Fifth-year defensive tackle Tershawn Wharton has surged forward this season.

He’s started more games (seven) than in the rest of his career combined (three), and he produced one of the Kansas City Chiefs’ season highlights with his fourth-down sack in Las Vegas to punctuate an epic goal-line stand. And he tends to be found in the middle of pivotal scrums, like he was against the Raiders on Friday as Nick Bolton made a game-saving fumble recovery.

To understand a bit about how and why, well, consider what might be called the most important play of the season:

The alert, instinctive way he came to catch 13-year-old Andy Radzavicz as the boy fell headfirst out of the stands at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Nov. 24.

“They say I’m a hero,” Wharton said in an interview with The Star, spoken in such a tone as to suggest that he just did what anyone would.

But look closely at the start of the viral TikTok video and you see something revealing about both the person and the player — who happened to be looking up because he likes to give his gloves away after games.

“His eyes just get kind of big, and he darts over,” Jay Radzavicz, Andy’s father, said Monday in a phone interview with The Star. “We had a good guy in a good position.”

‘A different way to meet him’

In fact, the undrafted free agent out of Missouri S&T made his way to the NFL in large part because of a soul and heart that make him relentless — something coach Andy Reid noted earlier this season when he said “nobody practices harder, nobody works harder than ‘Turk’” and that persistence has paid off for him.

Those traits certainly paid off for the Radzavicz family, now forever grateful to Wharton for what he did to save Andy from a potentially serious injury.

As Wharton reflected on the moment in an interview after the Chiefs’ 19-17 victory over the Raiders on Friday, he recalled hearing someone calling his name.

Then he felt fear himself as he saw the boy wearing a Bolton No. 32 jersey tumbling from the stands above the Chiefs exit.

So he barged through a couple security guards, who had their back to the stands.

“I don’t think they knew what I was doing,” Wharton said with a laugh. “So I kind of had to just lay out a little bit and push them (back).”

You can’t see any of that in the video that Jay Radzavicz jokingly has likened to the Zapruder film.

And you don’t get to see that Wharton asked Andy if he was OK and helped hoist him back into the stands and somehow still had the presence of mind to give Andy his gloves.

The football-crazy family that lives near Jacksonville got to express its gratitude more directly on Friday at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

As part of another trip spanning the country for NFL and college games, they’d already arranged to be at the game. But through word of mouth, the Chiefs organization discovered they would be attending and arranged pregame field passes and let Wharton know where they’d be.

“It was a different way to meet him,” Wharton deadpanned with a smile, “other than when he was falling.”

The family gave Wharton a Missouri S&T sweatshirt; Wharton gave them the jersey he wore in Charlotte and signed it in a few different places on the numbers:

“To Andy”

“Go Chiefs!!!”

“TW#98”

“Strive for Greatness”

“Always put God First”

“Love those who love you”

Count Andy in the latter group.

“He’s my favorite by far now,” Andy said.

Holiday roads

Jay Radzavicz was raised in upstate New York and had an early fascination with football.

Around the time he was in eighth grade, he remembers a family cross-country drive in a Griswold-esque paneled station wagon highlighted by stops in Columbus, Ohio, and Manhattan, Kansas, just so he could stare at the empty stadiums and imagine them on game days.

He’d become far more acquainted with our area and grew to be a Chiefs fan when he was a football graduate assistant at Central Missouri State and during his 11 years in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was a reporter, producer and sports director for KOAM-TV.

The imagination and wanderlust for sports stoked in his youth stayed with Radzavicz, who later spent 20 years as a producer with the Golf Channel and now runs his own production company.

So traveling for events has been a big part of family life for Radzavicz, his wife, Maureen (LIV Golf’s director of tournament media operations) and their sons Andy and Asher.

By Jay’s estimate, Andy probably has been to about 40 NFL games by now, including a number in Jacksonville, and several dozen college games.

While the boys have different NFL allegiances (Asher is a Bills guy and secured a glove from Josh Allen on Sunday night), they are aligned when it comes to their favorite college team: Kansas State.

In 2020, Andy was elated to get gloves from one of his idols, Deuce Vaughn, after Kansas State’s 69-31 loss to Texas.

“Because he’s short (5-foot-5), and I’m short, too,” Andy said. “He inspired me.”

(For the record, Andy said he wasn’t sure how tall he is right now but was reminded by his father he was about a foot shorter than the other receivers on his team this fall.)

That 2020 game was part of a combo trip to see the Chiefs against the Broncos, one of a number of such travels they set up a couple times a year.

Last week, for instance, Jay and the boys flew here on Thursday after Thanksgiving dinner and took in the Chiefs game on Friday.

Then they drove to Ames, Iowa, for the Kansas State game on Saturday and rather remarkably made the 870-mile drive to Buffalo for the Sunday night game.

The boys had hoped to stop to see Notre Dame Stadium and Toledo’s Glass Bowl on the way. But they had to stay on track to get to Wally World, er, Highmark Stadium, on time.

‘You’ve got to root for him’

Andy Radzavicz’s first game at Arrowhead was the 37-31 overtime loss to New England in the 2018 season AFC Championship Game.

“I liked the experience,” he said from the airport in Buffalo on Monday, “and I wanted to be a Chiefs fan.”

At the time, Wharton had just finished his senior year at Division II Missouri S&T, where he thrived in every way after not attracting any Division I offers coming out of University City High outside St. Louis. Wharton, who studied psychology at the school best known for engineering, was both a dominant player and standout young man there.

Andy Ball, then the assistant head coach calling the offense, still raves about Wharton’s tremendous athleticism, phenomenal “motor” and the selfless and deeply caring teammate he was.

“He’s such a humble good guy …” said Ball, the school’s head coach since 2022. “If you know him, you’ve got to root for him.”

All the more so, or at least all the more so for more people, as Wharton’s career has rebooted after he missed most of the 2022 season with a torn ACL and was working his way back in 2023.

And after making that vital postgame play that suddenly made him national news in about every media outlet imaginable.

When it happened, Jay was some 30 or so yards away to give Andy room to converge among a group of kids as he so often does to get autographs, a high-five or a glove.

(Or baseballs, for that matter: The boys have a bin full from MLB games).

By now, Andy knows how to handle himself.

But this time, something was different as he went down the stands to “try to meet all the Chiefs players” and leaned in to call out to Wharton and running back Carson Steele:

He thought one railing was extending right into another.

Only when he leaned his hip into it did he discover they didn’t connect.

“I just, like, got off-balance,” Andy said, “and I just toppled over.”

It was so sudden he almost didn’t have time to be really scared of what it would have been like to land on his head.

For that matter, by the time Wharton was handing him back up he was worrying about something else: whether he was going to be in trouble for falling on the field.

It all happened so fast that Jay didn’t really realize the gravity of it until the TikTok video emerged in the next day or so.

Next thing you know, it’s featured on “The Pat McAfee Show” and “Today” and “Inside Edition” and …

“It just kind of snowballed from there,” Jay said.

All because a potential tragedy was averted by “a good guy in a good position.”