Bob Weber was inducted into the Colorado State University football hall of fame in 2001.

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A lot of people ask: What is your ideal golf foursome, and invariably you say Nicklaus, Tiger, Arnie or maybe Annika Sorenstam.

Mine was a bit different. A year ago, I told former UA football coach Larry Smith I hoped to arrange a foursome that also included ex-Arizona head football coaches Bob Weber and Jim Young.

All lived in Tucson. All played golf. All agreed it would be a good day to celebrate UA football and tell stories.

But we delayed because Larry couldn't shake his illness, leukemia, which, tragically, killed him in February.

A few months later, I asked Bob Weber if he would agree to a foursome in which former Colorado State head coach Mike Lude, a Tucson resident, would join Jim Young and me.

"I've got Parkinson's disease and I'm slowing down a bit, but I'd love to play golf with Mike and Jim,'' he said. "Mike hired me at Colorado State in 1964, my first college coaching job.''

We had to wait because Lude spent the summer in Seattle (he was Washington's athletic director for 15 years) and because Young usually gets away to San Diego in September.

"I have a very high regard for Bob Weber,'' Young told me. "When I was hired as Arizona's football coach in January 1973, Bob phoned and arranged to meet me for lunch. He gave me great insight into the returning personnel, the UA's recruiting history and whatever else I asked. It was a very classy move. Not many coaches who have been fired would sit down with the new coach and assist in the transition.''

I was about to phone Weber in early October when I was told he was being treated at Tucson Medical Center for pancreatic cancer, an aggressive and unforgiving disease. He died Saturday. He was only 75.

It has been a mournful year for the extended UA football family, which also lost one of Weber, Young and Smith's top defensive linemen, Mike Dawson, who died last spring at 54.

"During the last few weeks of Bob's life,'' his wife, Connie, remembers, "he would sometimes awaken, still groggy from the medication, and start talking about golf. Something like, 'Hit it left on this hole' or 'What hole are we on now?' He enjoyed golf and he enjoyed coaching. He had a very good life. We were fortunate that he was able to say goodbye to our children and grandchildren. At the end, he was ready to go.''

The record books will forever list Weber's record at Arizona and Louisville as 36-61. But the wins and losses are inconsequential.

"Bob Weber was a character guy,'' says Tucson businessman Justin Lanne, who was a starting safety on his UA teams of 1969 and 1970. "He was a very good man.''

Weber was 35 when he became the UA's football coach in 1969. It was a different era; his top salary here was $20,000. He was an oldschool guy who grew up on a farm in a rural area near Fort Collins, Colo., the son of a Russian immigrant who knew a lot about raising sugar beets and shoveling grain, but very little about football.

One day, Colorado State football coach Bob Davis drove to the Weber farm and told the center-linebacker he could have a scholarship to play for the Rams.

Initially, Weber told the football coach he didn't plan to go to college; he would, as his father, be a farmer. But the coach persisted. Together they pitched hay for an hour or so, the coach delivering his recruiting spiel as they worked.

Ultimately, Weber played at CSU (he was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2001), and in 1956, he made the all-conference team. He might've had a career playing pro football but seriously injured his foot in a water skiing accident after one year with the Edmonton Eskimos.

He married Connie Campbell, his high school sweetheart, in 1957; they had three children and he began his coaching career at tiny Trinidad Junior College near the Colorado-New Mexico border.

"He won the national championship at Trinidad, and it was very impressive because he had literally nothing to work with," Lude recalls. "I wanted him on my staff at Colorado State and it was a good decision; Bob worked hard and was quiet; there was nothing flamboyant about him. But he was a very good teacher, the type of coach you'd want your son to play for.''

After coaching at SMU and Vanderbilt, Weber retired to Tucson in the mid-1990s. He often sat in the stands at Arizona Stadium, unrecognized, and watched his old team play.

"I hear people around me criticizing the coaches and the kids,'' he told me last fall. "It hurts me to hear that. It's just a football game. That's not what really matters.''

A memorial service for Bob Weber will be held Nov. 15 at 10 a.m., at Our Saviour's Lutheran Church, 1200 N. Campbell Ave.