No. 2 and Counting . . . : Pallares Runs From the Publicity

Ray Pallares looked down and shook his head. Oh, the lies he must endure. For 2 1/2 seasons with Valencia High School he has run, spun, crashed and bashed his way toward the Orange County career rushing record--a record he didn’t know existed until a few months ago--and the whole time, he’s heard the lies.

Spreading them this time was, of all people, his older brother Ron.

Sitting pool-side at the family’s Placentia home, Ron spoke his peace while Ray stared at the ground.

“I don’t care what anyone says, anybody who has seen Ray run, knows he’s a great back, “ said Ron, a defensive back for Valencia the past two seasons and now the Tigers’ assistant freshman football coach. “It’s obvious he’s great when you’re down there on the field with him.”

The painful price of fame. You can’t even depend on your brother to tell the truth about you. That you’re not a great running back, that you’re not even a very good one.

“I’m an average running back,” said Ray, annoyed as usual with any suggestion of him being exceptional. “I’ve been lucky to play behind some great lines.”

He has had some big people to run behind. Such as 6-foot 3-inch, 235-pound Joe Garten, 6-5, 250 Mark Williams and 6-1, 235 pound Xavier Hicks.

“People are making too much out of this,” he said.

There are more than a few people who agree with him.

--Coaches, whose defenses he has decimated for 3,901 yards so far claim he is fortunate to be on a team so dependent on the run for its success. Many don’t rank him as one of the Top 10 running backs in Orange County history, despite the fact Pallares needs but 263 yards to break Myron White’s (Santa Ana Valley, 1972-74) career rushing record of 4,164 yards.

--Fellow running backs, who claim if they were running behind the same behemoth offensive linemen they would compile twice the yardage Pallares has.

--Various media-types who have chronicled his success, and yet still look at his accomplishments with suspicion. Though The Times named him to its All-Orange County football team in 1983 and 1984, when he rushed for 1,794 and 1,563 yards, respectively, he was only considered good enough to be a second team selection both seasons.

Detractors? Nah.

Pallares will tell you they know of what they’re talking.

“I really haven’t done anything great,” he said. “I was just around at the right time.”

OK. So he’s rushed for 100 or more yards in 20 of the 30 games he has played in.

And yeah, it just so happens Ray’s first season on the Valencia varsity, when he not only rushed for 1,794 yards but also scored 16 touchdowns, just so happened to be the season the Tigers broke a 50-year drought by winning the Orange League championship.

Valencia has advanced to the Central Conference semifinals the past two seasons and are odds-on favorites to get at least that far this season.

It’s also true the freshman team he played for in 1982 was 10-0.

In fact, every team Pallares has played on since he began in organized football at the age of 8, has had a winning record.

Lupe Pallares, his mother, says some of Ray’s early success came from a size advantage. She says he was 5-9 by the time he was 10.

“We used to have to put him on a special diet a couple of days before a game,” she said. “Because they would weigh him, and if he weighed too much they would make him play with kids 12 and 13 years old.”

What was this miracle diet?

“We didn’t feed him,” she said.

Which apparently did nothing to inhibit his strength or speed in those days.

At 11 years old, he rushed for 2,200 yards for a Pop Warner team called the Trojans.

A quick look at the Trojan team photograph shows there were no behemoths in front of Pallares then, just a bunch of kids in ill fitting uniforms struggling to keep their chinstraps out of their mouths.

The biggest knock against Pallares, one that always will be, is that he is too slow to be a truly great running back.

“He’s a great high school running back,” said Mike Marrujo, Valencia coach. “Anybody who says otherwise either hasn’t seen him play or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

“He runs with a great body lean and has some terrific moves. The problem is that when he gets to college most of the backs have the same moves, but they have the great speed.”

Lupe knows better than anyone about Ray’s speed. She used to run along the sidelines with him during his Pop Warner games yelling, “Run, Baby Ray. Run!”

“It was the funniest thing to watch,” Ron said. “Here’s Ray, the biggest guy on the field, and Mom is calling him baby . He’s knocking guys all over the place, and she’s calling him baby .”

Ron knew all too well that Ray was no baby. Though he is a year older, Ron always was the one getting beat up when the brothers fought. There were times Ron would bring in reinforcements, that’s right, the dreaded Gomez brothers, cousins of the Pallares’.

“We’d go three against one, wrestling,” Ron said.

Who won the fights?

“No comment,” he said.

Ray looked down shook his head . . . and grinned.

What the Orange County career rushing record means to Ray Pallares could fill, one, maybe two sentences.

Asked what he knew about the man whose record he seems destined to eclipse, Pallares admitted he didn’t know a whole lot about Myron White, but did know at least where he played high school football.

“Edison, right?”

As aforementioned, White played at Santa Ana Valley.

It was only after last season was over that Pallares was informed that such a

statistic as an Orange County-career rushing record existed. He’s never been one to really dwell on what he’s done.

“We’re lucky to get him to talk five minutes about a game he has played,” Lupe said.

Ray doesn’t talk much about anything. There are dozens of horror stories from reporters eager for a quote from Pallares after a big game, and getting a big fat, “Yep,” or, “I don’t know,” or worst of all, just a smile and a nod.

Once, a reporter asked what the similarities between he and Ron were.

“We’re brothers,” Ray said.

That was it.

Garbo spoke more freely.

But in Marrujo’s system, stars are not allowed.

“I never think about the record, we’ve never talked about it at practice,” Pallares said. “What I do doesn’t matter if the team doesn’t win.”

The Tigers were not quite America’s team two seasons ago when they won their first league championship. They were more like the American Dream in shoulder pads.

“Everyone loves an underdog,” Marrujo said. “You work hard, you sacrifice and you make something of yourself. I think people appreciate that. A lot of people rooted for us because we were the underdog.”

For 50 years the Tigers had just been dogs.

Until 1981, when Marrujo arrived, Valencia had only one winning season since 1973. And only eight winning seasons in its last 30.

Marrujo came from a run-oriented program at Pius X in Downey. There he coached Darrin Nelson (later of Stanford and currently the Minnesota Vikings) and his younger brother Kevin Nelson (UCLA, the Los Angeles Express).

He believes in winning with the run. Nothing fancy. He’s angered whenever one of his players attempts to go wide in search of a big play. According to Marrujo, a game is won four yards at a time.

“That’s what our plays are designed to get, four yards,” he said. “They run straight ahead and get those four yards.”

Pallares is the ultimate embodiment of the Marrujo-running back.

His shoulders constantly squared to the line of scrimmage, he leans as he runs--something coaches say cannot be taught. Machine-like leg action pounds and tears at the ground as he bounces his 5-11, 188-pound frame off tacklers. More often than not, he falls forward as he is brought down, gaining additional yardage.

Though he’s not especially large, he’s extremely strong. He’s lifted weights since he was 10.

“It used to be hard to get to bed,” Ron said. “When Ray was supposed to be sleeping he’d be lifting weights and making a lot of noise.”

He not only lifted weights, he pushed them. Before his sophomore season, in an effort to build up the strength in his legs, he and teammate Robert Rangel would push a pick-up truck up and down the street behind the Pallares house--Palm Ave.

Palm Avenue is more significant than just being a training grounds for Pallares. If he had lived on the other side of the street, he would have attended El Dorado High School. The Pallares’ live much closer to El Dorado than to Valencia.

Carl Sweet, El Dorado football coach, would have loved to see Pallares make the trip across the street, so he could play for the Golden Hawks. If, for nothing else, just to avoid what Pallares did to El Dorado, Sept. 27.

Trailing 10-3, Valencia had the ball on its 42-yard line late in the third quarter. The Tigers drove 58 yards, Pallares accounting for 52, including the final 12 which, with the extra point conversion, tied the score at 10.

The game-winning drive, which took Valencia nine plays, had the ball in Pallares’ hands six times. He scored from the one to give the Tigers a 17-10 victory. On the night he had gained 226 yards.

“He was just incredible,” Sweet said. “That’s one night when I wished he played for me. I heard some of our kids say that coming into the game they didn’t think he was that good, but they were convinced now he was great.”

Jim Rawls, Garden Grove Coach, had a chance to see the El Dorado game.

“It was one of the most phenomenal performances I’ve seen by a kid in long time,” Rawls said. “Players like him don’t come around too often. He’s not the smooth accelerating type, but he cuts at the right time. He doesn’t have exceptional speed or the greatest moves, but who cares, I’d give my left leg to have him on my team.”

Intangible should be his middle name. Every coach mentions his lack of speed, and in the same breath mentions how much they’d like to have him on their team.

“He doesn’t have the speed Myron White had,” Troy Coach John Turek said. “But he’s got other intangibles, things that are hard to measure. He’s tenacious and has a tremendous center of gravity, he’s not going to be brought down by an arm tackle.”

Sweet: “I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen him brought down from behind on the films. But I think people look too much at those things and not at the intangibles, like heart, that you can’t measure. He’s tough.”

Tough, durable, Pallares sounds like the old pick-up truck he used to push up Palm Ave., when described by coaches.

He has carried the ball 20 or more times in 20 games.

“There may be a lot of backs faster than him,” Marrujo said. “But a lot of them are the same ones who will miss two games because they have a hangnail. Ray is always there. There’s really no secret to his success.”

A hand injury slightly more serious than a hangnail set the stage for what Pallares says was his most satisfying game.

After defeating Fullerton, 33-21, in the first round of the 1983 Central Conference playoffs (Pallares rushed for a career-high 243 yards on 26 carries) the Tigers faced a heavily favored Newport Harbor team on the Sailors’ home field.

Pallares broke his thumb midway through the third quarter.

“I couldn’t really hold the ball,” Pallares said. “I had to trap it tight against my body. But I didn’t want anyone to know that I was hurt. I was afraid they’d take me out of the game.”

Marrujo eventually found out, late in the fourth quarter, but not before Pallares had gained 173 yards on 19 carries to lead Valencia to a 17-13 win.

“That’s my favorite game,” Pallares said. “I remember after we won the game and were walking toward the bus, some of their fans started to throw garbage at us. That was great. It made it that much better to beat them.”

He has missed only one complete game in high school. That was in 1984, against Bolsa Grande. A back injury sustained the week before against Troy kept him from running against the Matadors, whom he gained 167 yards on just 14 carries against in 1983. Valencia plays Bolsa Grande Friday in Bradford Stadium. This time, however, Pallares is healthy.

He hates to come out of games so much that he says he sometimes wishes Valencia won’t score too much so he can stay in the game.

“Stay like 14 points ahead,” Pallares said. “Coach Marrujo doesn’t run up the score on people, but if we were not that far ahead I get to stay in.”

If he had his way, Pallares would be in the game all the time. He loves to play defense, and Marrujo utilizes him as a linebacker on goal line defenses. Against El Dorado, he batted down a pass on a goal line stand.

Though recruiters from Nevada Las Vegas and Colorado have expressed interest in him, and just down the street at Cal State Fullerton, Coach Gene Murphy is looking for all the help he can get on offense, Pallares says he not only expects but hopes he will play defense in college.

But Ray, what about all the publicity, and all the attention you’ve gotten as a running back?

“That’s why I want to play defense.”