Tony loved to ride his bicycle. But, like nearly everything else, he did it for a reason bigger than himself.
The ride 11 days ago, May 25, was one of his last training rides before the 60 mile Race Against Hunger in Mission. Proceeds benefitted a Rio Grande Valley food bank.
It was the first event where he would test his new $2,000 racing bike.
It seems too coincidental, too fateful, too tragic to say that Tony Balboa fulfilled a mission on this narrow stretch of farm road among the grain fields and brushy pastures outside Alice.But this is where it happened. Here, 11 days ago, at 5:36 p.m., as the melty blacktop and its faded yellow stripes emitted heat waves that blurred the brown sorghum and blue sky into an impression of themselves.
"It's too hot," Tony's mother, Patty, told him before he left for his bike ride. "Stay home and have dinner with us."
They would fry the redfish his grandfather caught.
"It's fine," Tony protested. "I'll be back in an hour."
It was 94 degrees.
"Always remember," he said, "that if I'm in an accident, you should donate my organs."
He tightened his helmet. He clipped his shoes into his pedals. He rode.
Tony loved to study biology and medicine. Like nearly everything else, he did it for a reason bigger than himself.
His father got out of the hospital in December just in time to watch him graduate with honors from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. He finished a semester early. This surprised no one.
And while Tony spent hours in books, his mind, heart and body found time to go everywhere.
To his nephew's Cub Scout troop, spending a weekend helping them earn their forestry badges.
To build houses with Habitat for Humanity.
To Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Sunday mornings at 6:30, to serve breakfast to the parishioners.
Luis Lane, grand knight for the San Antonio council of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service fraternity, worked those mornings beside Tony, cutting vegetables, scrambling eggs and rolling tacos.
"It sounds provincial," Lane said, "but if I had a daughter, he would be the kind of guy I would have loved for a son-in-law."
Tony met his girlfriend, Andrea Gonzalez of Harlingen, one night in Corpus Christi. A biomedicine student, she attended Texas A&M-Kingsville.
Tony found a way to combine his love of Andrea, his love of medicine and his love for his family and his community so that no thing was separate from the others.
On dates, he couldn't walk past a moth or a caterpillar without collecting it for his entomology studies. And dates with Andrea more often than not turned into dates with his parents and hers. They couldn't believe he had coaxed their shy daughter from her shell, let alone stolen her heart.
He had won over the nurses, too, at Christus Spohn Hospital Kleberg in Kingsville.
There, he shadowed Dr. Gilberto Sosa, a family practice physician who made his rounds at the hospital on weekends. For three months, Tony came, sharply dressed, eager to learn, cordial with the patients.
Sosa asked Tony to run the practice in Kingsville when he retired. Tony just smiled. He couldn't say no, but his heart was in Alice, not Kingsville. He wanted to open his own practice and help people back home who couldn't afford health care.
On the rounds with Dr. Sosa, Tony saw the failures: the livers, kidneys and hearts for which there was no cure.
"We talked about the hardships in the profession and raising a family and how we deal with death," Sosa said. "This wasn't a common topic. But when I would talk about some people dying, one time he brought it up: He said, 'That's what I would do if I died. I would like my organs donated to help other people.'"
"It's good," Tony told Dr. Sosa, "because your life goes on."