The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodying
the ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that of
high performance is basically the same as the dynamics of change
behind any other form of human projection. Structurally, it
consists of the transition from direct forms of interaction with
the outside world to more and more mediated interrelations.
Chasing an animal that will eventually be caught and eaten is a
performance directly related to survival. In addition to the
physical aspect, there are other elements that intervene in the
relation hunter-hunted: how to mask the presence of one's odor
from the prey; how to attract game (through noise or lure); how
to minimize energy expended to succeed (where to hit the prey,
and when). Ritual, magic, and superstition were added, but did
not always enhance the outcome.
Running for the maintenance and improvement of physical qualities
is immediate, but still less direct in relation to the outcome
than in hunting. The activity displays an understanding of
connections: What do muscle tone, heartbeat, resilience, and
volition have to do with our life and work, with our health? It
also testifies to our efforts to preserve a certain sense of
time and space (lost in the artificial environments of our homes
or workplaces) and projects sheer physical existence. Running for
pleasure, as we suppose animals do when young and enjoying
security (think about puppies!) is different from running with a
purpose such as hunting an animal, catching someone (friend or
foe), running after a ball, or against a record. Running for
survival is not a specialized experience; running in a war game
implies some specialization; becoming the world champion in
field and track is a specialized effort for whose outcome many
people work. In the first case, the reason is immediate; in the
second, less direct; in the third, mediated in several ways: the
notion of running to compete, the distance accepted by all
involved (athletes, spectators, organizations), the value
attached, the meaning assigned, the means used in training and
diet, the running costume. Before specialization, which is
exclusive commitment to a particular practical experience,
socially acknowledged selection took place. Not everybody had the
physical and mental qualities appropriate to high sports
performance. In the background, the market continuously
evaluates what becomes, to variable degrees, a marketable
product: the champion. In the process, the human being undergoes
alienation, sometimes evinced through pain, other times
ignored-books never read don't hurt. People tend to remember the
festive moments in a champion's life, forgetting what leads to
victory: hard work, difficult choices, numerous sacrifices, and
the hardship inflicted on the bodies and minds engaged in the
effort of extracting the maximum from the athlete.
How literate should an athlete be? The question is not different
from how literate a worker, farmer, engineer, ballerina, or
scientist should be. Sports and literacy used to be tightly
associated in a given context. The entire collegiate sports world
(whose origin in 19th century Britain was already alluded to)
embodies this ideal. Mens sana in corpore sano-a healthy mind in
a healthy body-was understood along the line of the practical
experience involving literacy as a rule for achieving high
efficiency in sports. Some forms of sport are a projection from
language and literacy to the physical experience. Tennis is one
example, and possibly the best known. Such forms of sport were
designed by literates and disseminated through the channels of
literacy. Collegiate sports is their collective name. But once
the necessity of literacy itself became less stringent, such
sports started emancipating themselves from the confinements of
language and developed their own languages. When winning became
the aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount and
started being measured and recorded.
Literates are not necessarily the most efficient in sports where
physical prowess or quick scoring are needed to win: football,
basketball, or baseball, as compared to long-distance running,
swimming, or even the exotic sport of archery. This statement
might seem tainted by stereotype or prejudice to which one falls
prey when generalizing from a distorted past practical
experience (affected by all kinds of rules, including those of
sex and race discrimination). What is discussed here is not the
stereotypical illiterate athlete, or the no less stereotypical
aristocrat handling Latin and his horse with the same elegance,
but the environment of sports in general. People involved in the
practical experience of sports are sometimes seen as
exceptionally endowed physically, and less so intellectually.
This does not have to be so; there is really nothing inherent in
sports that would result in the intellect-physique dichotomy, one
to the detriment of the other. Examples of athletes who also
achieved a high level of intellectual development can be given:
Dr. Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute mile
barrier; William Bradley, the former basketball player who became
a United States senator; Michael Reed, once defense lineman who
is now a concert pianist; Jerry Lucas, now a writer; Michael
Lenice, a wide receiver who became a Rhodes Scholar. They are,
nevertheless, the exception, not because one kind of experience
is counterproductive to the other, but because the expectations
of efficiency make it very difficult for one and the same person
to perform at comparable levels as athletes and as
intellectuals. Specialization in sports, no less than in any
human activity, requires a focus of energy and talent. Choices,
too, come with a price tag.
While literacy does not result in higher performance in sports, a
limited notion of sports literacy, i.e., control of the language
of sports, allows for improved performance. It is relevant to
analyze how today's sports experience requires the specialized
language and the understanding of what makes higher performance,
and thus higher efficiency, possible. Once sport is understood
as a practical experience of human self- constitution, we can
examine the type of knowledge and skill needed to reach the
highest efficiency. Knowledge of the human body, nutrition,
physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology is important.
Information focused on reaching high performance has been
accumulated for each form of physical exercise. As a result of
the experience itself, as well as through import of pertinent
knowledge from other domains of human activity, expertise
becomes more and more focused. In some ways, the commonalty of
the experience diminished while the specific aspect increased.
For instance, on the basketball court, as we see it in various
neighborhoods, playing is the major goal. Rules are loosely
respected; players exert themselves for the pleasure of the
effort. One meets others, establishes friendships, finds a useful
way of getting physical exercise. On the professional basketball
team, various experts coordinated by a coach make possible an
experience of efficiency predictable to a great extent,
programmable within limits, original to some measure. The effort
to coordinate is facilitated through natural language; but the
expectation of efficiency in achieving a goal-winning the
game-extends beyond the experience constituted in and
communicated through language. Games are minutely diagrammed; the
adversary's plays are analyzed from videotapes; new tactics are
conceived, and new strategies followed. In the end, the language
of the game itself becomes the medium for the new game
objectives. In the last 30 seconds of a very tight game, each
step is calculated, each pass evaluated, each fault (and the
corresponding time) pre-programmed.
Technology mediates and supports sports performance in ways few
would imagine when watching a volleyball team in action or a
runner reaching the finish line. There are ways, not at all
requiring the tools of literacy. To capture recurrent patterns
characteristic of high efficiency performance and to emulate or
improve them, adapt them to the type of sportsperson prepared
for a certain contest, becomes part of the broader experience.
Indeed, boundaries are often broken, rules are bent, and
victories are achieved through means which do not exactly
preserve the noble ideal of equal opportunity or of fairness.
Sports experiences were always at the borderline. A broken rule
became the new rule. Extraneous elements (mystical,
superstitious, medical, technological, psychological) were
brought into the effort to maximize sports performance. The
entire story of drugs and steroids used to enhance athletic
prowess has to be seen from the same perspective of efficiency
against the background of generalized illiteracy. The languages
of stimuli, strategies, and technology are related, even if some
appear less immoral or less dangerous. As drugs become more
sophisticated, it is very difficult to assess which new record
is the result of pure sports and which of biochemistry. And it is
indeed sad to see sportsmen and sportswomen policed in their
private functions in order to determine how much effort, how
much talent, or how much steroid is embodied in a performance.
Stories of deception practiced within the former totalitarian
states of Europe might scare through gruesome detail. People
risked their lives for the illusion of victory and the
privileges associated with it. But after the ideological level is
removed, we face the illiterate attitude of means and methods
intended to extract the maximum from the human being, even at
the price of destroying the person. Whether a state encourages
and supports these means, or a free market makes them available,
is a question of responsibility in the final analysis. Facts
remain facts, and as facts they testify to the commercial
democracy in which one has access to means that bring victory and
reward, just as they bring the desired cars, clothes, houses,
alcohol, food, or art collections. Among the records broken at
the Olympic games in Atlanta is the number of samples collected
for doping control (amounting to almost 20 percent of the number
of athletes).
American football is possibly the first post-modern game in that
it appropriates from the old for use in a new age. Comparing
American football with sports of different pragmatic
frameworks-to tennis, volleyball, or rugby-one can notice the
specialization, mediation, new dynamics, and language of the
game. There are twenty- two positions and special formations for
place kicks, kick-offs, and receiving. There are also support
personnel for different functions: owners, managers, coaches,
trainers, scouts, doctors, recruiters, and agents. The game is
burdened with literacy-based assumptions: it is as totalitarian
as any language, although its elementary repertory is quite
reduced-running, blocking, tackling, catching, throwing, kicking.
Rules implicit in the civilization of literacy-all know the
language and use it according to its rule, sequentiality,
centralism-are observed. The word signal, snap numbers, color
code, and play name are part of the semiosis. It is a minimal
rule experience, which seems a comedy to someone who never
watched it before. The players are dressed in ridiculous gear.
They seem actors in a cheap show, and act according to plans
shared through private code.
As opposed to many games that we can only sketchily retrace to
someplace back in history, we know how all this came about in
American football. The goal was no longer the game, as it was in
its early history as a college sports, but winning. A more
efficient game required more efficient football machines,
specialized in a limited repertory, present only for the
duration of their task. The game acquired a configurational
aspect, takes place at many levels, requires distribution of
tasks, and relies upon networks of communication for maintaining
some sense of integration. Its violence, different from the
staged buffoonery of wrestling, is in sync with the spirit of
belligerence implicit in today's competitive environment: "We
teach our boys to spear and gore.... We want them to plant that
helmet right under a guy's chin." (Woody Hayes, legendary coach
at Ohio State University, better known for its football team than
its academic standards). There is physical involvement, injury,
steroids, drugs, illicit money-and there are statistics. The
spirit of the game is disseminated to other sports and other
aspects of life (business, politics). In the case of baseball,
the statistics are most important. They attach to each gesture
on the field a meaning which otherwise would escape the mind of
the viewer. In games of a more continuous flow (soccer, tennis,
handball), the attraction is in the particular phase, not in the
number of yards gained or the average (hits, home runs,
strike-outs).
The general dynamics of existence and human interaction in the
civilization of illiteracy also marked the dynamics of the
practical experience of sports. Higher speed, shorter
encounters, short action spans-these make the sports event more
marketable in the environment of the new civilization. The more
precise the experience, the less expressive. Almost no one
watched the compulsory ice skating exercises at world
championships, and so they were canceled, but millions enjoy the
dramatics of dancing on ice that is becoming more and more a
show watched around the world. The more extensive the effort,
the less attractive to spectators. A twenty-five kilometer cross-
country competition will never interest as many viewers as a
fast, dangerous downhill race. These characteristics are
definitive of the civilization of illiteracy. People do not want
to learn how to perform at the same level; knowledge is
irrelevant. Performance is what attracts, and it is the only
thing which gains prizes that the winner of the ancient
Olympics, who was also spoiled, never dreamed of. "Winner take
all" is the final rule, and the result is that winning, more
than competing, has become the goal.
The efficiency requirement leads not only to the relative
illiteracy of those involved in sports, but also to a practice
of discriminatory physical selection. In the USA, for instance,
black African-Americans dominate football and basketball, which
have become national obsessions. If equal opportunity were
applied to professional sports as it is to other activities, the
competitions would not be so attractive. The irony of this
situation is that, in fact, black African-Americans are still
entertainment providers in the USA. Regardless of how profitable
professional sports are, the obsession with efficiency
effectively consecrates an important segment of the population to
entertaining the rest. Blacks are also playing in the most
advanced major basketball leagues in the world. In what used to
be the Soviet Union, chances were that the winter sports teams
would be recruited from the Siberian population, where skiing is
a way of life. All over Europe, soccer teams recruit from Spain,
Italy, Africa, and South America. It is easier to attain maximum
efficiency through those endowed with qualities required by the
new goals of the games instead of creating a broad base of
educated athletes.
The public, homogenized through the mediating action of
television, is subjected to the language of the sports
experience and is presented with performance and interpretation
at the same time. Thus, even the mechanism of assigning meaning
is rationalized, taken over by the market mechanism, freed from
the constraints of literacy and reason, and rendered to human
subjects without requiring that they think about it.
Blaming changes in sports, or for that matter in literacy, the
condition of the family, the fast-food curse, television,
increased greed, new technology, or lower levels of education,
results in only partial explanations of the new condition of
sports. Yes, the greatly celebrated champions are illiterate. No
matter how good in their political game of finding excuses and
alibis, colleges care for the high performances of physically
gifted students, recruited only insofar as they add to the
marketability of the institution, not to the academic entry
requirements. Literacy is not a prerequisite for sports
performance. It might actually interfere with it. In the world
of competitions, sportsmen and sportswomen are either jetting
around the globe or traveling from one exhibition game to
another, barely able to breathe, never mind to take care of their
literacy or their private lives. Their language is one of
pitiful limitation, always inferior to the energy spent in the
effort or externalized in frustration when the rules don't work
in their favor. They don't read, they don't write. Even their
checks are signed by others. The description might be somewhat
extreme and sound harsh, and the attitude might seem
impertinent, but after all, it is not because sportsmen and
sportswomen know Shakespeare's sonnets by heart that people
watch baseball, nor because they write novels (or even short
stories) that the public applauds the ice skating dancers, and
even less that they keep diaries, with minimal spelling errors
and full sentences, that spectators die to be on the stand of
the stadium where the drama of football starts in the fall and
ends shortly before another sports takes over the media.
Sports are marketable work, of high intensities and no literate
status. The efficiency of each sport is measured in the
attraction it exercises over many people, and thus in the
ability of a sport to transmit messages of public interest,
insofar as public interest is part of the market process.
Alienated from the expectation of integration, corresponding to
the ideal of the complete human being, sport is as specialized as
any other form of human praxis. Sports constituted their own
domains of competence and performance, and generate expectations
of partial sport literacies. That in the process, because they
address physical attributes and intellectual functions, sports
became a molding machine for the athletes, another nature,
should not go without saying or understanding what it takes to
succeed. All over the world, where efficiency reached levels
corresponding to the new scale of humankind, football,
basketball, soccer, and tennis players, swimmers, runners, and
gymnasts are created almost from scratch. Experts select
children, analyze their genetic history and current condition,
devise training procedures, and control diet, psychology, and
emotional life until the desired performer is ready to compete.
Gentlemen, place your bets!
The investment in sports, as in the stock market, is supposed to
return profit. Successful sportspeople need not testify to how
high their own return is. That this return also means
compromised physical or mental integrity is part of the cynical
equation that the public enthusiastically validates. When
players are traded and contracts are signed, the money they
earn, disproportionate as it seems at times, corresponds, almost
to the last digit, to the number of people who will watch them,
some for the sake and pleasure of the performance, others making
money from a team's victory or an athlete's record. In some
states and countries, whether betting is legal or prohibited, it
is by far the strongest sector of the economy. It takes very
interesting forms, however. One is the direct bet: this horse,
this player, this team.
Betting, with its partial literacy involving its own mediating
elements that render reading and writing useless, is not a new
institution. People were challenged by the odds down through
history. But once the structural change that entailed means of
networking, task distribution, and almost instant access to any
event in the world was in place, the experience of betting
totally took over that of competing. All our unfulfilled desires
and drives are now embodied by those we choose to represent us,
and for whose victory we not only root, but also invest in.
There is an ideal stake-the successful player-and a mundane
stake-the actual wager. Expectation of high figures is an
extension of literate expectations. It embodies the naive
assumption that cultivated minds and challenged bodies unite in
a balanced personality of high integrity. The reason this model
failed over and over need not be restated here. But the point
needs to be made that the ideal stake and the trivial stake are
not independent. This introduces to competition an element of
obscurity in the form of motivations not intrinsic to sports.
The indirect wager represents this element.