Chow’s experience with lefties is coming in handy

Right-handers own the world and I’m among the left-out who just pay rent.

I’m reminded of that regularly at the end of checkout lines when it’s time to sign for a credit or debit card payment … Whoops, sorry, there goes your Mentos display. My bad for being among the 10 percent of people who write with the wrong — I mean, left — hand.

Maybe that’s why left-handed people suffer a higher incidence of industrial accidents. The factory is set up for the majority of the workers, and there’s no high-powered drill inscribed with "LEFTY" like the scissors in kindergarten.

But lefties apparently do ha ve advantages in some walks of life. Politics and sports come to mind.

Southpaws are more likely to become president than right-handers, and a higher percentage of left-handers are members of Mensa.

You can come up with your own conclusions or punch lines based on the fact of Ronald Reagan starting out as left-handed but switched to the right.

Tim Tebow proves you can be a right-winger and a left-flinger. Then again, his lack of precision has at some point probably generated the question a well-meaning coach once asked of me: "Are you sure you’re left-handed?"

And that brings us to the University of Hawaii football practice field, where two of the three guys throwing the most passes the first week of camp were lefties. Now we hear one of them, Sean Schroeder, will be named the No. 1 quarterback today.

After watching Schroeder the first two practices, I’m not surprised. The Duke transfer was on the money with nearly every pass — and this without the benefit of spring practice at UH.

Of course, his first interception came right after a bunch of us watching from the hill had just agreed he was doing great.

But Schroeder apparently has done enough to impress coach Norm Chow and give him the edge over what, for now, anyway, becomes a lefty-righty bullpen combo of Jeremy Higgins and David Graves.

This isn’t the first time for Chow to work with a left-hander who hopefully has the right stuff. You may have heard of a couple of guys he coached named Matt Leinart and Steve Young.

Leinart won a Heisman Trophy at USC in 2005 — a season that began with a 63-17 win at Hawaii.

Young was second for the stiff-arm statue in 1983 with BYU and ended up in the Hall of Fame.

I couldn’t remember the last time UH had a lefty at quarterback. Our Warriors football beat writer, Stephen Tsai, reminded me that Kiran Kepo‘o was on the roster (but didn’t play in a game) in 2007, when they went undefeated in the regular season.

Hawaii’s best left-handed quarterback was the exciting Raphel Cherry, who starred for the Rainbows in the early 1980s.

You might think Young would be the biggest UH nemesis as a portside QB. But Hawaii and BYU didn’t play each other during Young’s spectacular senior season.

Anyway, that title easily goes to Boise State’s Kellen Moore, who did in the Warriors three times as a starter from 2008 through 2010, throwing with the "wrong" arm. If Moore derived any advantage by being a left-handed passer in college, it wasn’t seen as such at the Senior Bowl. One scout downgraded him for (among other things) his passes having a "weird spin" because he’s a southpaw.

Moore went undrafted last spring. If he eventually finds success in the NFL, it will be as the game-manager type. That’s interesting, because if you look at the names of some of the more remarkable lefty QBs in NFL history, you see many were known as wild ad lib playmakers.

Some cases in point: Frankie Albert, Mike Vick, Jim Zorn, Bobby Douglass.

Douglass was one of my early favorites as a young kid. It took me a long time to realize he was left-handed because he ran so much.

Young was like that early in his career, but developed into arguably the greatest lefty QB ever. Arguably, because every Raiders fan worth his Sunday’s best Halloween costume will say Kenny Stabler.

As for Schroeder, he’s got the size, the arm, the smarts.

I don’t know why he didn’t play at Duke. I do know that Norm Chow can coach up a lefty.