Bobby Tiner could beat you many ways in various sports.
At Morrilton, he was a high school basketball star who averaged 20 points per game. He was a shortstop in baseball who could field and hit. As a quarterback, he was a threat as a passer and a runner.
No recruiting storms broke out around him in his senior high school year, though.
“Ouachita Baptist showed a little interest in me,” Tiner said during a recent interview. “Arkansas Tech wanted me to walk on in football, and that’s the way I was headed. I had my room reserved [at Tech], knew who my roommate was going to be, had my class schedule - everyone was set.”
But Tiner ended up in Conway, where Bill Tiner, his older brother, played in the UCA backfield.
“It wasn’t a case of me following him there,” Tiner said. “In fact, I wasn’t interested in UCA at the start because I didn’t want to have to try and follow [the other Tiner]. He was a good player.”
“We lost our first two games. I really hadn’t really been on the field at that point. We were really behind against Ouachita when someone threw me an interception. It went through my hands and went through the hands of the guy on the other side of the field. He couldn’t hold it, either. It was 13-7 at halftime.”
Tiner had spent most of the second half passing UCA to a 33-13 victory. Those were his first steps to a record of 6,110 yards of total offense, a mark he he held for 14 years. He rushed for 30 touchdowns, ended up passing for 4,304.
Tiner weighed only 147 when he enrolled, and never played higher than 165 or 170.
“People said I had a knack for making things happen, but there was a lot of luck involved,” Tiner said. “Ouachita tipped the first pass I threw, but Bob Renfro caught it. In the second half, Renfro caught the winning pass flat on his back in the end zone.”
“That tipped pass, God must have been on my side.”
As good as he was on the field, Tiner turned out to be astute on the sideline, spending 35 years as head football coach at Pulaski Oak Grove, ending up with one state championship and a field named for him, one of many honors he has received.
Tiner, inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1990, now serves on the Hall of Fame board. He’s a member of University of Central Arkansas Sports Hall of Honor, an acknowledgement for a collegiate career that saw him become a four-time All-AIC selection in football and baseball. He also led UCA to two football championships in four seasons.
“We could have never done anything like that without Tiner,” the late UCA coach, Raymond Bright, once said.
Sports, Pages 18 on 08/20/2013