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.