the radio-hour lead-in: training athletes as entertainers
Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant.
Context
Baked into the E.T.A. curriculum is a doctrine about what the athletic body is finally for: the "six-term Entertainment Requirement" exists "because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers." Himself had to ram it past both Avril and Schtitt, but it names the destination of every drilled body — the Show, where the developed athlete performs for an audience. The regimen that plants players next to "the corpore-potis-type goals kids were coming up the hill to give their childhoods for" is also, per the founder, training them to be watched. (The entertainment-theory itself is e-s's; landed here is the athlete-as-entertainer curriculum fact.)