
Occasional wisdom by Texas Tech coach Mike Leach.
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Dearest Mike,
Rare question here, I assume, from across the pond. I was hoping to get a bit of the American perspective on the sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the famous "fastest man on no legs," who was disqualified Sunday from his first run against "able" bodies in Sheffield for leaving his lane en route to a seventh place finish. I believe his case raises some interesting questions about the future of athletics in our technological age. Do you believe he should be allowed to compete in the Beijing Olympics, if he can qualify on what you might refer to as his "souped-up" prosthetics?
Ever so much awaiting your response, and Go Raiders!
Minding Another Trend Every Year
Innovation is essential to man's survival and conquering of nature, MATEY. It's very likely we wouldn't exist today if one of our enterprising anscestors among the archaic H. sapiens hadn't developed the Levallois technique of making crude stone tools 250,000 years ago (in France, no less, which just goes to . That early man would probably object to the "unfair advantage" we have today of eyeglasses, for example, since it's commonly assumed the once-thriving gaelic H. heidelbergensis went extinct primarily due to chronic nearsightedness. Kept bumping into things - rocks, sabre-toothed tigers. Bloody shame, as they say up your way.

Carbon fiber cheetah feet? I want that!
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People praise physical strength, but man's gift in everything he does is his mind, MATEY, and the lines are already too far past naked Greek grapplers to be stopped. Soon we'll all be running on cheetah stilts, and if that technology helps us close the gap on Texas, I'll be the first to embrace it. I want them now, actually, and if Gerald Meyers and Bobby Gleason and the International Council on Human Rights Policy would allow me to amputate my receivers' legs and install lightweight and durable carbon fiber blades from Iceland in their place, then believe me, I would. You're going to be dead in a hundred years, go for it. Live dangerously. All the naysaying, hand-wringing, tutting over, like, Barry Bonds improving his performance through "artificial" science, that's just too strong, too much. All the pundits are just a little too sure of it for my taste. Don't be a coward. Take a straight line towards your goals. The world only wants to put limits on what you can achieve, MATEY, and how, and through what channels, but Oscar Pistorius just confirms that's really up to you.
Yer bucko,
Mike Leach
Cap'n Head Coach, Texas Tech Red Raiders