Minor Miners Musings

Saturday's 42-13 blowout of the UTEP Miners by the 10th-ranked Texas Longhorns was the first Miners game I've attended in probably more than 30 years. Things have changed a bit since then, no? The stadium's bigger, the enthusiasm for the team more pronounced (especially when UT's in town) and, at least for one night, the air was electric.

I've been in Michigan the last 25 years, nearly 20 of which was spent in Flint, just outside Detroit, where major league teams and major colleges (University of Michigan, Michigan State) are the norm. So are nationally televised games.

Not here. Bg games like this, even clearly lopsided games going in, are a big deal. We don't get enough of them, but as you can tell from a Sun Bowl record crowd of more than 54,000, if you bring 'em, they will come.

Maybe because I've covered some big events, like covering the entertainment elements of Super Bowl XL in Detroit two years go, and maybe because I have, as one editor put it, "fresh eyes," I got the assignment to write what we call in the trade a "color" piece for Sunday's A1.

The idea is to take in the sights and sounds, the smells and the tastes, talk to people inside and outside of the stadium and make it all fit into a story, which, by the way, was banged out in about 50 minutes.

I got there about 4, parked in a designated media lot overlooking the border and huffed and puffed up the hill to the stadium so I could set up my gear in the press box, where about 300 media personnel squeezed in to wax poetic about The Big Game (well, Big for UTEP; just a game for UT, which no doubt wanted to get out of there without embarrassing itself).

I was sardined in the press box between Patrick Cannon, a gentle giant of a guy who played football for UTEP from 1988-93 and is now the director of event operations for the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe. Not too shabby. The other guy, J.R., is a Miners fan originally from Indiana who works for Superior Copy and has to make sure all the copy machines in the press box are working OK. There are a lot of copies being made during a college football game.

About 4 hours before the kickoff of the game televised nationally on The Deuce (ESPN2), I lit out to the countless tailgate parties in search of some pearls of wisdom (or well, perspective) from the assembled masses, hoping to get some perspective on why this was such a big deal.

The idea was to make a complete circle around the stadium, hitting everything from the private non-tailgate for sponsors on Glory Field (I wasn't supposed to be there, but nobody was minding the open gate by the Casa Ford tent) to student celebrations near dorms to the Texas Exes, vanquished to the far SW corner of campus (and, no, I didn't make it to the huge RV city at Schuster and Sun Bowl roads), then back up the hill to a season ticketholder lot, where I found a couple enjoying beers and watching the sunset. A lovely way to oil up for The Big Game or any game.

I wrote about what I learned in Sunday's A1 story. But in the course of doing that, there were people I talked to whose names and words didn't make it into my story. There were people who did who spoke so fleetingly that I didn't get all the bio details.

Here's a few of the outtakes:

• I found my friends Rick Cross, Ray Stallings and Ray's 11-year-old son Michael sitting pretty on the 50 yard line, 77 rows up on the east side of the bowl. I help coach a little league team with Ray, younger brother of longtime friend Pam Cross (Rick's wife) and Rick, with whom I went to Eastwood. Michael's kind of the team's Mr. Clutch.

Anyway, I asked Ray how they got such choice seats. "I had one employee, a season ticketholder, who was nice enough to purchase them for me. He didn't realize he'd have to stand in line and have to buy them," Ray, a tech support manager for GECU, said. "I have to buy him lunch."

I asked Michael what he thought about it all (this was around 7 p.m.). "It's taking too long," he said. He had another 80-minute wait, this without a video game!!

• One of the hazards of being new to a city, even one where you grew up, is not knowing who's who sometimes. I talked to Pat Dalbin in the corporate sponsor area. She had just snagged a couple of $30 tix for her daughter, Margaux, and her friend, Ava Rey, both 17. What I didn't know, because Pat had to rush off to meet her husband to get the cash for the ducats, is that Pat's in charge of public art for the city's Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. Man, the conversation we could have had! I found that out when I saw her name in my colleague Maribel Villalava's column in Sunday's paper.

The girls, seniors at Coronado, told me they had just won the city's doubles team championship that day at Americas High School. "We're the No. 1 doubles team," Rey said proudly. "Now we're best friends."

When I finished my outside circuit with a stop to the season ticketholders lot near the stadium, I didn't realize the couple I met enjoying beers and the sunset were notables. He was Mark Dyer, whom I remember as a sports and outdoors writer for the Times years ago. He's president of the El Paso Home Builders Association. She was Christy Bernosky of One Realty. She wouldn't let me use the phrase she came up with to describe the excitement, but we did exchange business cards. Hey, I'm in the market for a house!

• Also lost in the shuffle of scrambling a story together on deadline was Pat Munoz, a sweet lady who was working one of four concession stands for the Miracle League, a baseball league for people with physical and mental handicaps between the ages of 10-25. It was a fundraiser for the league, said Pat, who coaches the Dodgers. She had a big smile on her face every time I walked by their booth on my way to or from the press box. She couldn't help but be impressed with the atmo. "As you can see by the colors of the crowd," she said, surveying the brightly colored throng, "Orange Fever's out there."