BY GREG SELBER

WESLACO – It was one of those scenes a kid gets to take part in once in a lifetime, if the fates and oracles are generous. Bright Friday Night TV Lights, a throng of worshipping cheerleaders, and a fabulous comeback victory on the road to celebrate. Albert Chavez, calm as always, waited along with Channel 4’s Darren Haynes for the electronic go-ahead; momentarily, the TV setup in the west end zone of Bobby Lackey Stadium was going to be the place to be, in living color, as they say.

The buzz was still white-hot after Mercedes had knocked Weslaco East from the ranks of the unbeaten, 28-24, with a raucous car-horn barrage in the slow-moving parking-lot lines mixed with random screams of happiness or grumbles of despair. Some zany character kept jumping up and down from behind the chain-link fence adjacent to the scene, yelling “Puro!” in honor of Chavez and the Tigers. All anyone could see was his head, occasional bobbing into sight and then disappearing.

The senior gunslinger just stood there, patiently, with the varsity pom-pommers gathered to his side. As Haynes interviewed Chavez and Mercedes Coach Michael Uribe, the quarterback took control. Seems that the cheer gals hadn’t gotten the script from Haynes, and they were unsure as to when to break into the picture for their moment in the sun, strange for signature representatives of a self-aware, MySpace set bent on healthy exhibitionism.

The quarterback deftly waved them into the picture with a flip of his hand, much like he’d done in dispatching the Wildcats by producing three second-half touchdowns. Then, he motioned them back out of the camera’s glare, noiselessly but definitely, and people, here is Albert Chavez in a nutshell. Though he’d suffered two lost fumbles in the first half, and started one key second-half drive at his own 1, the Mercedes wunderkind had carried the day when he had to. Now, as was apparent, he was at it again.

The guy even directs the cheerleaders to the right place at the right time!

SETTING THE TABLE

Uribe, whom observers might recall as hard-hitting No. 90 out of their Harlingen football program from the Cards’ glorious 1989 four-deep juggernaut, told his team going into the game that is wasn’t going to be easy. Anything but, truly, versus a 7-0 East unit that had stone dominated its previous foes, allowing a scant 198 yards and eight points per game, one that had crunched for 412 yards and 38 points per behind one of the biggest and most physical offensive lines in Valley football.

And he was right. As the game has started with cascades of confetti interspersed in the cool autumn air with surprise cadres of butterflies, Chavez lost two fumbles and Mercedes fell behind, 10-0. The Tigers turned it over four times in the first half and had been damn lucky to trundle into the lockers with only a 17-7 deficit staring them in the face. He’d completed 6 of 7 balls in the first 24 minutes and rushed for 31 yards, but it not a performance he is going to remember the rest of his life.

Luckily, the Real Deal arrived after the break, and the 6-foot-3 package of dynamite exploded when it counted. He led the Tigers to those three scores, the most wonderful of them being an 83-yard TD pass to junior Ruben Sosa early in the fourth; that spiraling dagger gave the Tigers (4-1 in District 32-4A and 5-3 overall) their first lead at 21-17, and though East (4-1, 7-1) would soon retaliate, Chavez had the antidote. Carrying four times for 39 yards, No. 15 slipped, slid, and finally pounded his way into the end zone at 5:50 of the end, and after a madcap series of misadventures by both teams in the late-going, the win was sealed.

He had done it, upset the Wildcats on their own turf, and sent the rowdy Mercedes contingent into ecstasy.

Having come into the game nursing a nagging high-hamstring hurt, Chavez started slowly, losing his footing on a number of early plays and the football on a pair of runs. But when the chips were down, he came through, finishing with 243 yards passing on a textbook 12-of-15 jag, and running for 72 more on 17 tries.

“Did the injury bother me?” he asked himself afterward. “No, it was just the type of game it was, a really tough team, that’s all. I don’t make excuses for anything I did. We just got fired up after the first half and came out ready to play.”

Uribe, the first-year head man whose enthusiasm and penchant for getting into his team’s face when it needs it most, has paid off for the Tigers. He is a Straight-Talk Express who looks a man in the eye and speaks from the heart.

“Albert is a great competitor and sometimes that is a strength and a weakness,” explained the burly 36-year-old. “He is not the type to say much one way or the other when’s he hurt…and maybe sometimes he wants to go out there and make it happen a bit too much. But I have been around a lot of great quarterbacks, and he ranks right up there with the best of them. I have no doubt about that.”

TIME TO ROLL

East has been one of the media darlings of the season so far, with a terrific starting run under veteran coach Armando Cuellar. With its stable of superb junior backs, the Nasty Boys up front, and a solid QB in Al Salinas, the Wildcats had torn through seven opponents without missing a beat. Before Friday’s test against the no-huddle, no-prisoners Tigers, Cuellar had spoken to the lingering questions left unanswered amid the well-deserved groundswell of applause for his fine team.

“I want to know how these kids, our program, how we are going to handle the pressure,” said the coach. “Not of big games, because we’ve been in several the past few years. I want to know how we are going to respond to being 7-0, we’ve never done that, it’s a first for us, and I think this is going to be a good night for our team in that respect.”

And the ‘Cats did nothing to dispel their top-heap ranking in the early going, charging to that aforementioned 10-0 advantage. Senior LB Freddy Garcia (team-high 13 tackles Friday) and senior DB Rollie Alaniz (six) combined to force Chavez to cough it up on the game’s third play, after the Tigers had dropped an easy pass to begin: the pre-game butterflies would visit both teams in the beginning.

East took over at the Tiger 31 and soon produced a 30-yard field goal from junior Michael Torres, who earlier in the year had booted a short three-pointer inside the final three minutes to provide the winning margin in the team’s breakthrough win at Edcouch-Elsa. At 8:41, 3-0, with Mercedes fans shaking their heads but knowing that this sort of foolishness could never happen again. Um…

It did, as Chavez drove the team to the East 44 before suffering a sack at the hands of senior D-liner Victor Ruiz and fumbling it away on the ensuing snap, senior Nick Gonzalez recovering for the ‘Cats at the East 45.

Nine plays hence, East’s impressive ground assault, aided by two surprise completions from Salinas (one a strike of 16 yards to junior Joey Garcia) fashioned the big early bulge, as bowling-ball 11th-grader Addison Einhorn (96 yards on 19 carries) crashed in from the 6 at 1:16.

Faced with a bit of desperation time, the Tigers then gave it right back with their third turnover in as many possessions when junior Thomas Cisneros broke free for a 13-yard gain but forgot the football at the end. When Alaniz came up with it, East was set up at its own 38.

The Wildcats set sail again behind rugged Cat Salazar and Abe Trejo up front, driving to the 36 at the start of the second period before bogging down. On fourth-and-3 from there, Salinas was stacked up a yard shy on the sneak as gutty junior tackle Sammy Sanchez (11 tackles, and what a fierce run-stopper) keyed the defensive surge.

A huge breath of relief went up on the Orange side, and with good reason. East scores there, and you can kiss this one goodbye, baby!

On trotted Chavez, who despite the two gaffes now showed no outward signs of panic. He proceeded to engineer a vital march, as Mercedes traveled from its 34 to a touchdown, with Chavez lofting a perfect lob into the left corner of the end zone to big-play Sosa at 7:56. The 10-play exercise meant that in spite of having been pretty bad so far, Mercedes was right in there. The difference between 17-0 and 10-7 in such an enormous game is beyond numerical operationalization.

However East, which chewed up 164 yards on the ground in the half, calmly went to work. Bobby Gonzalez, who in uniform looks and runs a helluva lot like last year’s 2,000-yard man, Andrew Alvarado, scooted for 34, and then Einhorn, a tough guy with a low center of gravity and a whole lot of hit-ya, rumbled for 25 more. He fumbled at the play’s close but lanky touchdown maker Bryan Guzman, the third junior in that grand group of ground-gobblers, made the play of the half by hustling downfield to corral the loose pigskin at the 25.

Granted the reprieve, the home side continued the assault, scoring on a 9-yard smash from Guzman (his 17^th of 2009) at 5:24.

That’s the way it wound up at the gun, with East ahead by 10 again and the Tigers lucky to be alive. Mercedes rooters, baffled at the turn of events featuring some not-so-great moments from their hero, Chavez, might have been reminding themselves while waiting in impossibly long bathroom lines with thousands of others in the now-cavernous Lackey Stadium, that the Tigers have been a second-half team all season long.

And if they were thinking this, they were anticipating the script quite well.

GUT CHECK FOR ALL

Mercedes, a playoff team a year ago with an 8-3 showing, had taken its lumps as 2009 started, with a 1-3 start against a murderer’s row of opponents including Port Lavaca Calhoun, Los Fresnos, and Mission. Turnovers had been the main culprit, that and a 44-yard field goal at the gun as they lost a 50-48 thriller to the Falcons. But Uribe’s band got it rolling after that, taking out Mission Vets, Edcouch and Roma in succession, with Chavez having tossed eight scoring passes the past two weeks and the defense improving by leaps and bounds.

Now the visitor was up against another standout club in East, and it would have to do just about everything right to make the comeback.

Though it was tenuous at the outset, with East driving 10 plays out to near midfield, the Tigers, growling with renewed intensity, stopped the Wildcats there, as Jonathan Ortega (13 tackles) came up for three hits in a row to force a punt.

Wasting no time from his own 23, Chavez stepped up and fired a bullet across the middle that Sosa (three catches for 147 yards, he now has 649 in eight games) grabbed for a breathtaking 46-yard gainer that signaled to the masses that, yes, The Gunslinger was ready to rock. Completions of 9 to senior back Jaime Castaneda (who had a solid night with 83 total yards from scrimmage) and 7 to junior Esteban Gonzalez continued the surge. After Chavez’ 11-yard rope to senior Nate Alvarado, Castaneda zipped in from the 2 to make it 17-14, East at 4:12.

It is hard to slow down the Wildcats, though, as Gonzalez came into the night ranked third in the Valley in rushing, his 1,076 yards putting him behind Enrique Saldana of Hanna and Gilbert Espino of P-SJ-A. He is a hard runner for a little dude; he attacks the hole with a flash and can deal out some punishment to would-be tacklers once he’s there. He ripped off gains 9 and 14 yards (the latter on a 3^rd-and-8 play) and East found itself on the Tiger 34, looking to avenge the earlier score. But here Mercedes rose up again, with a defensive stand led by interior hogs Sanchez and Jabo Casarez. A motion penalty also hurt, and East punted to the 1.

On the kick the Wildcat gunner stood a half-yard deep in the end zone to down the ball and the side judge ruled a touchback. He was overruled on that judgment and their protestations to the contrary, the Tigers were 99 yards away from anything good.

“Well, I saw that, 99 yards, that’s a long way,” No. 15 would say later. “But we just drove 99 yards, you know what I mean?”

It came fast too, as on the third play, Chavez exploited a nice-size seam down the gut of the green, sending a ball 40 yards in the air that Sosa pocketed in mid-stride.

“They were too slow to catch me, and I knew it,” chirped Sosa with a grin. “I knew they weren’t going to run with me.”

He wasn’t exaggerating, actually, and the eye-blink of a game-changer took Mercedes out of a black hole and into orbit, for an 83-yard TD at 10:55 of the fourth that resulted in a 21-17 lead. Seemingly on their hind legs, the Tigers had struck like a shooting star. Now, how would East respond as we keep in mind Cuellar’s pre-game query?

The answer was, marvelously. Though most of the charge this year has been via the run, anyone thinking that the ‘Cats cannot pass is asking for trouble, and Salinas proved this by connecting with Guzman on a 36-yard aerial shot to the Mercedes 29; this was the shootout everyone had waited for, in this much-touted Class 4A tilt that had bogarted the headlines all week.

Mercedes, keyed by linebacker Rick Izaguirre (13 stops), had come to play in the second half, as has been its wont in 2009. And as East reached the Red Zone, the Tigers girded for another fight. This time, however, the Wildcats prevailed, as Guzman outleapt Luis Saucedo for the ball on a 12-yard TD pass on fourth-and-3 at 7:59. Guzman stands five inches taller than his enemy, and on a badly underthrown ball from Salinas he had to come back, make the jump, and steal it away from Saucedo, which is what he did.

It was 24-21, Wildcats back in front.

Bing! Back came Chavez and the Tigers in a simply superior fourth-quarter from both teams, though the last five minutes would be all-around iffy. Mercedes worked its way 82 yards on seven plays, gaining such good real estate on early downs that it never faced a third-down conversion. A personal foul helped out, and when Chavez stormed in from the 11 at 5:50, Mercedes led, 28-24.

Weslaco East would pick up 297 yards rushing Friday, with Gonzalez getting 124. Three hefty jaunts accounted for 46 yards on the team’s first three snaps on a crucial drive during crunch time, and the Wildcats were at the Mercedes 8 in a heartbeat. The Tigers’ decision to squib the kickoff after their go-ahead score had backfired as Einhorn ran it back to the East 46 to give the unbeaten giant excellent field position.

From the 8, though, it died.

Mercedes linebacker Ortega later said that his defensive unit is disciplined and hard-working, and was able to make the plays it needed to get at the end. Uribe added that he challenged the D at the half to step up and give some fire to the offense, and it did this, too.

Izaguirre absolutely clobbered Einhorn on the first play, as he blitzed, caught the fullback up high and cratered him. Then East made the first of its blunders that eventually sealed the outcome, as Salinas took a knee when it appeared that offside would be called against one of the two lines. The play stood as a minus-1 when no flag was thrown, and it was 3^rd-and-goal from the 9.

Trying to win the game through the air, East passed on the next two plays. First, junior Joe Garza (a game-high 17 stops) dived to break up an end-zone throw. Then, with the game hanging in the balance, Ortega met Alfonso Salinas in midair in the end zone, separating him from the ball to turn it back to his offense at 3:14.

This might have been the clincher, but the Tigers made an interesting decision to throw on second down. At the time, East had burned its three timeouts, two of them having been of the frustrating variety to avoid delay-of-game calls earlier in the half. But Chavez’ attempt to win it with a long rifle shot went incomplete and with 2:35 to play, East got a break.

The ‘Cats also got the ball back shortly thereafter for one last effort to run to 8-0. After a punt exchange, East was a tantalizing 38 yards away from the winning six, but then the bottom fell out.

The center snap went to no one in particular, and by the time Einhorn raced madly back to get it, a killer of a 22-yard loss was in the books. Two snaps down the pike junior DB Robert De la Cerda swooped in for an interception of Salinas, and finally, after all that craziness, Mercedes had won the match.

AFTER THE FACT

“We just won and it feels great, we beat the undefeated Weslaco East Wildcats!” crowed Ortega in the aftermath. He invited defensive pal Izaguirre over to share the spotlight.

“We were a little worried after we got behind early, but you know we are a second-half team,” he noted, repeating the team mantra. “We just had to push a little harder.”

When asked if he had been surprised that the Wildcats had passed twice on the penultimate drive, Izaguirre shook his head.

“No, I think they knew we might be able to stop them on the run,” he suggested.

Uribe opined that even though East runs the ball 85 percent of the time, he didn’t blink when the ‘Cats aired it out in the late stages.

“Honestly, I wanted us to try and get them into doing some things they normally don’t do as much,” he commented. “If you can take away a team’s strength, then you have a good chance to win.”

And as for the performance of Chavez, who rebounded from some eh moments to win the day at the wire?

“We saw some things in their alignment on the long pass to Sosa,” Uribe reported. “We took what they gave us and Albert just laid it out there, and it worked out well for us. He’s just a great player and a real competitor.”

Oh, that Chavez. Ever since he entered the Valley record books this year with 318 rushing yards against Los Fresnos – well, way before that, one guesses, because he’s been one of the area’s most hyped football players for two seasons – he’s been itching for the Big Game Spotlight. Forget about all the 7-on-7 summer success, and the eight wins from a year ago. The Mercedes double-threat needed a super night to show that he can master the difficult ball games.

With an 80-percent completion rate and the winning touchdown run, he certainly put paid to the critics, if there were very many to begin with. He is long and lean, can throw a ball through a carwash without getting it wet, and is a leader like few have been before him.

As he took part in the Channel 4 media party, Chavez was asked if he keeps tabs on the exploits of 956sports.com.

“Of course,” he mouthed, careful not to disturb the ebullient sportscaster Haynes at work. His look at the questioner seemed to say, “what are you, nuts?”

Then he was told that the chronicle of perhaps his greatest night as a high school football star would probably not test the ether of the Internet until the wee hours of Saturday morning, The Gunslinger just smiled.

What he said then was emblematic of the approach he’d just employed to turn a 10-0 deficit (plus a 24-21 one) into a fantastic finish that puts the Tigers square in the middle of the hunt for the 32-4A crown. If they take care of business against Valley View and Lincoln, and if East can take out Mission next week, it will be Tie-breaker City.

“Take your time, man…take your time.”

Tags: albert chavez, mercedes tigers