Bob Timmons, KU track and field coach from 1965 to 1988, tried one of those paint-by-number pictures in 1954. It didn’t turn out very well, so he put it away and forgot about it. When he retired from coaching in 1988, Timmons started back up on art. “I thought, well, I’ll try doing some other painting,” he said. Timmons sculpts, paints and writes poetry to accompany some paintings. One of his favorite paintings is of Jim Ryun, whom he coached at Wichita East for three years, four years at the University of Kansas and some coaching after Ryun graduated.

Bob Timmons sat in an old, torn green leather chair next to the fireplace in his basement.

Several paintings were framed on the wall next to him, with his name written neatly in the lower right-hand corner. They depicted South Africans, a farm cabin and Jim Ryun, all signifying proud moments from the life of the 80-year-old man who coached track and field and cross country at Kansas from 1965 to 1988.

The ‘great motivator’

Bob Timmons has touched the lives of hundreds of people, from building a track in 1994 for the residents of a poor South African community to coaching thousands of athletes.

But he will likely be remembered most for coaching Jim Ryun, the first American high-school student to break the 4-minute mile when he ran 3:59 in 1964. Timmons first coached Ryun at Wichita East High School and then at the University of Kansas.

Ryun likes to tell a story about Timmons, one that he feels sums up his former coach best:

He was a high school sophomore, in his first year competing in track and field, and was sitting on the bus on the way to a race.

Ryun had run in just a few races, and his best mile time was about 4:21. He had been feeling pretty good about the way he’d been running.

Timmons called Ryun up to the front of the bus, sat him down and told him for the first time that he though he could break the national high school record of 4:08.

In the same breath, Timmons told him he had the potential to be the first high school miler to break four minutes.

Ryun said Timmons’ belief didn’t just give him the confidence to break the 4-minute mile, it changed his life.

“He was a great inspirer, a great visionary and a great motivator,” Ryun said.

The statistician

Jim Ryun is just one of the young men Timmons inspired.

Don Steffens was a manager on Timmons’ track and cross country teams for three years at Wichita East and two years at the University. At every practice at Wichita East, Timmons had him and the other five managers keep detailed statistics on each athlete, which they would hand to the athletes as they stepped out of the shower.

When Steffens was a high school senior, in the winter of Jim Ryun’s junior year, Timmons sent him to run Ryun’s workouts. Coaches weren’t allowed to during the offseason.

He would record Ryun’s times, type them up and bring them back to Timmons.

Steffens said he would still be working for Timmons today if he could. He now lives in Andover, where he is an apartment manager and self-professed track nut.

He has been the announcer at the Kansas Relays and the Kansas State Track and Field Championship meet for about 30 years. He also worked for Track & Field News for 18 years, first as a writer, then as an editor.

Steffens’ voice chokes up a little when he talks about Timmons.

“He’s the one that really got me interested in track and field,” he said. “He’s one of the heroes of my life.”

• * *

• Timmons suddenly stood up, walked swiftly to the adjoining room and opened several drawers of a large metal file cabinet, searching for a statistic.

He had been talking about legendary Kansas track coach Bill Easton, the man he replaced in 1965.

He opened a drawer and pulled out one blue and two brown folders.

“Aw, heck!” he said, moving across the room and laying the folders on top of other papers on his cluttered desk. The search for Easton’s statistics was particularly important to him.

“I’ll keep looking for it and give you a call when I find it,” he said. “We’re talking about one of the nation’s greatest coaches. I don’t want to mess it up when talking about what the statistics really are. As you know, track and field is a sport of statistics. I just have to make sure we get it right.”

Change in style

In 1954, when he was the swimming coach at Wichita East, Timmons had a coaching revelation.

After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1950 with a master’s degree in physical education, he had spent two years at a high school in Caldwell and one in Emporia, coaching various sports with little success.

When he moved to Wichita in 1954, he started to coach swimming at Wichita East. One day, the team had a meet against Coffeyville, which had won the state meet six years in a row.

Wichita East lost the meet, but one of its swimmers, Jeff Farrell, won the 220-yard freestyle and set a national record for his age group. He had been merely an above-average swimmer up to that point.

Timmons was dumfounded by Farrell’s performance. He and Farrell’s father walked into the Coffeyville coach’s office and Timmons said, “Johnny, I don’t know anything about this. How do you get a record recognized?”

The coach told him he would have to fill out a form and send it to the national swimming body.

Then, Farrell’s father spoke up.

“I don’t want to interfere with your coaching,” he said. “But I just happen to have a certificate to apply for the national record.”

Timmons’ coaching career changed forever at that moment, seeing how much faith the father had in his son.

“Jeff hadn’t come close in practice, but he had so much belief in him,” he said. “Remember, I was the guy losing all those meets, all those basketball games, and you’re talking about a national record? From that moment on, my teams were always doing the best we could do.”

He started taking national age group record forms to every swimming and track and field meet, pushing his athletes to go for national records.

“Then here’s what happened to me,” he said. “As I go through the halls at Wichita East, I start looking at all these guys wondering, ‘How many did I go by that might have been national champions?’”

• * *

• Timmons stood back up and walked over to his desk.

He opened a folder and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was a record one of his old managers had typed up of someone’s splits for a day of practice when he was coach at Wichita East.

He set the paper aside and passed by his old megaphone on the way to the adjoining room. He pulled out record books he had made when he was volleyball coach at Baldwin City High School from 1992 to 1998, continuing to search through a lifetime of papers for a statistic on Easton’s coaching career.

“I want to do right by Bill Easton,” he said. “You know, he’s passed away, and I don’t want to be inaccurate.”

He found a brown folder containing five groups of stapled-together papers and a Sports Illustrated with Jim Ryun on the cover.

The papers contained Ryun’s practice schedule for the weeks leading up to June 5, 1964, when the 17-year-old Ryun ran a 3:59 mile and became the first high school runner to break 4 minutes. His splits for the famous race were typed next to the target times Timmons had set for each of the 110 yards of the race.

Timmons’ goal for Ryun was 3:59.0, the exact time he ran.

He pulled out a 1966 media guide, sat down and thumbed through it.

“There it is,” Timmons said, reading some of Bill Easton’s records as coach. “Three individual cross country champions, one team championship, two outdoor track national championships.”

Staying busy

Timmons has been somewhat of a Renaissance man since he retired from Kansas in 1988. He began to paint, make sculptures and write poetry.

A bronze bust of one of his two grandchildren sits in the living room of the house that his wife, Pat, keeps extremely tidy, a sharp contrast to the basement.

Clay sculptures he made of Kansas greats Gale Sayers, Wilt Chamberlain and Lynette Woodard reside in the basement. His paintings adorn the walls of many of the rooms.

A poem entitled “Our Ole Barn” hangs framed on the wall in his basement under a painting of his cabin at Rim Rock Farm, the cross country course north of Lawrence that he’s built and maintained since the 1970s. He donated the land to the University last Tuesday, something he’d been planning to do for a long time.

Portraits of South Africans hang on the wall adjacent to the painting of the cabin. He went to South Africa in 1993 with Paul Taylor, associate pastor of the local Mustard Seed Christian Fellowship, where they worked with a missionary named Japie Venter.

Timmons returned to South Africa the next year and was instrumental in building a track, starting a track and field program, and introducing volleyball to one of the villages.

In July, he and Taylor attended the dedication of a new translation of the New Testament in the Solomon Islands.

While there, Timmons visited the island of Guadalcanal, where he had been stationed as a member of the Marines in World War II.

Timmons plans to return to Africa next year to see Venter, who is now stationed in Zambia. He has a box full of plans in his basement, including ones to build another track and set up sports programs.

“He’s been involved in many, many ways in people’s lives, in ways that most people will never see or know,” Taylor said. “He’s a remarkable man.”

— Edited by Ross Fitch