----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > OK, a ham-handed analogy, but Darrell, get serious. As you HSI people so well know, we're in the entertainment business here, and no entertainment I can think of has ever been successful that requred "educating the masses." > > Entertainment by its very definition is something that you do because it's fun; because you DON'T have to work at it. If Joe Sixpack wants an education he'll go to night school. If he wants entertainment, he's not going to go to some sporting event where for all practical purposes they're speaking Chinese. > > The clunk you hear every time some U.S. meet announces a field-event measure in metric measure is another fan falling off the bandwagon. Nonsense. Metric versus imperial is a red herring. My mother is European and thinks in metric, so she should have no trouble following athletics, you would think. Wrong. She may recognise the units involved, but the performances mean nothing to her. When I wom a 100m meet as a high school kid in 13 seconds she thought that was really, really fast. When she heard that it was only 3 seconds slower than the world record she was even more impressed. A hardcore t&f fan who has done track himself appreciates that the 100m in 10sec is in a totally different universe from 100m in 13sec. To a proud mom they are only a few heartbeats apart. Ask her if putting the 7.26 kilo shot 20 meters is a good performance. She has no idea. Ask her if throwing the javelin 200 meters is possible. For all she knows it's possible. Feet or meters, it makes no difference: she can relate to the concepts of competition, winning, and losing, but the cold figures themselves mean squat to her. Seen from another perspective: I sometimes watch major league baseball or NFL on the sports channel. They are full of figures that mean nothing to me. A picture comes up of some baseball player with a batting average printed on the screen: I have absolutely no idea if it's good, bad, or average. I know that a batting average of 0.3 is better than one of 0.2, but how much better is that? Is it like comparing a 15 sec 100m to a 10 sec 100m, or is it more like comparing a 10.6 sec 100m to a 10.0 sec 100m? Is it world class, or could I do that too with a few months of practice? I don't know, and frankly, it has little effect on my enjoyment (or non-enjoyment) of the game. I watched this year's superbowl live on TV, the first time I ever watched a non-summarized NFL game in it's entirety. The clunk you heard was me falling off the NFL bandwagon, but not because the announcers used imperial instead of metric. It was because it took 4 hours to show a game consisting of 1 hour pure playing time, and 3 hours for shots of bulky players milling around aimlessly, giving each other countless high-fives, and lots of tinsel involving boy-bands, teen pop stars, and renditions of various anthems. That they used yards instead of meters -- well, I couldn't care less. It doesn't matter one whit whether distances are measured in feet, yards or meters. It is a big misconception to think that the ordinary joe relates to a 24 foot long jump by saying: "Wow, that's as long as my driveway". Joe Average says "24 feet, whoopty fricking doo. Where's the remote?" and switches to the Star Trek channel, where he, like millions others, will watch a show with units like "Warp Speed 9" and "14 Megaparsecs" and "300 Lightyears" without ever once complaining that he can't relate to the measurements. Switch your t&f over to metric and stop whining. The hardcore fans will adjust without problems, joe average doesn't care either way.
