"You remember running wind sprints the August before our senior year? The preseason conditioning stuff?" I asked Dale. Dale and I played football together in high school. Dale was a tremendous linebacker. I once picked up a helmet he'd knocked off, fully expecting to see a head still inside. He's never given up the single-minded focus required of a linebacker, come to think of it. That probably serves him well in his construction career today. I've seen him exhibit that intense linebacker stare in different situations over the past 30 years. The aftermath never is pretty.

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure I puked stuff I hadn't eaten," he said. "Where you going with this?" Dale never fully cooperates with my verbal excesses. He's always waiting to jerk me back in line.

"I was thinking of our coaches," I said. "Guys who could convince us to run that hard. Weren't they ex-Marines?"

Both the head coach and the line coach rode Dale hard. Don't get me wrong. Many times he needed it. They liked him and appreciated his talent. But both were over 6 feet and a hard 200 pounds. This was in the days before hands-off policies at schools. These guys erred on the side of excess physical contact. They'd flat out knock you down if they didn't like your attitude. Dale's main problem was they couldn't knock him down.

"Marines ain't ever ex," he said. "Both were leathernecks in Korea. Why?"

"Leathernecks? Ha. That's even better. I've been reading about the National Collegiate Athletic Association and how they're petting PETA, that animal rights group, in order to switch from leather to fake-leather basketballs," I explained. "The whole process makes me wonder who's running the NCAA."

"I haven't heard about it," he said.

PETA, I explained, has been petitioning the NCAA, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball to stop using leather balls. After all, PETA pinheads say, leather is hairless fur. Charles Barkley, the former NBA pro, ate a hamburger in protest and threatened to run over PETA protesters "like dogs."

"Good for Barkley," said Dale.

"The bad news is that the NCAA tried to have it both ways. In fact, NCAA officials publicly thanked PETA for helping NCAA staff to 'achieve the desired result' of composite balls."

"Course that's basketball for you," said Dale. "You touch somebody five times and you're out. What kind a game is that?" He shook his head to emphasize his disgust. "How'd it go over with your friends in the cattle business?"

"Cattlemen called them on it," I said. "NCAA officials whined about how they were going to composite balls anyway, it was all a coincidence and they were being polite to PETA for their 'reasoned input.'"

"These guys politicians or athletic directors?"

"Wimps," I said. "They're representing coaches and land-grant universities, the very places PETA helps attack with terrorist tactics. You know, firebombing and destroying labs. One of PETA's lecturers even said he supports killing 'animal abusing' lab researchers."

"They need to be real careful with that kind of talk," said Dale. "They just might qualify for a game of cowboys and Osama. Terrorists are terrorists."

"The whole thing makes me wonder what our football coaches would have told the PETA folks 30 years back."

Dale took the question seriously and thought for a while. "I imagine they would have asked the PETA boys how they felt about genuine leathernecks before bouncing a basketball off their foreheads. Leather or composite. Either would work."