Ever since he was old enough to pick up a football, Norm Chow has looked up to and admired his older brother, Lenny.

He was inspired by Lenny’s exploits at Saint Louis School and sought to emulate him on and off the field. He benefited from Lenny’s counsel and felt his brotherly support and guidance.

But this week, with his 72-year old brother in town for Saturday’s University of Hawaii football game against Boise State, Norm says, “I ain’t even talking to that bugga’.”

 And as far as getting his brother tickets to the game, Norm deadpanned, “this week he can get his own tickets.”

  After 66 years as the best of friends, this is the week their worlds collide. Lenny, you see, bleeds the orange and blue of Boise State as a former Bronco and a half-century stakeholder in the program’s remarkable rise.

“Hawaii has been my home but the Broncos are my team,” Lenny likes to say, And whenever the Broncos play in Aloha Stadium, Lenny leads a group of Hawaii-bred Boise State alums and others here for a homecoming of sorts.

But with Norm in his first year as the Warriors head coach, this year has taken on some heretofore unexperienced complexities.

For example, it had been Lenny’s annual routine to take his old coach, Lyle Smith, to watch Broncos’ practices on the blue turf where the field is named for Smith.

“But Boise won’t let me out on the field for practice now (that Norm is the UH coach),” Lenny said.

 “Everybody asks me the same thing you are asking me,” Lenny tells a reporter. “‘Where’s your allegiance this week?’”

  Is it to Boise, the school he helped to the 1958 junior college national championship as a two-way tackle? Or to the brother he mentored and inspired and whose college games at Utah in the 1960s he drove hours to see?

  Is it to his neighbors and friends in Boise, where he ran a successful insurance business after his playing and coaching days? Or, is it to his Hawaii roots?

“They ask me what colors I’m going to wear (to the game),” Lenny said.

For 50 years Lenny has intertwined the two spheres of his life to a degree. When local players went to Boise — and there has been a remarkable pipeline over the decades — Lenny’s house was often one of their first stops.

“He’d bring some of them here (to his home) to fill them with some rice and keep them from getting homesick,” Norm said.

Lenny was among a dozen Hawaii players on that ’58 championship team and has hosted alumni gatherings and led tours.

“I think every Hawaiian in that area has been to one of his deals,” Norm said.

For years Lenny has kept a sort of Hawaii Bronco wall of fame in his Boise home, a gallery of photos and clippings that has become a historic timeline spanning the Broncos’ growth from a junior college program to small college to Bowl Championship Series buster. The photo of Punahou graduate Jeremy Ioane, the Broncos’ starting safety, is but latest in the long line.

As for whose colors Lenny will wear Saturday, he says, “you’ll have to wait and see.”

Norm says one thing is certain in the family this week, however. His 94-year old mother Toby, who lives with Lenny’s family in Boise and made the trip to Hawaii with him, “will be rooting for me,” Norm said.

“Yeah, she always liked Norm better,” Lenny quipped.

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.