Mike McGraw was born to be a golf coach, but home is calling

For Mike McGraw, the writing was on the wall.

Upon returning to campus following another disappointing season at the helm of the storied Oklahoma State men’s golf program, McGraw met with athletic director Mike Holder, the legendary coach who had preceded him, and could sense a change was imminent. For years, the pressure of coaching in Stillwater had taken its toll on McGraw, emotionally and physically, and as Holder remembers it, “At that moment in time, he was not Mike McGraw.”

McGraw’s wife, Pam, knew it, too. And so, as her husband, amid a cloud of stress and uncertainty, traveled the next day to recruit at the Oklahoma State Junior, she wrote him an email, which was filled with scripture and encouragement.

The note, dated June 1, 2013, centered around Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.”

You’re not being the coach you were born to be.

You’re an amazing coach, and you’re a great person, and you love people.

Where is that person?

Pam’s message was so impactful that McGraw has printed a copy and attached it to the inside-front cover of every team journal for the last 13 years.

“I want to be reminded that I don’t want to go to that dark place, where results are the only thing that matters, and I lose my purpose for why I coach,” McGraw said.

When McGraw needed it most, Pam was there.

Now, it’s time for McGraw to be there for Pam.

After nearly four decades coaching golf at all levels, McGraw, 65, is retiring, effective immediately. McGraw, in his 12th season Baylor’s head coach, announced his decision last week, citing the need to care for Pam, whose declining health now requires daily care.

“You want to make good decisions for your career and financially, but ultimately you want to make decisions that benefit those you love the most,” McGraw said. “And if that means I have to sacrifice a coaching career, I’m OK with that if Pam and I can get this figured out to where we can give her a good quality of life. The last few years at Oklahoma State, Pam was the one who was sacrificed because I was placing the job at such a high importance. The pressure cooker had become so much, and I know she suffered at that time.

“I didn’t want that to happen again.”

• • •

McGraw first met Pam in the mid-1980s at Kickingbird Golf Course in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he was an assistant pro after three years as a failed mini-tour player. Pam was part of a ladies group that took lessons from McGraw. A few years later, while working toward a teaching degree in history at Central Oklahoma, McGraw found himself learning from Pam, a teacher at Sequoyah Middle School. One of McGraw’s required 36-hour observations was Pam’s drama class. “It was so much chaos,” McGraw remembers, “but she handled it beautifully.”

McGraw started teaching social studies at Sequoyah in Fall 1990, and while the assistant golf coach at Edmond Memorial High, he and Pam began dating. They married in 1996, a year before McGraw was hired as the assistant under Holder at Oklahoma State.

From Day 1, Holder was adamant that McGraw, who had just led Edmond North to three state titles in four years, would never succeed him. And yet, McGraw’s tireless work ethic and strong character eventually changed Holder’s mind. McGraw aced his eight-year interview.

“He’s a winner,” Holder said. “He’s always been a winner, and he was born to be a coach.”

After being a part of 16 team titles, including the 2000 NCAA Championship, and one season as the women’s head coach, McGraw was promoted to men’s head coach ahead of the 2005-06 season. On that team was a redshirt freshman from Oceanside, California, named Jonathan Moore. Despite being on the women’s side, McGraw had mentored Moore the year prior after the once promising junior saw his game tank, struggling to break 100. It got so bad that Moore, on a cold and windy day at Stillwater Country Club, shot 65 – in nine holes.

“He wouldn’t have made any high school golf teams,” McGraw said.

McGraw met with Moore frequently Moore’s redshirt season, usually over coffee and almost never talking about golf. McGraw’s message to Moore was consistent, that Moore would rise from the depths, albeit incrementally.

The next year, Moore captured the NCAA individual title by four shots in Sunriver, Oregon, while the Cowboys won McGraw what ended up being his only NCAA team title as a head coach.

“I have chills right now just thinking about it,” Moore said. “He walked through life with me the year before when I was really struggling as a golfer, and it was a wow moment for us both, like, can you believe we’re both right here, right now? Who would’ve thought? He was a women’s golf coach, and I couldn’t break 100. Neither one of us could ever have dreamed of that.”

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In eight seasons leading Oklahoma State, McGraw coached some of the best players in the country, including Rickie Fowler, Peter Uihlein, Pablo Martin, Morgan Hoffmann, Kevin Tway and Talor Gooch. Martin won the Haskins Award in 2006. Fowler and Uihlein received Hogan Awards, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Uihlein was also the 2010 U.S. Amateur champion, and Moore and Hoffmann were Mickelson Award winners as the nation’s top freshman.

“I credit my work ethic, timeliness and discipline to him,” Fowler said. “He outworked just about anyone out there. He’d be in the gym before all of us. When it was cold and the weather was iffy, like in the 20s, a lot of times I’d be the only player that would go out and play at Karsten, and there were a handful of times where McGraw would grab a bag and go play with me. We had some good times where it was just the two of us out on the golf course.”

But McGraw’s impact in Stillwater transcended the roster. Ryan Cameron had just graduated from Oklahoma State when he became the sports information director for men’s golf, a position he still holds. At his first NCAA Championship, in 2001, the first year that Oklahoma State missed the cut, Cameron roomed with McGraw.

“I remember thinking, this guy has so much energy,” Cameron said. “He couldn’t sit still. He’d be doing push-ups or sit-ups in the room, always moving around.”

Cameron also recalls the dinners Pam would cook for him as a 20-something with little money, and the first time that McGraw went into the athletics closet and gifted Cameron his first Swinging Pete hat and a couple golf polos.

“You would’ve thought I won the lottery,” Cameron added.

McGraw’s star-studded teams after that 2006 run weren’t as lucky. The Cowboys slipped to a fourth-place finish at the 2008 NCAA Championship and then started the match-play era with three straight exits in the knockout stage, including in 2010, when they were upset by Augusta State. In 2012, Oklahoma State failed to even make nationals, the first time that had happened in the program’s 65 years.

Meanwhile, McGraw was feeling the heat, admitting now that the pressure was “literally eating me alive.”

Holder tries not to think about that phone call in late June 2013.

“That’s how difficult it was,” Holder said. “But at the time, I don’t know if he remembers this, I told him I was doing him a favor. … He cared too much, and he worked too hard, and he sacrificed too much. His sense of responsibility to the current team, and the tradition and legacy of what Oklahoma State golf, it all just overwhelmed him.

“When I hired him, I thought, this is going to be the greatest thing ever, turning him loose out there on college golf because no one’s going to outwork him. He’s going to get all the players, and he may win every tournament. It’s hard to believe that his strongest assets, his work ethic and his commitment, turned out to be liabilities. But it happens, and he landed on his feet.

“It didn’t take him very long to get back to that happy place where he thrives.”

• • •

Alabama head coach Jay Seawell was recruiting in Mississippi when his assistant, Rob Bradley, who helped guide the Tide to the 2013 NCAA title, called to say that he was taking the Purdue job. The night before, Seawell had heard that McGraw had been let go. Within a minute of hanging up with Bradley, Seawell dialed his old friend.

“I told myself, wow, Mike McGraw needs to be in coaching,” Seawell said. “I asked him what he thought about coming to work with me, and he said, ‘Roll Tide,’ pretty quick.”

Seawell’s only ask: “I just wanted him to bring that seventh-grade, social-studies teacher with him.”

Tuscaloosa ended up being the perfect landing spot for McGraw. Though Justin Thomas had turned pro, Alabama remained loaded with the likes of Bobby Wyatt, Cory Whitsett and incoming freshman Robby Shelton. McGraw wouldn’t be asked to recruit, or fundraise, or any of that; he’d only be required to do what he did best: Coach, and have fun doing it.

“I felt no pressure that whole year,” McGraw said. “That allowed me to get back to my roots. You know, at 53, when I got fired, with all I knew about the game and coaching, and all the experience I had, I was not as good of a coach as I was at 25, when I had a heart to serve kids. I was a shell of that coach.”

McGraw’s only season at Alabama would culminate in the Tide’s second straight NCAA Championship, and they would beat McGraw’s former Oklahoma State squad in the final at Prairie Dunes. “How ironic is that?” Holder says now. McGraw walked that last day with Shelton, who defeated Zach Olson in arguably the best match in NCAA history; the two combined to make 22 birdies, which the USGA later told Seawell was a record, at any level.

Seawell called that national title justification for McGraw, who had recruited that entire Cowboys roster. Cameron remembers watching McGraw during the trophy ceremony and seeing mixed emotions.

“It was a such a weird feeling,” Cameron said. “I could see it in his face; he’s watching those guys, and he’s hurting. He was happy for his guys, but those were still his guys, too.”

• • •

When Cooper Dossey committed to Texas A&M, it would mean bucking the trend of over 40 family members who had graduated from Baylor. But just a few months before Dossey was set to sign with the Aggies, McGraw was hired as the Bears’ head coach. A&M granted Dossey permission to visit Baylor, and it cost them a recruit.

“McGraw was the reason I went to Baylor,” said Dossey, whose two brothers, Luke and Sam, later followed him to Waco, Texas.

Dossey was one of six All-Americans who McGraw coached at Baylor, along with Kyle Jones, Braden Bailey, Matthew Perrine, Garrett May and three-time All-American Johnny Keefer, who is now on the PGA Tour as the reigning Korn Ferry Tour player of the year. The Bears captured 20 team victories under McGraw while also making six of the past nine NCAA Championships. Before McGraw, Baylor had qualified for nationals just five times.

Keefer contests that McGraw has the best memory of anybody, easily recalling every past major champion, who they beat and on what course, plus hundreds of phone numbers. Dossey calls McGraw the fastest eater you’ll ever meet.

“We’d get ice cream, and he’d be first in line, and by the time the last guy was ordering, McGraw would have finished his and got back in line for a second one,” Dossey said.

Then there was a dinner at Johnny Carino’s, an Italian chain, where Dossey’s teammate, Colin Kober, copied McGraw’s order, spaghetti and meatballs, and tried to finish his plate before McGraw without telling him.

“They both get to where they were about 75% done,” Dossey recalls, “and McGraw looks over and realizes what Colin was doing, and he puts down his fork and his knife, and he starts eating it with his hands and beat him. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The only time McGraw lost an eating content was to Trey Mullinax at Alabama, and that was only because Mullinax chose the right food for the spice-adverse McGraw: a buffalo-chicken pizza.

“He thinks he’s the Jack Nicklaus of eating,” Seawell quipped.

Jokes aside, Dossey, like so many others, credits McGraw for helping him mature into a man who, in Dossey’s case, is married, just welcomed his first child and competes full-time on the Korn Ferry Tour. After a strong freshman campaign at Baylor, Dossey met with McGraw, expecting to be showered with praise. Instead, McGraw told Dossey that he’d never play the PGA Tour if he kept relying solely on talent. Dossey left that meeting confused, but looking back, it spurred him to improve his work ethic and practice habits.

“That meeting has replayed in my head a lot over the last nine years,” Dossey said. “If he hadn’t said that, I don’t know where I’d be right now.”

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Since announcing his retirement, McGraw has received over 700 texts and other messages, many with similar stories of how McGraw has influenced them. For someone who has journaled every day of his life into a notebook, McGraw plans to carefully respond to each one, when time permits, as Pam requires five hours of dialysis per day, three days a week, which McGraw compares to stepping into the ring against Mike Tyson.

“You come out, and you’re alive, but that’s it,” said McGraw, who added that Pam is not a candidate for a kidney transplant.

Having written his own book, “Better Than I Found It,” McGraw has also started to compile a list of his 25 most significant coaching memories; McGraw’s embrace with Moore on the 72nd hole in 2006 will be among them.

“Nothing as a coach is ever worth sacrificing the relationships that are most important, and that starts with your family,” said Moore, who has leaned on McGraw in recent years while raising a son with special needs.

“This is maybe the best lesson he’ll ever teach any of us.”

Holder believes McGraw still has more chapters left to write as a coach, but for now, McGraw couldn’t give it his all. He promised himself he’d never coach a program into mediocrity, and he says he hadn’t been on a plane to recruit in almost three years.

McGraw knew his next step back in October, though it took convincing Pam, who for 30 years has been just as crucial to McGraw’s teams as McGraw himself. Unable to have kids of her own, Pam made her impact on hundreds of her husband’s players in a variety of ways, from hosting annual Christmas parties to simply providing an example of patience for the often-anxious McGraw.

“You could tell that we were her kids as much we were his,” Dossey said.

When McGraw was inducted into the Oklahoma Golf Hall of Fame last November, he answered a question that he had asked many people on his podcast but had never been asked himself: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

For McGraw, it was this: “A coach told me really early on in my career, you better act like what you’re doing is important because it really is.”

It’s just not the most important thing.

“I know why I do it today, and that’s why it’s crushing not to be able to coach anymore,” McGraw said. “But I know that I’m in the place that I’m supposed to be, and that is with Pam.”