Hometown Glory
The most successful coach in college baseball? Meet Rice's Wayne Graham
Gearing up for the 2010 college baseball season, Baseball America has a featured profile on one of the sport's most prolific and successful coaches—Rice University's Wayne Graham.
Graham has racked up an impressive 830 wins since 1992 as a Division I college coach, garnering the elite school 14 consecutive conference championships, 15 consecutive NCAA tournament berths, seven trips to the College World Series in Omaha and a national championship in 2003.
"I'm one of those guys who's lucky to be able to do the job that he prefers to do above all other jobs," Graham said. "I had to pay an awful long apprenticeship to get here (getting the job at age 55), but that's one reason that I continue doing it. I tell people all the time that I died and went to heaven when I came to Rice, so why would I ever leave?"
As Baseball America notes, "His longevity in the game gives Graham an anachronistic, generation-spanning biography. He has one foot in a distant era of newsreel legends like Bibb Falk (his coach at Texas), Casey Stengel (his manager with the Mets) and Southern Methodist football star Doak Walker (one of the biggest reasons Graham wears No. 37, which also was Stengel's jersey number), and the other in a time of SportsCenter stars."
Graham was never more than a footnote as a professional player, appearing in only 90 Major League games, but his time there informed his coaching philosophy. Plus he's honed a great eye for talent—Graham has helped mold stars including Andy Pettitte, Lance Berkman, and "a pudgy kid out of Spring Woods named Clemens."
"I was (with the Mets) for only two months, but most of that time was spent on the bench with Casey," Graham said. "Not next to Casey, but within hearing range. I never heard him say a word that wasn't dead-on, like which pitch should have been thrown. Casey influenced me in two areas—how important each pitch is, and the importance of understanding human nature."
"Human nature does not change that much," Graham said. "Everyone wants to be respected, and everyone wants to love and be loved. Things like that don't change, do they? Think about that. They never change. So it all comes down to human nature."
"You may have to penetrate a lot of chaos and mess, but you get back to the basics in people—that desire to be respected, to be loved by their teammates and the feeling that they can depend on their teammates and their teammates can depend on them. Most people have normal desires, and there's a goodness in most people. There's also badness in people, but you have to learn how to tap into that goodness and inner drive."
