Wayne Graham on one of his signature slow walks to the mound (Photo by Kendall Rogers)
Though he didn’t have the win total of Augie Garrido, the national titles of Rod Dedeaux, or the staggering longevity of Mike Martin, there’s an argument to be made that former Rice head coach Wayne Graham is the greatest head coach in college baseball history.
But I can’t really be an objective arbiter of such things, because I partially owe my career to Coach Graham in a roundabout way.
Growing up in Houston, one side of my family was a Rice family, with two uncles and two cousins who were proud university graduates. One of my earliest collegiate sports memories was watching Rice get trounced in football by Air Force in front of a relatively sparse crowd at Rice Stadium in 1997.
The turnout at that game was evidence of a couple of things: the profile of Rice, a highly academic, expensive private school with a small enrollment and many alumni who were as likely to be working overseas as they were to be working 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 those came in 1954 or earlier, and the latest was in 1970. Women’s basketball has had more recent success, with four NCAA Tournament appearances this century, but its 2000 trip to the tourney was its first.
Put another way, when Graham, affectionately known as the OG (initially used as a way to differentiate 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 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 had never been to the NCAA Tournament.
It was within this backdrop of futility that Graham turned the program into a juggernaut that won a national title in 2003, went to Omaha six other times, and produced MLB player after MLB player, beginning with Jose Cruz, Jr., all the way to Evan Kravetz, who just made his big league debut last week.
And I’m here to tell you that I was enamored with the program as a preteen and teenager. It allowed me to wear my Rice gear with pride, not just because the team was good, but the Rice brand became cool. Anyone who played travel baseball in Texas during Rice’s peak under Graham surely recalls the staggering number of travel baseball organizations that began using old English lettering during this time.
But also, Rice was my intro to college baseball and I fell in love with the sport. I loved that a school like that could become a force by simply making the right coaching hire and committing resources to the program. Along the way, I discovered other schools that were relatively anonymous to anyone who wasn’t a college baseball fan, like Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State — also were regulars deep into the postseason.
I also loved the quirks of the sport that made it unique—the three-game series every weekend, the midweek games that every program treats somewhat differently, the regional format (which at the time was even crazier than the current format) and the fact that its championship was held every season in Omaha, Nebraska.
Without that passion, I don’t do this for a living, and without Wayne Graham deciding to take on the massive building job that was Rice baseball, that passion might never have come to the surface.
I started writing college baseball right as Graham’s tenure at Rice was winding down, but I did have a brush with covering his teams when I briefly moved back to Houston in 2016 and was writing as a side gig for a now-defunct college baseball blog.
You won’t be shocked to hear that Graham was old school in his approach to postgame interviews. Rather than rush through it on the field, in the dugout or in an interview room, he invited people into his office to chat. My first time covering a game at Rice, me and another reporter who wrote for a small publication tentatively went down to his office, somewhat expecting to have to sheepishly ask for some time after the “real” reporters were done, but Graham waved us in, and I took a seat next to my now-colleague Kendall Rogers. He didn’t do that as a favor to us—it was simply part of his process—but it made me feel like I belonged at a time when I really didn’t.
I never had a chance to tell him my story, but that’s probably for the better. He didn’t strike me as a particularly sentimental type, especially not with the media, and I don’t think he would have known how to react to that information anyway.
In the coming weeks and days, Graham’s career will be recounted both in tangible ways, like wins and big leaguers, and intangible ways, like the fringy players he developed into guys who got a crack at pro baseball and the opportunities he provided for hundreds of players to get a Rice education while they won a whole bunch of games.
The late Bill Walton was fond of using the phrase “thank you for my life” when talking with those who he felt had impacted him positively, both in big and small ways, and I think that fits here.
Small role though he might have played, thank you for my life, Coach Graham.
