Sports in Time

Athletes, heroes, champions, experts, superstars & civilians coexist in a reality that remains identical in every practical respect, much as a car and a train may run alongside for a good while, or until the next turn.

Athletes have had to fight for a right to run, jump, grow muscle, etc—from day one. They had cast the worst lot of all... Even a slave had a right to do a kind of job... Women were maltreated for a million years but, still, maltreated as women—for being a female... Whereas the first athletes & heroes weren't even allowed to be punished for being that, so forbidden that was—so unnatural in Nature!...

Initially, sports were neither a game of skill nor a test of strength. Strength itself hadn't dawned as a concept, at this time. Darwin would have been delighted to observe that showmanship was completely unnecessary to the business of human survival... Not that it would have made a difference to his creed: this exuberant anthropologist was probably too obsessed with glamour...
Darwin's idea of Survival in the Far West...

Sports, and military arts did exist in Prehistoric Times, but at a dimension of existence so rarefied, one could see it everyday and not know what it was—much as Radium had always been available...

Homo-Sapiens didn't use names, and though Sapiens means knowledge, these people appear to have been too ignorant to notice that they actually knew more than they did... Of course, Early People didn't have equipment for sports. Their idea of enjoying a ball-game consisted in throwing stones at each other in some ironic imitation of Cricket. You had to sit around a fire. Someone was bound to play with it. The burnt Hominid would then accuse everyone in turn, carefully noting facial expressions—as guilt shows in a grin. The injured fellow would cast a stone at the suspect who—if still alive—retaliated, because he hadn't done anything wrong! Apes being imitative, everyone threw a stone at the fellow who had cast the first. This one now had better start running, but—vital to the game—while on the run he had to be able to throw rocks at his pursuers, as they tried to knock him down... This game was played over a million years without any alteration, before the Sapiens...

Sports were a kind of priesthood...
Athletics had nothing to do with games, until recent Antiquity. And then, kings & pharaohs alone could play. Knowledge of physical arts, sports & related games was reserved for the Mighty—including high priests & military equivalents. Normal people were forbidden to even think of it. At best they were kindly told that none of it would be good, pleasant or suitable for them. Public entertainment amounted to playing with bones, pebbles & sticks, or cards—which learned men had designed with a view of transmitting initiation to the Profane, all the same...

Knowledge of Sports was Forbidden...
In short, regular citizens could not hope to know the first thing about athletics—and if they did they must die, twice. First, for knowing what one wasn't meant to know. If the man had a flair for these things, some natural ability, he was nonetheless accused of high treason: how else could he have known, unless some god had told him? And this, of course, was the highest crime of all—maintaining presumption that divinities talk to nobodies...
Dreaming was likewise forbidden...
Dreaming is Taboo...

Someone had to realise that sports are a line of work...
Sport also summarises existence—someone else must have understood this, even before.

Sports, a replica of life... Sports, as a whole, represent all we do in order to exist, and for a living...

From this viewpoint there is little difference between physical & dramatic arts... Theatre likewise sums up all possible variations of human act & expression... Initially, however, theatrical expression was meant to have a depth of expression capable of being in resonance with Cosmos—a totality of that one may experience in fractional glimpses, at best! An actor who had this resonance could transfix an audience, throw everyone around in mystical state—almost as good as what happens in a Campaign for Presidency, or even Osama making another Videotape for us...

Classicism altogether embodies an attempt at reinstating this universal feeling in every field of endeavour—not excluding the Sports...

The typical glamour & glitter that come with the performing arts only make up half the reason for their high popularity rating. They otherwise shine by a faculty of impersonation, which enables actors, athletes, dramatists, heroes and various artists to re-enact almost any fragment of human experience in detail—though that experience be unknown to them, or completely lost in time.