Career
Bruner was a star athlete at duPont Manual High School in Louisville. He lettered in baseball, basketball, football and track. Bruner was inducted into the duPont Manual High School Alumni Association Hall of Fame in 2005.
His participation in boxing began in the 1930s while he was employed by the City of Louisville Recreation Department.
He was responsible for playground tournaments, followed by district and city championships. In 1939, Bruner became athletic director at the Army Post in Fort Knox, Kentucky.
His responsibilities included setting up and supervising several boxing gyms, organizing and supervising numerous boxing shows and tournaments, and selecting and accompanying a Fort Knox representative team to the State Golden Gloves Tournament. Bruner also managed the baseball team and coached the basketball team
Among the baseball players Bruner managed at Fort Knox were future Major League players Stan Lopata, Joe Garagiola, Roy Sievers and Early Wynn.
Bruner"s basketball teams went up against Adolph Rupp"s Kentucky Wildcats four times. After seven years in Fort Knox, Bruner resigned and returned to Louisville. From 1951 to 1959, he served as matchmaker for the Louisville Golden Gloves Tournament.
He was also the matchmaker for the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Boxing Trials and for William H. King Promotions.
Bruner opened the Headline Boxing Gym in 1952 and started managing and training boxers. He trained fourteen Kentucky State Golden Gloves Champions, eight of whom were named the best boxer of the tournament.
His most notable boxers were welterweight contender Rudell Stitch, future WBA World Heavyweight Champion Jimmy Ellis and Mayfield Pennington, who defeated former World Welterweight and Middleweight Champion Emile Griffith. Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, occasionally trained at Bruner"s gym.
Bruner suffered a spinal cord injury when he fell down the stairs at his gym in 1985.
The injury left him confined to a wheelchair, but he continued to manage and train boxers until the fall of 1994.