Once they were gridiron teammates.

Now they’re at opposite ends of a prolonged, sometimes testy, increasingly high-profile State House tug of war between the Democratic Senate and the Republican governor over the administration’s use of private companies to staff Rhode Island’s government.

Meet Sen. Mike Lenihan and Gov. Don Carcieri.

They met long ago.

Look at a photo of the 1961 Brown University freshman football squad in the Bears’ old long-sleeved uniforms.

In the front row, number 12 in your program, is Carcieri. And over there in the second row is number 74, Lenihan.

Records list Carcieri as 6’1”, 175 lbs, Lenihan as 6’3”, 208.

Carcieri had been a standout quarterback at East Greenwich High. Lenihan was a tackle for Scituate. They played against each other not only in football but also in basketball.

Now here they were at Brown, where Lenihan blocked for Carcieri. The team’s record was 2 and 4. The varsity was 0 and 9, and when the freshmen would play them in informal scrimmages, the governor reports, the frosh would win.

The 1961 Brown University freshman football team included Don Carcieri, number 12, third from the left in the front row, and Mike Lenihan, number 74, third from the right in the second row.

Courtesy of Brown University archives

The freshmen had a bad day at Boston College, losing 31 to 7. In his State House office, the governor, now 64, points to his chin and says, “I still bear the — see that — that scar.” He laughs and continues, “We got clobbered. I was coming down the field to cover a punt and the guy from BC, he just let rip with an elbow that caught me right there on the chin, ba-boom, and split it open.”

And, sure, at Brown he remembered Lenihan from the small world of Class C high school sports. “He was a starter, a big guy,” Carcieri says.

Lenihan, 63, says Carcieri was a gifted, hardworking athlete. He recalls being impressed at the way the future governor reacted when increasingly asked to play defensive back instead of the more glamorous position of quarterback. “There was never any kind of complaining,” Lenihan says.

Carcieri says of the switch “My arm wasn’t good enough.”

In succeeding years, he played on the varsity, and he graduated from Brown in 1965.

It was different with Lenihan.

Lenihan, who was on a Navy ROTC scholarship, didn’t play football as a sophomore. He was working two part-time jobs and thought he should spend more time on his studies. As it turned out, he left Brown at the end of the first semester that year without taking final exams. “I had pretty much given up on the academic side,” he says.

Lenihan says the course work was difficult and he wasn’t up to Brown’s academic standards. Also, “Immaturity had a great deal to do with it.”

During the rest of that school year and the following summer, he worked full time as a machinist at Brown & Sharpe. Now the world of academia was looking inviting, and Lenihan enrolled at Rhode Island College. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and then returned to Brown, this time for graduate school. He received a master of arts in teaching in 1968.

In the mid-60s, his family moved to East Greenwich, where he still lives. It remains, of course, Carcieri’s hometown and the two have known each other over the years.

Lenihan taught English at Scituate High. He’s now retired, but you don’t have to spend too much time talking with him to realize how much he enjoyed it — and that, in some ways, he is very much a student himself.

We chatted last week in his capitol office, not far from Carcieri’s. Lenihan, a former Senate Finance Committee chairman, was speaking of the work of the Senate Committee on Government Oversight, a relatively new panel he heads. It is probing the administration’s use of private staffing firms. And he mentioned a Jim Baron column in The Times of Pawtucket.

Lenihan told me, “I know some of the hearings we have are, as Baron phrased it the other day, ‘soporific,’ but I like that sort of stuff. I like getting data. I like getting information. And trying to get to answers.”

Soporific means sleep-inducing.

Lenihan seemed to relish the term, so I asked him about words and their use.

He said, “I love words.” He said he’d tell his students that words are a set of tools, or weapons, available to them forever. He’d say, “If you can find the best word to describe something and not have to use a second cousin, you have an advantage over someone else.”

Lenihan mentioned a Senate debate in which a bill provoked a tirade from a colleague. “I rejoined him by referring to him as an ‘isochronal ignescent’… someone who erupts from time to time … He wouldn’t speak to me for weeks!”

Lenihan said he likes to pick up words, use different words. He reads a lot — mysteries, histories, courtroom dramas — so that’s a resource. But in addition, he sometimes sits and scrolls through a dictionary.

Now Lenihan was talking about teaching Shakespeare, and that can spill over into the State House. For example, one day he was making a formal introduction in the Senate of a pal who had come to visit. Addressing his fellow members, Lenihan referred to Hamlet, where Pelonious, adviser to the king, tells son Laertes:

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.

“And,” Lenihan recalls, “I introduced this gentleman as a person that I tried to retain a strong friendship with over the years.”

Lenihan comes from mostly Irish stock. I wondered to what extent this defines him.

He said his late father, Joseph, had it right. “My father belonged to, for example, the Ancient Order of Hibernians… He took me to a meeting one Sunday afternoon and I listened to this gentleman, in hugely emotional terms, describe the shillelagh and wax eloquent about Irish history and a variety of other things. And I said to my father afterwards, ‘Is every meeting like that?’ And he said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Well, do you like that sort of thing?’ And he said, ‘Son, I’m Irish and I’m proud of it, but I don’t make it my life’s work.’ ”

As you size up the State House squabbling, you should know that Carcieri and Lenihan express mutual high regard.

And yet here they are in this struggle over the administration’s use of private firms to supply workers. Carcieri & Co. call it a way to fill short-term needs without taking on full-time personnel entitled to a host of benefits. But there are a ton of questions, such as why a certain company — Foxboro-based Smart Staffing Service — was hired and whether the administration is trying to circumvent posting requirements and state staffing limits.

There’s been sparring between the Democratic senators and GOP administration over the quantity and pace of producing records and over treatment of administration officials. Lenihan’s panel has raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas. Carcieri has sought to rock senators back on their heels by vowing to post an Internet log of legislators seeking jobs and contracts for their friends.

The controversy long has been building at the State House. Last week’s flap over the use of employees provided by another Massachusetts-based firm to staff a traffic-monitoring center undoubtedly caught your eye: You remember: The state, using mostly federal money, had been spending at the annual rate of $102,858 for a clerk-typist.

The ongoing skirmish between Carcieri and Lenihan’s committee reflects the new age of separation of powers. Senators created the oversight committee as a way to keep tabs on the executive branch in the aftermath of lawmakers being stripped of membership on state boards and commissions.

Carcieri and Lenihan both backed separation of powers.

Discussing relations with Lenihan’s panel, Carcieri sought last Tuesday to play down the drama. He told me, “All I’m trying to get clear is what’s the role of oversight and how are we going to mesh that with getting the job done that we have to do in the executive branch?”

And he said his accusation that the committee harassed his aides related not to Lenihan but to others on the panel.

It’s not even clear to what extent aides actually were harassed. Carcieri said they felt belittled. He conceded that that may have been a perception on their part even as someone else viewing the situation might see the treatment in a different light.

Despite conciliatory comments on his part, Carcieri said he intends to go ahead with a move to shed light on State House backstage life by posting on the Internet a log of legislators who approach the administration for jobs and contracts for their pals.

It’s a very interesting idea — great for reporters — but also kind of, um, high school. Carcieri said he’ll take responsibility for his people. As for the legislature, “They should worry about their own people and fingers. And so, if anybody wants to put in a good word, that’s fine. Just recognize that in putting in a good word it’s going to be a public record.”

When I told Lenihan about Carcieri’s plan to go ahead with the Web plan, he said evenly, “He’s free to do that. I have never phoned and asked the governor for a job or a contract for a friend.”

Lenihan thinks any misunderstandings between the committee and the governor about production of records can be worked out.

As to the panel’s interest in Smart Staffing, Lenihan said the committee first saw references to the company in some preliminary looks at purchasing procedures. Journal reporter Katherine Gregg began writing about the firm. Lenihan told me, “When she first called me she was asking about how we were proceeding.” He said he told her that, in regard to purchasing, whenever he sees a loose thread, he starts pulling to see where it leads.

He said that Gregg’s continuing stories “drew the attention” of committee members.

He refused on Tuesday to say whether he thinks the hiring of private workers was underhanded. “My job is to try to look at as much information as I possibly can and reach logical conclusions,” he said.

Lenihan’s task may be difficult, but he also knows that life can be much tougher.

In 1985, he had surgery for skin cancer. His mother, Muriel, and a sister, Nora, died after breast cancer spread through their bodies.

Nora was only 40.

Lenihan, who is Catholic, says his religious beliefs make him feel there is a grander purpose to human existence than “just a lifelong hurtling through space.” But he says he has no idea what that purpose is. “Hopefully,” he says, “some day I’ll find out.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com