Posted on: Saturday, October 16, 2004

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

EL PASO, Texas — Down near the base of the hillside, not much more than a couple first-down passes from where the Sun Bowl has been carved, is a starkly revealing section of the serpentine U.S.-Mexico border.

The outer parking lots and the cliff-side road that winds its way to the stadium on the U.S. side provide a lofty if sobering view of the poverty-stricken outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, an area of dirt roads and shanty towns where the places some call home are little more than packing crates.

It was in glimpsing the scene from a bus window on his first trip here four years ago that then-freshman UH quarterback Tim Chang recalled his shock. "I wasn't thinking about the game. I was thinking about the border and what was on the other side," Chang said.

Today, for the last time as a Western Athletic Conference opponent of UTEP, UH takes what is bound to be the same reflective bus ride to the Sun Bowl, one that can't help but prompt a solemn counting of blessings.

What the Warriors find when their buses round a rocky corner and pull up to the stadium's tunnel, however, will be such an incongruity from what they have witnessed in the previous 10 minutes so as to jolt them back into their adrenalin-filled cocoon of major college athletics.

For while dusk and 50-degree temperatures settle on the gritty landscape below, the UTEP campus will become a festive, incandescent mesa alive with music and scents of tailgate parties.

Amid the stadium lights will gather as many as 50,000 fans to celebrate homecoming, the 90th anniversary of the school and the hopes for another victory by a team that has found a surprising turnaround.

It is rare for the 51,500-seat Sun Bowl to be filled or for fans of the home team, which has had but four winning seasons in the last 36 years, to have much to cheer about.

But after playing two-time WAC champion Boise State tough and knocking off Weber State, New Mexico State and Fresno State, the Miners are on a roll. A program that has won all of one Division I-A game a season for the last three years, can, if it beats UH, have three such victories in a row.

There is untethered talk of a bowl game this year and, looking at the transfers and recruits coach Mike Price has brought in for next year, when UTEP joins Conference USA, maybe even a shot at the Top 25 in the future.

UTEP is buoyed for the season at hand by knowing that, with UH, it will have finished the toughest half of its schedule. UH, meanwhile, understands that, at 2-2 with Boise State, Fresno State, Northwestern and Michigan State still to play, its schedule only gets tougher from here on out.

But having made the eye-opening drive to the Sun Bowl, there is perspective in that no matter what the season might hold for the Warriors, tough on the field hardly compares to what they witnessed through the window.

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