Photo Courtesy Rene Torres
Former Pan American College baseball player and sports historian Rene Torres has been inducted into the UTRGV Athletics Hall of Honor for his contributions to Rio Grande Valley sports history, the recognition he said he dreamt about but never envisioned would become a reality.
The induction took place Feb. 19 in the UTRGV Ballroom on the Edinburg campus, along with the Hall of Fame ceremony, which inducted the 1987-90 women’s cross-country teams, former men’s basketball student athlete Jim Board, former women’s tennis student athlete Barbara (Barrera) Gonzales, and former baseball student athlete Joe Hernandez.
“It was certainly a great privilege to join such a list of prestigious Hall of Honor inductees,” the Brownsville native told The Rider. “I had dreamt about, you know, reaching that point, but I never envisioned that it would become a reality.”
Learning to play baseball in the sandlots of Brownsville, Torres attended legacy institution Pan American College from 1966-69 on a baseball scholarship as a center fielder.
Off the field, he has spread the history of Valley baseball for the last 20 years via oral presentations, exhibits, writings and university journals.
Torres is also a retired assistant professor from legacy institution The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.
Bronc Baseball
“I arrived [in Edinburg] in 1966 and I had all my belongings in an H-E-B bag,” Torres said. “My pockets were full of hot air and didn’t have a single penny in my pocket.”
During his first semester and a half, he volunteered at the South Texas Rehabilitation Center for food and a place to stay.
“It was very stressful for me because by taking 12 hours, full-time student and also a student athlete and working full time, that was very challenging for me,” Torres said.
He set the program record then for most consecutive games without an error at 46 and is currently tied for seventh overall while ranking fifth among pure outfielders. Torres made just one error in three years as the starting center fielder.
“The traveling itself to different places, playing in different venues, you know, it just revealed how naive I was,” Torres said.
He said he would sometimes pinch himself from the wow factor of playing against big schools, such as the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, and just getting to travel across the country.
The biggest highlight of his career came when the Broncs faced the Longhorns in the 1968 playoffs, the first year moving up to NCAA Division 1.
Losing the series 2-1, Pan American College won Game 2 with a score of 2-1, marking the first win against UT in program history.
“In the seventh inning, we were down 1-0,” Torres said. “I come to the plate and I hit a base hit to bring in the tying run in the seventh. And then, in the 10th inning, I put down a bunt to advance the runner to second [base], and that runner became the winning run, 2-1. … One of the biggest victories we had in those years, beating the Longhorns.”
Torres would take a brief break from college in 1969 to serve in the U.S. Army National Guard before returning to Pan American University in 1971 for his history degree with a minor in kinesiology.
Valley sports historian
“My first job was teaching in junior high in Brownsville [in 1971],” Torres said. “I was there for eight years. And then in 1979, I started working for the university, which at the time was, you know, Pan American University at Brownsville.”
He would spend 25 years teaching before focusing on research and writing about Valley sports history.
The inspiration came from reading a sports story about a semi-pro baseball team from California in the Brownsville Herald.
“I said to myself, ‘Hey, who’s writing about our people? Who’s writing about our boys and girls? Who’s writing about the semi-pro teams from this area?’ And nobody was,” Torres said. “So, I took the job, you know, I said, ‘I’m gonna start writing about, you know, this, this area, this region’ and mainly baseball at the beginning.”
Doing it the old-school way, in front of microfilm and microfiche, he would spend at least three days of the week doing research at the University Library.
“So, I accumulated a lot of research, I mean, a lot of research,” Torres said. “I’ve got boxes of research. And, you know, then I started collecting photos because, you know, as far as I’m concerned, you know, the photo is 50% of the story.”
With all the research, he would submit stories to newspapers across the Valley, from The Monitor to the Brownsville Herald and even university journals.
“So, what I was doing was rewriting these stories of people that were successful or contributed to not only sports, but to their communities from the 1920s and ’30s,” Torres said. “So, you know, I think in order to understand the present, you have to know the past and that’s the main thing. There were so many people that contributed to the success of this region, but have been forgotten and I’m bringing them back out.”
For his work as a sports historian, Torres was inducted into the Rio Grande Valley Sports Hall of Fame, the Leo Najo Baseball Hall of Fame, the Laredo Latin American International Sports Hall of Fame and now the UTRGV Hall of Honor.
“My wife [Lucy Torres] was my biggest supporter throughout the years, because I did spend a lot of time away from home doing research, doing presentations and exhibits,” Torres said. “If you don’t have a good foundation at home, you know, then it’s difficult to do what I did in those 30 years. And, of course, my dad. He showed me the way. My dad was illiterate and he was a car painter back in the 1940s, and ’50s. He was also my biggest influence, because he played hard. During the weekends, he played baseball in the 1930s and worked very hard during the week as a car painter and a body man for Ford for 35 years.”
