Rationalized in language, the notion of competition introduces the experience of comparing, later of measuring, and thus opens the door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalized aspects we today take for granted. Greeks cared for the winner. Time-keeping devices were applied to sports later, more precisely at the time when keeping records became relevant within the broader pragmatics of documentary ownership and inheritance. While playing does not require language, writing helped in establishing uniform rules that eventually defined games. The institution of playing, represented by organized competitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, and reflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy.
In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of nature and freedom, reminiscent of the experience of hunting, fishing, and foraging. But at the same time, sports experiences testify to changes in the condition of human beings as they relate to the natural environment, their natural condition, social environment, and the artificial world resulting from human practice. Target shooting, or, more recently, Nintendo-type aiming with laser beams, is at the other end of the gamut. The circumstances of human experience that made literacy necessary affected the status of the sports experience as well. The contest became a product with a particular status; the prize reflects the sign process through which competition is evaluated.
Allen Guttman distinguished several characteristics of modern sports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and quest for records. What he failed to acknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unless considered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sports seen against the background of the general pragmatic framework. Once we make such connections, we notice that efficiency is more important than the so-called equality of opportunity, quantification, and bureaucratic organization. The quest for efficiency appropriate to the new scale of humankind is exactly what today affects literacy's degree of necessity.
The quest for efficiency in sports becomes evident when we compare the changes from the very sophisticated, indeed obscure, rules governing sports performances in ritualistic cultures (Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Apache) with the tendency to simplify these rules and make the sports experience as transparent as possible. When certain African tribes adopted the modern game of soccer, they placed it in the context of their rituals. The entire set of premises on which the game is based, and which pertain to a culture so different from that of the African tribes, was actually dismissed, and premises of a different nature were attached as a frame for the adopted game. Consequently, the Inyanga (witch-doctor) became responsible for the outcome; the team and supporters had to spend the night before the game together around a campfire; goats were sacrificed. In such instances, the ceremony, not the game, is the recurrent pattern; winning or losing is of secondary importance. Once such tribes entered literate civilization, the utilitarian aspect became dominant. If we take European soccer and extend it to the American game of football, we can understand how new patterns are established according to conditions of human practice of a different structural nature. This discussion cannot be limited to the symbolism of the two games, or of any other sport. The attached meaning corresponds to the interpreted practical experience and does not properly substitute for the recurrent patterns which actually constitute the experience as a projection of the humans involved.
What is of interest here is that literacy was a powerful instrument for structuring practical experiences, such as sports (among others), in the framework of a dynamics of interaction specific to industrial society. As the cradle of the industrial age, England is also the place where many sports and experiences associated with physical exercise started. But once the dynamics changed, some of the developments that the Industrial Revolution made necessary became obsolete. An example is national isolation. Literacy is an instrument of national distinction. By their nature, sports experiences are, or should be, above and beyond artificial national boundaries. Still, as past experiences show (the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was only the climax) and current experiences confirm (national obsession with medals in more recent Olympics), sports in the civilization of literacy, like many other practical experiences, is tainted by nationalism. Competition often degenerates into an adversarial relation and conflict. In the physical exercises of ancient Greece, China, or India, performance was not measured. The patterns were those of physical harmony, not of comparison; of aesthetics, not of functionality. In England, sports became an institution, and performance entered into the record books. Indeed, in England, the history of competitions was written to justify why sports were for the upper, educated classes, and should be kept for amateurs willing to enjoy victory as a reward.
Some games were invented in the environment of the civilization of literacy and meant to accomplish functions similar to those fulfilled by literacy. They changed as the conditions of the practice of literacy changed, and became more and more an expression of the new civilization of more languages of a limited domain. In the information age, where much of language is substituted by other means of expression, sports are an experience that results primarily in generating data. For someone attracted by the beauty of a tennis game, the speed of a serve is of secondary relevance. But after a while, one realizes that tennis has changed from its literate condition to a condition in which victory means obliteration of the game. A very strong and fast serve transforms the game into a ledger of hits and misses. Quite similar is the dynamics of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, all generators of statistics in which the experts find more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics of changes in the nature and purpose of sports is related to what makes the sports experience today another instance in the process of diversification of languages and the demotion of the necessity of literacy.
The illiterate champion
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.