Good man, good coach. With Oregon State’s Wayne Tinkle, it’s hard to say good riddance | Commentary

I admit to having a soft spot – if not a blind spot – for Wayne Tinkle. He was the first college coach I ever covered.

I was a sophomore reporter newly hired to the Kaimin, the student newspaper at the University of Montana. Tinkle was the first-year head coach of the men’s basketball team. My debut assignment was to profile a backup point guard named Cameron Rundles who was having a nice season.

Tinkle was kind enough to pick up his office phone.

“When it comes to crunch time,” Tinkle told me, “you’re comfortable with the ball in his hands.”

Over the next couple of years, I covered Tinkle’s team for the Kaimin. I sat courtside at games, across from the Grizzlies’ bench – Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament’s regular seat was to the right of me – then shuffled into a back hallway to wait for Tinkle to come out and answer whatever questions I had jotted down.

At 6-foot-10 with broad shoulders, he cut an intimidating figure to a kid with nothing but a pen and a spiral notepad. But he was warm and patient. He was, notably, understanding of my not infrequent rookie mistakes.

I don’t want to give the impression that the now-fired Oregon State basketball coach and I are great friends or that I know him well outside of our professional relationship. But we share an alma mater and a little bit of history. We both like to play cribbage and have the same favorite Montana-made beer, Cold Smoke Scotch Ale.

In recent years, when I stopped by his office on campus in Corvallis, I occasionally smuggled in a single can of Cold Smoke as a token offering. In 2023, the Beavers pulled off a surprise win over a good USC team. I watched the game on TV and not long after, my phone buzzed with a message.

It was a selfie of Tinkle, toasting the camera with a Cold Smoke I’d slipped him the day before.

I like him. He is, in the casual vernacular, a great guy. I happen to also think he’s a good person.

Brett Hollins can tell you that, too.

Hollins was the prison inmate who wrote letters to college basketball coaches while serving four years for a stabbing and who, when he received a response from Tinkle, taped the orange and black letter to the top of his bunk bed for inspiration.

“That, more than anything, impacted the rest of my time while I was incarcerated,” Hollins told me on Thursday afternoon. “It just gave me the confidence that I could come home and do what I’m doing now.”

Hollins left prison and, at 28, became a captain on the NAIA Southern Oregon basketball team. He now operates a nonprofit, the Side Door Foundation, that helps prepare inmates for life after prison. When he visited the Oregon State Correctional Institution last fall, Tinkle joined him inside the prison walls to meet inmates and observe a basketball game.

He didn’t just stand in the corner and watch, though.

“He went and shook hands with every single one of the players,” Hollins said. “He was involved in their huddle. He was coaching them up on the sidelines. That’s just the type of person he is. He sees value in anybody. If there’s somebody that he believes he can give some life to and pour into in a positive way, he’s going to do it.”

At that game, Hollins presented Tinkle with a jersey signed by the day’s participants. The coach proudly hung it in his home office.

So, that’s the Wayne Tinkle I know. And the one I will think of long after his successor is in place and either succeeds or fails.

But it has long been obvious that this day of reckoning was coming. And, even, that a change in Corvallis was needed.

In my second stint covering Tinkle, after I returned to The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2022, there has been less a question of whether he would be able to recapture the success the Beavers rode to the Elite Eight in 2021 than there has been one of how he and OSU would eventually, inevitably part ways.

Almost immediately he went from the Big Dance to an awkward dance.

Still, I didn’t expect athletic director Scott Barnes to pull the plug on Thursday, or perhaps not even at all. The contract extension Tinkle earned with that tournament run in the NCAA’s Indianapolis bubble became an albatross. The sort of thing the university was much less inclined to pay out once the Pac-12 disintegrated. I thought it was more likely that OSU would ride it out and Tinkle would coach the final year of his contract and then either move on or retire.

Instead, he gets fired with games remaining in a winning season, riding a two-game winning streak. He will coach the Beavers for their regular-season finale on Saturday at Santa Clara and however long their stay in the WCC Tournament might last.

I suspect the emotions of most OSU fans range from apathetic to elated. In 13 seasons under Tinkle, the Beavers were 175-204. His teams reached the NCAA Tournament twice. He also set the program single-season record for losses twice.

I’m under no illusion that at 60 years old Tinkle was on the cusp of turning around the program. Like many coaches of his generation, he had struggled to adapt to elements of the modern era of the sport, including how to recruit one year at a time and how to hold players accountable when they should simply leave. Still, I believe less of the blame for OSU’s problems truly fall on him than the harshness of his firing would suggest.

Since the dissolution of the Pac-12, Tinkle has gotten the most out of his teams that anyone could have hoped for. Two years ago, he lost Jordan Pope in the transfer portal to Texas and Tyler Bilodeau to UCLA. Last year, Michael Rataj was lured away by Baylor and Parsa Fallah got a payday at Oklahoma State.

His program is severely short on resources, plays in the historic-but-archaic Gill Coliseum and lost whatever competitive recruiting advantage it had when the Pac-12 fell apart.

Despite those challenges and with a roster that lacks much star talent outside of former walk-on Josiah Lake, Tinkle managed to get to 9-8 in the West Coast Conference and 16-14 overall.

Perhaps fans had legitimate reasons to grumble, but Tinkle continually got as much out of his teams as possible and was the first Beavers coach since Ralph Miller to figure things out. At least a little.

He delivered more moments of celebration than any recent predecessors. And he was able to coach his son, the All-Pac-12 forward Tres Tinkle, for four years – which I’m pretty sure Tinkle would tell you was his greatest highlight of his time here.

Moving on from Tinkle gives the Beavers a chance to reset the deck. I get that. They can find a coach who is younger and cheaper, who doesn’t carry the baggage that stacked up over Tinkle’s 12-year run. I question, however, whether they will find someone who was as good a steward of the OSU basketball program or who represented the university better than Tinkle did.

Portland State’s Jase Coburn has built a Big Sky champion and managed to recruit and hold onto players with virtually no NIL or revenue sharing. Gonzaga assistant R-Jay Barsh is a rising star. There are good coaching prospects all along the West Coast.

New Beaver football coach JaMarcus Shephard is the model for just how invigorating the right new coach can be.

Maybe Barnes already has that person in mind.

Maybe he’s taking a leap of faith and believes he can find him.

I think we all understood several years ago that Tinkle was not part of the Beavers’ future. That the program was stuck in gear. I’m still sad to see him go.

But that’s just my soft spot talking.