Tim Jimenez Jr. could have stayed in Vegas, a city teeming with very big and very fast young men, and perhaps he’d be playing football with them on a powerful high school team. But that would have defied more than 60 years of tradition in Carpinteria, the hometown of his grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
So after Tim completed the 7th grade, his family moved to Carpinteria. His dad, Tim Sr., kept his job at a club in Las Vegas, commuting every Tuesday and returning home Friday. Why go to all that trouble? “Tim had to live up to the Jimenez legend,” his father said. “He got the triple whammy: my father, myself, and especially my brother.”
The Jimenez boys have been good-luck charms for Carpinteria High football. Tony Jimenez Sr. was the first, an All-CIF running back as a senior in 1953, when the Warriors went undefeated in the regular season but lost to Hawthorne, a vastly larger school, in the play-offs. His two sons, Tony and Tim, helped take the Warriors several steps further.