By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

With a pick-ax hoisted menacingly in one hand and his players following behind him two-by-two through the aisles of the end zone seats, it has become the ritual for gray-haired coach Mike Price and his University of Texas-El Paso football team to enter the Sun Bowl in a cloud of well-orchestrated smoke and blaring music.

But what the Miners are doing on the field this year involves neither smoke nor mirrors.

Under the 58-year-old Price, the 3-2 Miners have become a major challenger, going from conference cream puff to a team to be reckoned with in the Western Athletic Conference.

Soon after arriving in El Paso, Price seized upon the pick-ax as a symbol of the toughness and hard work he sought to forge in the chronically underachieving program and the new start he would carve out for himself.

For Price, who was dismissed at Alabama without coaching a game after a scandal-charged strip show visit to Florida, and the Miners, it was something of a mutual new beginning.

As part of it, Price underwent hip surgery during the summer so he could personally lead the Miners onto the field through their "Mine Shaft" tunnel — a symbolic gesture that has taken root and caused not only his players but the growing fan base to rally around the Miners.

So much of a trademark has it become that Price dared to run into Bulldog Stadium in Fresno Saturday, ax in hand, to lead the Miners to a 24-21 upset of Fresno State.

A program that won just three games against Division I-A competition in three previous season will have three in a row, if it can take down UH. UTEP's only losses have come to nationally ranked teams, No. 15 Arizona State and No. 21 Boise State, the latter game in doubt until the fourth quarter of an eventual 47-21 loss.

But coming off the win at Fresno State and with the perceived "soft" part of its schedule upcoming, there is already, believe it or not, bowl talk in El Paso surrounding a school that has gone to the postseason just twice in 37 years.

The team and, indeed, the frenzied atmosphere, that awaits Hawai'i Saturday night in El Paso will be like few others the Warriors have encountered at a place where the crowds, what there have been of them, often streamed toward the exits by late in the third quarter.

In fact, Saturday is such a big night — homecoming and a celebration of the 90th anniversary of UTEP's founding — that with the prospect of the largest crowd, 51,500, in its history, school officials earlier this year adamantly refused to move the game from its 7 p.m. Mountain (3 p.m. Hawai'i time) start to suit ESPN's request to show the game.

Of course, back in August, few could have foreseen the sudden turnaround that Price would bring or the hold on the community that the man waving the pick-ax would quickly carve out.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.