"We were eyeball to eyeball," then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk said in 1962, summing up the final day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, "and the other fellow just blinked."
The only time Johnny Manziel and Malcolm Brown were eye to eye Friday night came during the postgame handshake line that followed an epic game in which they'd been the stars. Yet to call it a battle would be incorrect somehow, since that brief meeting was the only time they were on the field at the same time.
Still, Kerrville Tivy picked up its 38-34 upset of Cibolo Steele largely because of Manziel's cool performance under pressure as the clock wound down.
And because Brown, for lack of a better word, blinked.
Brown's final carry in a 329-yard, four-touchdown night was supposed to be part of a reverse as the Knights, ranked No. 5 in Class 4A by CoachesAid.com despite a passing game generously described as erratic, attempted to move down the field in the final minute. Instead, the ball pitched to Brown wound up on the Lehnhoff Stadium FieldTurf and eventually in the grasp of Tivy linebacker Stephen Cordova.
Come to think of it, Manziel and Brown were on the field at the same time then, too. Only Manziel was about 50 yards from the ball, jumping with glee as Brown and the Knights trudged toward their bench.
Kerrville Tivy QB Johnny Manziel
"I was so pumped; I'd been sitting on the bench twirling a towel," Manziel said. "Felt like I was in college, going for a national championship or something. It feels great."
Many more performances like the one he had Friday, and Manziel someday could be doing just that. Perfectly orchestrating Tivy's version of the frenetic Texas Tech offense, Manziel accounted for 424 yards and five touchdowns. He led his team on a 91-yard drive that put the Antlers ahead to stay with about four minutes left when Manziel scored his third rushing TD, a 16-yarder to go with earlier runs of 3 and 4 yards.
"Definitely a little worried, but the way we fought tonight, I don't think anybody could stop us," Manziel said.
Certainly not a beleaguered Steele defense that found stops few and far between, especially on the two occasions in which Brown and the Knights offense handed it a two-score lead: 20-10 in the second quarter, and 34-24 with 11:54 remaining in regulation.
"I know this: We felt like (the Knights) weren't real great in coverage; we felt like they freelanced at times, and we thought if we got 'em into the second half they'd get tired, and the pass rush would become a null-and-void deal," said Tivy coach Mark Smith, who credited assistant Julius Scott and his offensive staff for its plan while Smith focused on the seemingly weekly District 27-4A "defensive coordinator's nightmare."
"And I think that all came true."
Yet even with Manziel's huge night — he hit 29 of 40 passes for 319 yards and two TDs, picked up 105 yards on the ground and even caught a 15-yard pass from top receiver Mikhail Ironside — it took the Antlers' final march and the Knights' final gaffe to overshadow Brown.
Cibolo Steele RB Malcolm Brown
"It's disappointing, but we just didn't get the job done as a team," said Brown, who had 169 yards by halftime and surpassed the 300-yard mark late in the third period. "It was nobody's fault; it was our fault, the team's fault. We just didn't get the job done tonight."
Brown was the catalyst on the Knights’ opening drive, capped by Alfonzo Trammell’s 2-yard TD run, but his defining moment came on Steele’s second TD drive. On a simple handoff over right guard on first-and-17 from midfield, Brown hurdled a tackler near the line of scrimmage, bowled over another about 10 yards upfield and later eluded another who fell while being juked and tried to trip Brown with a leg whip.
When Tivy seized the momentum as well as a 24-20 lead in the third quarter, Brown quickly took it back by sprinting 69 yards over right tackle on the first play after the kickoff. And when Brown scored from the 1 on the first play of the fourth period, it looked like the Knights were ready to take another step in their ascension to the top of the South Texas 4A heap in just their fourth varsity season.
"We'd talked all week long about how we've just gotta keep choppin' wood; we gotta be that ax," Smith said. "And if we got to the fourth quarter, we'd find a way to win. And I'm gonna tell ya: They dug in and they found it."
Manziel needed barely two minutes to drive Tivy to the TD — a 15-yard pass to Colton Vick — that narrowed their deficit to 34-31. The Tivy defense then held Brown short on a third-down run before the Knights' punt pinned the Antlers back at their own 9-yard line.
The march itself lacked drama; indeed, the only question was whether Tivy had scored too soon. The late fumble took care of that, but took nothing off the luster off the Brown-Manziel showdown.
"Great battle; he's a great kid," Manziel said. "You saw him, he's a great athlete; one of the best in the state ... I just felt like I could come out here and compete with him. I said earlier this week it was gonna be a battle between us. He did a heckuva job, but we just got it done."
Steele coach Mike Jinks came away impressed by Manziel, but already knew he would be.
"(Manziel matched Brown) play for play," Jinks said. "There's not much you can say about him. He's a special kid, and we knew that coming in. We knew that if we couldn't contain him, we wouldn't have a chance to win the game."
Smith knew the same principle applied to Brown.
"Between (Manziel) and Malcolm, you saw two great athletes on the field going after one another," Smith said. "What you saw were two good teams, but two great athletes trying to help their teams win."
That commodity was in short supply for Tivy early in the season. Playing three of the San Antonio area's top 5A teams, the Antlers opened 0-2 and trailed San Antonio Madison in a game that was canceled because of storms just before halftime; call it an 0-2½ start.
"Our kids understand: We play the people we play to get us better," Smith said. "And sometimes when you play those kind of people, you run the risk you're gonna get beat, and we lost some. I mean, I'm not ashamed of that; we're not afraid to play the best people in the state. We're not afraid to play the best people in the area. It does come with a high risk, but it comes with a huge reward in the end."
En route to that shot at the ultimate reward, Tivy is now 4-3, but improved to 4-1 in 27-4A, same as Steele (6-2 overall). And both teams still have a shot at league-leading Alamo Heights (6-2, 5-0), with the Antlers' coming next week on the road.
On a night where he won his personal duel with a Knight, nothing seemed to faze Manziel.
"Last week felt good," Manziel said of his 372-yard, three-TD night against New Braunfels Canyon, "but this one feels 20 times better to knock off a team this highly ranked."
Don't blink. Those are Antlers on the horizon.
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