need to be literate
in order to become a champion or to make it into a first-league
team. Running, jumping, pushing, throwing, catching, and kicking
are part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-day
existence, easy to associate with ways through which survival
took place when scavenging, hunting, fishing, and foraging were
the fundamental ways for primitive beings to feed themselves and
to avoid being killed. Even the association of sports and with
mytho-magical ceremonies implying physical performance is easy
to explain without reference to language, oral or written.
Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in some
parts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyond
immediate control and understanding. Gods were worshipped
through exceptional physical feats performed by people
worshipping them. In archaic cultures, athletes could even be
sacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best were
destined to please the gods.
The initial phases of what was eventually called sport correspond
to establishing those sign systems (gestures, sounds, shapes)
which, in anticipation of language, made language possible and
necessary. This was a phase of syncretism, during which the
physical projection of the human being dominated the intellect.
Running after an animal or from one, and running for play are
different forms of human experience corresponding to different
pragmatic contexts. They have different motivations and
different outcomes. Probably 20,000 years separate these two
experiences in time. In order to reach the level of generality
and abstraction that a competition embodies, the human being had
to undergo experiences of self-constitution within which the
domination of physical over intellectual characteristics changed
drastically. The qualifier sport-a word which seems to have
ascended within the English language of the 19th
century-probably came about in the framework of the division
between secular and non-secular forms of human praxis. Both
maintenance and improvement of the human biological endowment
and mytho-magical practice were based on awareness of the role
the body plays and the recognition of the practical need to
disseminate this awareness. Efficiency was the governing aspect,
not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged in
the cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of the
shared culture. The contest (for which the Greeks used the words
athlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the word
athlete) embody generalizations of those practical situations
through which survival and well-being came about.
As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrational
components. This is why approaching the relation between
literacy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions.
Sports is approached here from the perspective of the changes
through which it became what it is today: a well defined form of
relaxation, but probably more a competitive type of work
acknowledged in the market like any other product of human
practice.
The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcome
of practical experiences dominated by physical aspects was
established within very limited, but strongly patterned,
activity. It soon became the measure of survival success, and
thus the rationality shared by the community experiencing the
survival of the fittest is reflected in competition. Athletes
competed in order to please gods; to conjure fertility, rain, or
the extension of life; or to expel demons. The process is
documented in a variety of petroglyphs (cave paintings,
engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal horn
and metal, as well as in the first written testimony, in which
the role of the stronger, the faster, the more agile was
evinced. Documents from all known cultures, regardless of their
geographic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on the
physical as it acquired a symbolic status.
To understand how some biological characteristics improved
chances of survival means to understand the rationality of the
body. Its embodiment in the culture of physical awareness
facilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution that
would result in sports professions. The irrational element has to
do with the fact that although all males and all females are
structurally the same, some individuals seem better endowed
physically. As with many other aspects of the practical
experience through which each person acknowledges his or her
identity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain of
explanations where the rationality is lost. This is why
expectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forces
are associated with sports. The cult of the body, in particular
of body parts, resulted from experiences leading to awareness of
oneself. When the body, or parts of it, became a goal in itself,
the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradicted
by the irrationality of fitness for reasons other than
individual and communal well-being. Rituals, myths, religion, and
politics appropriated the irrational component of physical
activities. In ancient communities, in the context of a limited
understanding of physical phenomena, attempts were made to infer
from the immediate well-being of the body of competing athletes
to the future well-being of the entire community.
When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival of
the fittest, can we suppose that a lone human being stands out,
something like the lonely animals on their own until the time
for pairing comes, competing with others, killing and being
killed? Probably not. Scale defines the species as one that
ascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, no
matter how primitive. Up to a certain scale, the only competition
was for survival. It translated into food and offspring. Only
after the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level of
efficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the element
of competition shifts from survival to ascertainment.
Competition and expectations of performance correspond to the
period of incipient writing, and were progressively acknowledged
as part of the dynamics of communal life. Every other change in
the role of humankind brought with it expectations of physical
fitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency.