With game, Uvalde takes a step forward
UVALDE — Jonathan Jimenez spun to his left, then cut back to his right, and in that moment he was not mourning.
Not consciously, anyway.
As he pumped his legs, he did not think of his best friend, Chance Luevanos. Picking up speed across the field, he did not think of Luevanos’ little brother Jayce, the adorable 10-year-old boy who’d dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween and made his grandparents a pot of coffee every morning.
When Jimenez made one last turn and bolted down the sideline, he heard the crowd at the Honey Bowl roar, louder and louder, but as he ran he did not consider what so many of those people had lost.
Nor did he contemplate the gift he was giving them.
“I didn’t really think of anything,” Jimenez said. “I was just running.”
That simplicity, perhaps, is what brought a town to its feet. About 5,000 fans packed the Honey Bowl on Friday night, not just to watch Uvalde High School’s first home football game since 21 lives were lost in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, but to be together, and to celebrate instead of grieve.
To cheer instead of cry. To care about something trivial, and to let it feel like the most important thing in the world.
Before the opening kickoff, a 21-second moment of silence was followed by a prayer from Oscar Mireles, who 50 years earlier had been the star running back on a Uvalde High team that won a state championship and helped unite a town fractured by a school walkout.
As part of his invocation, Mireles declared that the people there “humbly ask for the recovery of our entire community.” Mireles, a retired Border Patrol officer, said he understood one football game wouldn’t fix everything, or anything.
But later, when he spoke of seeing victims’ families in the crowd that watched the hometown Coyotes pull off a dramatic 34-28 victory over Eagle Pass Winn with the help of Jimenez’s wild run, Mireles managed a smile as his eyes welled up.
“Maybe what happened here was just a little bit of a help,” Mireles said. “It puts something in their mind that’s not tragedy. I think they enjoyed it. They needed it.”
How the steps start
There can be a tendency for outsiders to oversell the meaning of nights like Friday. Over the past three months, the people of Uvalde have grown accustomed to TV trucks and cameras and reporters around just about every corner, and the locals know dramatic license when they see it.
But no, the significance of Friday wasn’t exaggerated, countless people in maroon “UVALDE STRONG” T-shirts insisted, from the afternoon pep rally at the high school gym to the pregame festivities at the Honey Bowl to the tearful family hugs outside the locker room in the darkness under the water tower.
“There are many Monday nights and Tuesday nights that are spent at council meetings,” said booster club president Brooke Carnes, mother of the Coyotes’ starting quarterback, Brodie Carnes. “Those nights are reflective, where we’re trying to work things out. But the town needed a Friday night like this. This is a night where we can take a step back and celebrate.
“It was pretty tough at first. But you just put one foot in front of the other.”
And this is how the steps start.
They start with Ruben Ruiz deciding to sit in the grandstand and watch the Coyotes again. The officer’s wife, Eva Mireles, was one of the teachers killed at Robb. Twenty-five years ago, he was a Uvalde classmate of Roland Ramirez, who’s now an athletic trainer for the Houston Texans.
Ramirez’s connection to the tragedy was one of the reasons the Texans sent a contingent that included head coach Lovie Smith to speak to the Coyotes this week, and why the Texans donated new uniforms and invited the players to join them in Houston for a game.
When Ramirez heard his old friend had decided to attend Friday’s Coyotes game, he was thrilled.
“It’s been a tough road for him,” Ramirez said. “To not be inside and in his house, to be out here with the community, it’s therapeutic, no doubt.”
The community hopes so, at least. It hopes that, somewhere in the crowd that erupted with what must have been the loudest sound in the Honey Bowl’s 75-year history as the final seconds expired Friday night, there were family members of the victims who found some joy and some relief, however temporary.
That’s what Brook Lopez wanted for her family. Her nephew, 10-year-old Xavier James Lopez, was one of the Robb victims. Her brother-inlaw and sister-in-law, Xavier’s parents, have spent many of their waking hours this summer pushing for legislation to raise the minimum age to buy assault rifles in Texas from 18 to 21.
But Friday, they were coming to the Honey Bowl to watch Brook Lopez’s son, Roy, play.
“This is their nephew,” Brook Lopez said. “And their son loved the Coyotes.”
‘You have to have hope’
Linda Cruz Alcorta remembers the day in 1970 when she was a freshman at Uvalde High School and several of her closest friends left the building. After a popular Hispanic teacher didn’t get his contract renewed, hundreds of students took part in an organized walkout, which lasted six weeks.
“It was very, very hard, for a long time,” Alcorta said. “The town was divided.”
Two years later, though, the Coyotes started winning, and they didn’t stop. With Alcorta urging them on as a cheerleader on the sidelines, they won 15 games in a row on their way to the Class 3A state championship. Somewhere in the middle of that run, Alcorta noticed that “everybody in Uvalde got together.”
“It was a magical time,” she said.
She eventually moved away from Uvalde, becoming an elementary school teacher in San Antonio, but those memories of the early 1970s were part of the reason she was so happy to join the 50th anniversary ceremonies at the Honey Bowl on Friday night.
“Uvalde is such a wonderful place,” Alcorta said. “I think it’s important to remember the happiness of the past, and to look forward to the future.
“Because there’s still hope. You have to have hope.”
On the field Friday night, nobody exemplified that spirit better than Jimenez, the short, speedy slot receiver who with one electrifying scamper gave thousands of people a memory they’ll never forget.
With 36 seconds left in the fourth quarter, the score was tied 28-28. Uvalde had the ball at their own 42, and coach
Wade Miller was content to settle for overtime. So he called a play in which Jimenez was supposed to take a handoff and pick up a few yards before running out of bounds.
But when Jimenez — whose best friend had lost his little brother in the shooting — neared the left sideline and saw the entire Winn defense waiting for him, he improvised. He spun once, then reversed course across the field to the right.
A murmur in the grandstands turned into a gasp, and then to deafening mayhem.
“The next thing you know,” Miller said, laughing, “the little fart is running down the sideline.”
Jimenez gained 51 yards with his wild dash, putting the Coyotes just yards from the end zone. And on the next play, Brodie Carnes threw a perfect pass to Devon Franklin for the game-winning touchdown.
Jimenez said later that “everything was just for them,” referring to the families of the Robb victims. But right after his run, as he sat on the bench trying to catch his breath, a teammate named Jeyden Gonzales wanted to know something.
“How’d you do that?” Gonzales asked.
Exhausted, Jimenez offered no explanation. But behind him, up in the grandstands, a town knew the answer.
He put one foot in front of the other.