To Our Readers
FOOTBALL is a metaphor for war. The language is the same: Linemen battle in the trenches while coaches draw up strategic game plans and quarterbacks are both field generals and fighter pilots, unleashing air attacks to support the infantry-like running game. Our PC can beat your PC
Or, maybe war is a metaphor for football. Schwartzkopf pulls an end run around Saddam's lines, Montgomery pulls a trap play on Rommel in North Africa, Czar Alexander runs out the clock on Napoleon and Truman throws the bomb.
Either way, it should come as no surprise that in America both war and football are now computerized. For example, the Discovery Channel this week aired a piece on the U.S. Army's tank school at Ft. Knox, where training relies more on pixels and megabytes than motor oil and gunpowder.
Tank crews spend hours in computer-driven simulators, tank interiors with all the controls, bells and whistles of a real tank, mounted on hydraulic pistons that bounce, tip and spin to emulate the look and feel of real tanks in actual battle situations -- at least from the inside.
The simulators are pricey, but very cheap compared to the cost of running real tanks, firing real munitions against real targets. Ft. Knox has a squadron of the machines that interactively play and replay missions in concert for weeks at a time. Pity the opponent who runs up against our Windows-hardened veterans on a real-life battlefield.
In Thursday's paper we read that NFL coaches -- not to be outdone -- are putting on "a technological display worthy of a Silicon Valley board meeting." Gone are the chalk talks; no more plays scribbled in the dirt with a stick. We're now talking high-powered laptops on the sidelines with digital diagrams of blocking assignments, picture-in-picture big-screen videos and plans for "issuing playbooks on a CD-ROM."
The next step? "Quarterbacks wearing virtual reality goggles to scrimmage against imaginary defenses." Heck, after a few concussions, oldtimers like Y.A. Tittle and Roger Staubach could do that without the goggles.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.