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.
The message is the sneaker
The biggest indirect bet is made by marketing and advertising. On the never- ending table of Olympic records, the most spectacular performances are dollar signs preceding figures into the billions. Within the general shift from manufacturing to service economy characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy, sport becomes a form of entertainment. New media, replacing the printed word as the dominant means of communication, makes possible international viewing of competitions as they happen. In the past, we were satisfied with the image of the winner. Now we can own the tape of the game and can retrieve each moment of any event. More broadband, and soon we will download the running athlete directly onto our monitors. For a price, of course.
People consume sports. They are able to fly to the Olympics, wherever the best bid takes them (Barcelona, Atlanta, or Sydney), even able to pay for forty-five minutes or a whole week of shaping up with the very best trainers. Facts in the world of sports, as much as in the rest of our activities, are less important than the image. The authority and self-discipline, on which physical education was built, are replaced by the freedom and opportunity to choose from among many sports events, and by an attitude of permissiveness and self-indulgence which many times results in considering the whole world as a sports show. Sports are used to further many causes and support many interest groups. On the stage of the events they sponsor, the world's largest companies compete with feminism, equal opportunity, AIDS, and various disabilities for the attention and dollars of the audience. Sponsorship is a highly selective experience. Nevertheless, it frequently contradicts the slogans it sets before the public. These are important because the indirect bet on sports takes into consideration the huge market of entertainment, and defines within this market the segments it will address.
Product endorsements, advertising, and public relations are the media through which marketing places its bets. No less than 500,000 brands were traded in Atlanta. Only to keep track of them was a major task, described officially as "protecting the integrity of the Olympic Games and the rights of official sponsors," but also "detecting attempts at parasitic marketing." Every square inch on the body of a tennis player or a track and field athlete can be rented. And is. The better the manager (not necessarily a player's game), the higher the endorsement contract. The minute detail picked up by the camera allows us to see the name of the maker on the watch, the manufacturer's logo on the socks, a sponsor company's name on the shirts and headgear, the brand of glucose or mineral water, the maker of ice or snow for winter games. It seems that the competition on the court and the competition among those who buy the space available on cyclists' ware, football players' uniforms, skiers, swimmers, runners, and chess players are feeding off one another. When the Canon company chose as its prime-time advertising actor a tennis player who did not make it beyond the preliminary games, the bet continued on the waves, on the screens, on the videotapes, and on any other imaginable display.