A Brief History of Competition

I suppose at the beginning of the history of man, he spent most of his time working. Adam, for example, had to name and classify and organize all of creation; remember, this predated not only the computer database, but also the invention of the 3x5 index card. Eventually, however, he must have felt the need for recreation. The Scripture does not record whether he recognized the basic human instinct for play within himself, or whether Eve simply began complaining that he never took a day off or took her anywhere – judge for yourself.

Soon thereafter, recreation probably included testing one’s skills in rock-throwing for distance or accuracy, or the like: the beginning of sports as we know it. Then, after the invention of what we like to call “other people”, someone else was standing nearby and said, “I’ll bet you a day’s manna that I can throw the rock farther,” and suddenly we have competitive sports.

One day two of those guys were having a close contest, and the neighbors came over to watch, leading to the advent of spectator sports. My guess is that it was the next day that an enterprising fellow put a wall around the other two and began to charge admission -- would you call that “organized” sports? And the day after that, one of the contestants said, “I’m not going to put on a show for you unless you give me a cut of the gate,” which of course constitutes professional sports.

And so it continued for many, many years without much change – until the coming of newspapers. Think about it: reading a newspaper allows us in effect to send someone else to the game for us; then we read his or her account of what happened. Which is yet another “degree of separation” from the original guy throwing a rock.

Two things got me started thinking about this topic: Television Without Pity, and Big Brother. Television Without Pity is a blogsite where the writers blog about TV shows; I visit it frequently to keep up with my favorite shows. Oddly, I prefer to read an entry about an episode I’ve already watched over an episode I’ve missed; I do that every day, and even I think that’s weird.

Big Brother is a reality competition program (as always, using the word “reality” in its TV rather than its actual literal English-language sense) where people go live in a house filled with cameras, and one by one they get kicked out. I watched the first season, right after the original Survivor got me all hyped up about reality TV, and... nothing happened. They sat around, they talked, they ate peanut butter; once in awhile they had a competition invented by the producers. There was one guy who was mildly controversial, so they kicked him out first thing. OK, I confess I watched the second go-round too, but even less happened, so I’m all done.

But suppose I take it into my head to read the Big Brother blog? Actually, I do, once in awhile if the headline catches my eye. Then I’m sitting at my computer, reading something written by a guy who watched a show produced by a bunch of guys who pointed their cameras at a bunch of other people sitting around in a house doing nothing.

I love TV, I love to read, and I especially love to read a good TV blog. But when I consider how far removed you can get from actually doing something, I have to turn off my computer and go outside. Let's see how far I can throw a rock.