Iron Mike
Columbus, Ohio
September 24–25, 1994
At forty-six years old, Mike Holder was the unquestioned
dean of college golf, as recognizable in his sport as Bobby Knight
was in the world of college basketball and Joe Paterno in college
football. His focus was so acute, his intensity so singular, he was
oblivious to the whispers that followed him from the parking lot
to the clubhouse to the practice range at the Scarlet Course, site
of the early-season Ping Preview tournament in late September of
1994, whispers that defined a legacy that towered over his sport like
a monument.
Whether he was scouting or coaching, everybody on the course
knew the man with the expressionless face and orange wraparound
sunglasses, resting beneath a thick mop of reddish blond hair. His
was the most familiar pose in college golf. "Look, it’s Mike Holder,"
they would say, the respect discernible in their voices, the news
spreading through the gallery. When he was recruiting at American
Junior Golf Association events, people followed him just to see
which player he had come to see. It was a great compliment for a
junior player to know that Holder was watching. Galleries parted
when he passed through, which also spoke to his natural ability to
intimidate.
He put people off, made them feel uncomfortable. It had always
been that way. You might find yourself getting to know college golf ’s
mystery man at one tournament only to have him walk past without
a word or a look of recognition two weeks later. Just because he
was scouting a potential recruit on the practice range didn’t mean
he wanted to engage in friendly conversation with the recruit’s parents.
He was often referred to as arrogant, aloof, or worse.
Holder didn’t worry about what other people thought of him.
He was the embodiment of Oklahoma tough. To him, golf wasn’t
a country club sport. He was disciplined, demanding, and determined
to push players to their limits both mentally and physically.
He made them qualify in the rawest weather, made grueling earlymorning
workouts mandatory, and considered character building
the most important part of his job, which wasn’t always the most
popular approach in a sport where athletes were often coddled as in
no other.
At different stages of his career Holder made players run laps
for hitting balls out of bounds and do pushups for three-putting
greens. He loved Oklahoma State’s other dominant sport — wrestling
— and impromptu greenside matches between player and
coach were not uncommon. He had once angrily and, he believed,
justifiably bloodied Bob Tway’s nose in a wrestling match moments
before Tway was to tee off in the first round of a tournament.
His players learned about excellence from being around him. He
strove to operate with integrity and did everything to the best of his
ability. Mostly, he did things his way. If his players preferred some
other way, he would refer to the major north-south highway that
splits the state. "I-Thirty-five," he would say slowly, looking his target
right in the eye, his accent so purely Oklahoma it could double
as a voice-over for the state department of tourism, "goes both
ways."
No wonder other college golf coaches referred to him, behind his
back, as the "Great Iron Fist of the Midwest."
He preached the basic tenets: Be on time, go to class, tell the
truth, give 100 percent, play one shot at a time, conduct yourself
with class, stay physically fit, and never make excuses. Any player in
need of discipline could expect to run steps inside the football stadium
at sunrise.
Everything he did was designed to make his players better. He
dared them to be great, in the classroom and on the course, in everything
they did. If you were going to play for Mike Holder, being
average was not an option.
All this contributed to Holder’s status as his sport’s most controversial
and dominant figure and, by far, the least understood.
Holder was the John Wayne of college golf, but to define him
as one-dimensional failed to acknowledge his complexity. He was
also perhaps the greatest innovator college golf had ever seen. He
ran his program as if it were a Fortune 500 corporation and he
the CEO. He had won six national championships, ten fewer than
legendary former University of Houston coach Dave Williams,
the dynasty builder who dominated college golf for thirty-six
years. But Holder’s overall contribution to the sport was perhaps
greater.
Williams reinvented the game and became known as the "Father
of College Golf." Holder reinvented it again and again, in ways dramatic
and subtle, forcing those who wished to compete with him
to adopt his model and methods. Although the fi rst intercollegiate
golf tournament was held in 1897, and although no coach will likely
win more titles than Williams, Holder was, in many ways, college
golf s first modern coach.
He was the first to take the same microscopic approach to his
sport that is common in football and basketball, single-handedly
ending an era when golf coaches simply "drove the van," or shuttled
players from tournament to tournament. As his teams continued to
win, opposing coaches, albeit reluctantly and sometimes even unknowingly,
would do as Holder did, and soon what seemed like a
radical idea would become a standard practice.
At a time when most college coaches did their recruiting by
phone or simply welcomed players who arrived on their doorstep,
Holder became a fixture at American Junior Golf Association
events, always making sure he was the first coach to arrive in the
morning and the last to leave at night. He spent ten weeks each
summer scouring the nation and beyond for the best talent and
forced others to do the same.
The equipment kept improving. So did instruction. Holder was
convinced his athletes had to improve as well, and that meant they
had to be in better physical condition. He made demanding, thriceweekly
6:30 a.m. aerobics sessions mandatory.
Opposing coaches criticized him and his workouts while competing
for recruits. "If you go to OSU you’ll have to do aerobics,"
they would say. But within a few short years virtually every top program
had adopted a conditioning program.
Holder didn’t ask his players to do anything he didn’t do himself.
He worked out right along with them, never missing a session,
pushing the instructor to push his players — and himself — to their
limits and beyond. On days when there were no aerobics, he and his
stepping machine waged epic battles. Holder was a workout fi end,
and the stepping machine was his torture device of choice. It was
man versus machine in a daily pitched battle of wills. Holder wasn’t
going to quit. As long as the electricity held out, the machine wasn’t
going to quit either.
The sport had experienced a major transformation during the
two-plus decades Holder coached the Cowboys. Much of it was because
of him. When Holder started coaching, coaches rarely watched
their teams compete in tournaments. On the contrary, fearing their
presence might disrupt their players, they often left the grounds
altogether, sometimes even getting together with other coaches to
play a different course. Holder remained close to the action. He began
lingering near the par 3s to offer advice on club selection during
the early 1980s and had recently started walking entire rounds
with players in an attempt to steady their nerves and keep them focused,
prompting other coaches to do the same.
He had also learned at a young age that above and beyond everything
else he did as a coach, the one thing that separated him from
his peers was his ability to raise the money his program needed to
thrive. He needed the money to schedule events outside the Midwest,
which allowed his teams to hone their skills on the best courses
against the best competition. He needed it to fund his ever-growing
recruiting budget, to upgrade his facilities, and to purchase the latest
technology. Most of all, he needed it to make his greatest vision,
the one thing that could elevate Oklahoma State’s golf program to
a level only he envisioned, a reality.
He had set out to build the nation’s most dominant college golf
program, and he achieved it. Not even his detractors could deny
that. His teams won 135 of the 295 tournaments they entered during
his twenty-one years at OSU for a 45.8 winning percentage. They
finished second in 73 more of those tournaments, which meant
Holder’s teams finished in the top two in 70.5 percent of the tournaments
they entered. In nineteen of those twenty-one years, his
teams won the Big Eight Conference championship and finished
either second or tied for second in the two years they failed to win.
He coached seventy-six All-Americans, including twenty-nine firstteam
selections. More than a dozen of his former players, such as
Tway, Bob May, Scott Verplank, and David and Danny Edwards,
were competing on the PGA Tour. Numerous others were playing
on mini-tours and overseas.
But these gaudy statistics, while helpful in recruiting, were not
what drove Holder. Winning national championships was his singular
goal.
He measured his success and failure at the NCAA tournament.
During his tenure, his Cowboys led the nation in top-ten, top-five,
top-three, top-two, and first-place finishes at the NCAA Championships.
Only twice did his teams finish outside the top four at the
NCAA tournament. In thirteen of the fourteen years between 1975
and 1988, his teams finished either first or second. No current coach
had won more than his six national championships.
This 1994–95 team, he knew, on this same course eight months
from now, had the opportunity to make it seven. Given their talent,
it was almost an obligation.
His five returning players had all won All-American honors the
year before. Seniors Alan Bratton, from College Station, Texas, and
Chris Tidland, from Placentia, California, were best friends and
the backbone of his 1994–95 team. Bratton was named national co–
Player of the Year after finishing runner-up to Justin Leonard of
Texas at the 1994 NCAA tournament. He had expected little of Tidland,
who he doubted had the skills to compete at the elite level.
But Tidland had surprised him by blossoming into a first-team
All-American in 1993 and honorable mention the following year.
The most experienced player on the roster, Tidland finished in the
top twenty in twenty-five of the forty-five tournaments he entered
and proved his taste for a good fight when he took Tiger Woods to
the twentieth hole of an epic Western Amateur match that summer,
a match won when Tidland birdied the twentieth and Tiger
eagled it.
Junior Kris Cox was another fi rst-team All-American from Lafayette,
Louisiana, and one of Holder’s more consistent players. Cox’s
72.15 scoring average the previous season was second only to Bratton’s
71.28.
Trip Kuehne’s transfer from Arizona State to Oklahoma State
completed Holder’s team in ways he could not have predicted. Trip
was an outstanding student and player and would have been an asset
to any team, but it was his personality as much as his game that
made him such an ideal fit. Bratton and Tidland were inseparable
at home and on the road, always talking about the game, always
working on their swings. Kuehne’s friendship with Cox balanced
out the foursome; sophomore Leif Westerberg served as the easygoing
fifth wheel.
Holder had been billed the "Most Feared Man in College Golf" in
a Golf Digest article published in 1991 that was as damaging as it was
accurate. He had been known to chew out players for their behavior
on the course — even if those players competed for other teams.
When his teams played poorly, he was prone to tantrums, which
became known throughout college golf. His legendary scuffle with
Tway spoke to Holder’s demanding standards and the lengths to
which he’d go to uphold them. At one tournament without a practice
range, Holder was the only coach with the foresight to bring
practice balls and a shag bag, balls he dutifully retrieved for each of
his five players during warm-ups. It was hard labor, but Holder was
willing to give his players an advantage as he fetched one hundred
golf balls five times over each day. Tway had the nerve to complain.
He didn’t like that the balls were dirty. Enraged by Tway’s sense of
entitlement, Holder jumped him and the grappling began.
He had mellowed significantly through the years. If he hadn’t
toned down his hot-tempered ways, he would have driven himself
out of coaching, but the reality didn’t change people’s perceptions,
and his reputation began working against him. Rival coaches were
promoting the idea that he was too strict and too demanding. Playing
golf for Mike Holder was no fun, they claimed. Wasn’t college
supposed to be fun?
Now, there was turbulence in Holder’s world. In the 1991–92 season,
Oklahoma State did not win a single regular-season tournament
for the first time in history. Worse, the Cowboys had their
streak of eight consecutive conference titles snapped.
Holder had been forced to make some concessions after his team
finished twelfth at the 1993 NCAA Championships in Nicholasville,
Kentucky. Even more embarrassing to Holder, they never contended
and wouldn’t even have made the fifteen-team cut if several other
teams had not collapsed. The college landscape was changing.
College programs were producing more quality players than ever
before. That unprecedented depth affected Holder’s teams’ dominance.
Moreover, schools were allocating more resources to college
golf. Coaches were getting better, and schools such as Arizona State,
Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Stanford threatened Oklahoma State’s
place atop the throne.
Holder had to arrive at the course even earlier and stay even later
to be the first to arrive and the last to leave at junior tournaments.
He noticed the tournaments were now crowded with other coaches
competing for the nation’s top players. Some wondered if the Cowboys
dynasty was in decline.
Holder adapted and evolved, as he always had.
He’d never liked transfers to his program. They violated one of
Holder’s credos: "Finish what you started." But his assistant coach,
Bruce Heppler, convinced him to make an exception for Kuehne,
who had initially spurned OSU for Arizona State but wanted to
join his younger brother, Hank, who had decided to attend college
in Stillwater.
More changes: Holder had recruited foreign players before, but
never sight unseen. But he knew that the best player in Sweden was
better than the thirtieth-best player in the United States, so when he
heard about Leif Westerberg, a product of the Swedish junior golf
program, Holder offered a scholarship immediately. Westerberg
made good on the offer, making honorable mention All-American
as a true freshman.
Despite the relative woes of the current team, Holder was as
proud of them for what they accomplished in the classroom as
for what they did on the course. He knew they worked hard at the
game, but it was gratifying to know that all five of his starters were
also named to the Big Eight’s All-Academic team.
The problem was, for whatever reason, the 1994–95 team had yet
to scratch the surface of its potential.
Kuehne joined the team before the 1993–94 season and made
an immediate impact, finishing third in scoring average and being
named third-team All-American. Westerberg solidified the five
spot, and Bratton, Tidland, and Cox continued to mature. Holder
was convinced, just as his players were convinced, that they were
the best team in the country. Nobody could tell them otherwise after
they won eight of the sixteen tournaments they entered during
the 1993–94 season and finished no lower than fifth in the others.
Holder was confident he had the nation’s best team heading into
Stonebridge for the 1994 NCAA Championships.
Nobody who knew college golf would have picked Stanford to
win that tournament. But when the smoke cleared, it was the Cardinal
who flew home with the championship trophy. They weren’t
the best team in the country that season, but they had turned in the
best aggregate score after four rounds at the NCAAs. Such was the
fickle nature of college golf. If there was one thing Holder learned
from firsthand experience during his twenty-one years of coaching
college golf, it was that the best team didn’t always win.
Now media members drawn to the long-overlooked sport because
of the presence of one of the game’s greatest prodigies, media
members who didn’t understand the college game the way he
did, were calling Stanford one of the greatest golf teams ever assembled.
Stanford was formidable. No question. They had replaced
their worst player from their national championship team with by
far the greatest young talent Holder had ever seen. But not even the
presence of Tiger Woods, whose rare skill Holder had been admiring
for six years, could convince Holder that Stanford was the better
team.
