As noted earlier here, Houston has become the amateur baseball hotbed of America over the past decade, and no person is more responsible for that development than the coach of Rice University’s fine baseball program, the remarkable Wayne Graham.
Coach Graham was already a local coaching legend in local circles when he took over the Rice program 15 years ago. Already an accomplished high school and junior college baseball coach (he developed such players as Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte at San Jacinto Junior College amidst the petrochemical plants on Houston’s southeast side), Coach Graham was 55 when he took the Rice coaching position, which was his dream job. Under Graham, Rice has won 11 conference championships in a row, gone to 12 NCAA regional tournaments and six Super Regional tournaments, and — with this year’s team — have five appearances in the College World Series. Rice’s 2003 NCAA National Championship in baseball was the school’s first team national championship in any sport, an achievement made all the more incredible given Rice’s high academic requirements and relatively small enrollment (less than 3,000 undergraduates).
Graham is now 70, but his real age is closer to 50 because of a rigorous workout regimen and a healthy diet. Thus, he has no intention of slowing down and, as this excellent David Barron/Houston Chronicle profile reports, don’t be surprised if Graham is still coaching the Owls at the age of 80. Although Barron’s profile captures the special nature of Graham well, this related Barron article passes along my favorite anecdote about Graham, which involves happy-go-lucky Stros star, Lance Berkman, who played for the notoriously no-nonsense Graham at Rice during the mid-1990’s:

Berkman, meanwhile, is to Graham what Yogi Berra was to [legendary New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel] ó certainly one of his best players, clearly one of his favorites (a picture of Graham, [Rice Athletic Director Bobby] May and Berkman dominates one wall of Graham’s office at Reckling Park) and undoubtedly his most reliable source of unintended mirth.
Take, for example, the time against TCU when Berkman tried to track down a ball that came to rest inside a plastic bag in a pile of debris in the left-field corner.
Berkman managed to shake the ball out of the bag, but as he tried to relay the ball back into the infield, the wind blew the bag into the path of Berkman’s throw. The ball made it about 10 feet, and the TCU batter had an inside the park homer.
“He (Graham) jumped out of the dugout and ran down the left-field line and told me I was the worst outfielder he’s ever seen and turned around and ran back to the dugout as I’m trying to extract myself from a chain link fence that I had slid into trying to make the play,” Berkman said. “But he never said another word about it.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Graham said, shaking his head at the memory. “How does something like that happen?”

Read both of Barron’s fine pieces about Graham, another of the many remarkable people who make Houston such a fascinating place to live.