Wayne Graham in one of his signature walks to the mound (Photo by Kendall Rogers)
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Although he didn’t achieve Augie Garrido’s win total, Rod Dedeaux’s national titles, or Mike Martin’s incredible longevity, there is an argument to be made that former Rice coach Wayne Graham is the greatest coach in college baseball history. .
But I can’t really be the arbiter of such things, because I owe part of my career to Coach Graham in a roundabout way.
I grew up in Houston, the other side of my family was the Rice family, with two uncles and two cousins who were proud university graduates. One of my earliest sports memories was watching Rice get beat by Air Force One in front of a packed crowd at Rice Stadium in 1997.
Voting in that game was a testament to a few things: Rice’s profile, a very expensive, private school with a small enrollment and as many students who had gone to work overseas as they did in Houston, and a long, long history of losing.
Rice football went from 1961 to 2005 without making a bowl game. The only Rice head coach since the 1960s to leave the job with a winning record is Todd Graham, who left after one 7-6 season.
The men’s basketball team has only made four NCAA Tournament appearances in its history. Three of them came in 1954 or earlier, and the latest was in the 1970s. Women’s basketball has had recent success, with four NCAA Tournament appearances this century, but its 2000 trip to the tournament was its first.
Put another way, when Graham, popularly known as OG (originally used as a way to distinguish him from Todd Graham during his year at Rice) got the Owls to the Men’s College World Series for the first time in 1997, the football team didn’t win. I hadn’t been to a bowl game in 36 years, the men’s basketball team hadn’t been to the NCAA tournament in 27 years and the women’s basketball team hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament.
It was in this bleak environment that Graham turned the program into a juggernaut that won a national title in 2003, went to Omaha six more times, and produced MLB player after MLB player, starting with Jose Cruz, Jr., until be at the end. Evan Kravetz, who just made his major league debut last week.
And I’m here to tell you that I loved the show when I was young and young. It allowed me to wear my Rice gear with pride, not only because the team is great, but the Rice brand became easier. Anyone who played travel baseball in Texas during Rice’s senior year under Graham surely remembers the surprising number of travel baseball organizations that began using old English names during this time.
But then again, Rice was my introduction to college baseball and I fell in love with the game. I loved that a school like that could become a strength simply by hiring the right coaches and donating resources to the program. Along the way, I found some schools that were unknown to anyone who wasn’t a college baseball fan, like Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State – which were also regulars deep into the postseason.
I also liked the negative aspects of the games that made them different—the three-game series every weekend, the midweek games that the schedule handled differently, the regional format (back then that was a lot crazier than the current format) and the reality. that its championship was held every season in Omaha, Nebraska.
Without that love, I don’t do this for a living, and without Wayne Graham deciding to take on the massive construction project that was Rice baseball, that love would never have been seen.
I started writing college baseball when Graham’s time at Rice ended, but I had a brush with covering his teams when I briefly returned to Houston in 2016 and wrote as a side gig for the now-defunct college baseball blog.
You won’t be shocked to hear that Graham was old-school in his approach to post-match interviews. Rather than rushing through it on the field, in the dugout or in the interview room, he invited people into his office to talk. My first time covering a game at Rice, a reporter and I walked slowly to his office, somehow expecting to ask some time after the “real” reporters had finished, but Graham waved us off. , and I took a seat next to my now partner Kendall Rogers. He didn’t do it out of kindness—it was just part of his routine—but it made me feel like I belonged at a time when I really didn’t.
I didn’t get a chance to tell him my story, but maybe that would be better. He didn’t strike me as sensitive, especially not in the media, and I don’t think he would have known how to react to that information.
In the weeks and days to come, Graham’s career will be told in tangible ways, like wins with big leaguers, and in intangible ways, like the young players who grew into boys who got the chance to play baseball and the opportunities he provided to hundreds of players. players to get a Rice education while winning dozens of games.
The late Bill Walton liked to use the phrase “thank you for my life” when addressing those he felt had touched him positively, in ways big and small, and I think that fits here.
Small role however you played, thank you for my life, Coach Graham.
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