There was always something next for former Notre Dame women’s basketball head coach Muffet McGraw during a Hall of Fame career.
The next scout. The next practice. The next team meeting. The next trip to an opposing arena. The next game. The next postseason. The next recruiting class. The next season.
Next.
That’s the way it went for 33 seasons in South Bend for McGraw, who took over a nothing Notre Dame program in the late 1980s and made it something. For many around South Bend, a place she still calls home, she made it everything.
The place to be. The team to watch. A group that became so good for a head coach who was so driven that Final Fours went from a dream to a destination.
The last one here. The next one there. Stacking trips to the college basketball promised land like stockpiling firewood for another long Midwest winter.
There were two truths to those Northern Indiana winters — the days and nights would be cold, and the Irish women would be good. So many wins. So many moments. So many missed opportunities for McGraw to unwind with a Corona Lite and reflect on what it all meant.
That rarely happened. Always too much to do to keep the hoops hamster wheel spinning. It reached a point where everything seemingly ran itself. Just flip on the autopilot and watch Notre Dame women’s basketball rack up another season of 30-plus wins, of a conference tournament championship, of a deep NCAA Tournament run, another chase of a national championship.
It often felt that way, but never to McGraw.
“It was so different back then,” McGraw said during one of many honest moments in early May in a 38-minute sit-down at the Side Door Deli of Martin’s Heritage Square, an easy/accessible meeting place near her Granger home. “You know, I was always worried — what’s going to happen?”
Worried that she might not win enough to keep her job. Worried that she wouldn’t meet expectations, though they were once so minimal for a head coach whose program played in front of 330 fans that first home game against Northwestern in November 1987. Worried that it might all end before it ever got started.
The day McGraw sat and talked and laughed and reflected on her Hall of Fame career was five days short of the anniversary of her hiring at Notre Dame — May 18, 1987. It has been more than 39 years since former Notre Dame athletic director Gene Corrigan took a chance on an unknown from Philadelphia who had coached the previous five seasons at Lehigh.
Muffet who?
Thirty-three seasons, 848 victories, nine Final Fours, seven national championship games and two national championship banners later, everything worked out. Nobody saw any of that coming back then.
Not Corrigan. Not Notre Dame. Certainly, not McGraw.
“No way,” she said. “We came in with a five-year plan. If it didn’t work out, we could always go home (to Philadelphia). We had no idea what we were getting into.
“It was exciting. It was challenging.”
It was nerve-racking, a feeling that followed McGraw from that first game against Northwestern in 1987 to that last one against Pittsburgh on March 4, 2020. One time before a road game at Valparaiso, McGraw bumped into legendary basketball coach Homer Drew in an arena back hallway. She was a wreck, and asked Drew when he stopped being nervous before games.
Never.
“He said when you do, you should retire,” McGraw said. “I was like, ‘OK. Good.’ Every game, I felt like this could be the end.”
Instead, it would often be another win. Another year of a single digit ranking next to the Notre Dame name. Another season that stretched deep into March. Another run at a coveted national championship.
So much fun for everyone around the program, except for one. The one whose statue stands sentry outside the south entrance of Purcell Pavilion.
If there’s a regret, it would be that everyone around the Notre Dame women’s basketball head coach found so much joy in every memorable night, except the Notre Dame women’s basketball head coach.
“I didn’t enjoy the big moments along the way,” McGraw said. “You always ended the season with a loss, except twice. You’re always nervous. You’ve always concerned.
“I was never happy.”
There weren’t any hours in a day during the season for happiness. Never time to stop for a minute and think about what Notre Dame had done. Never time to ponder what it meant for a program that did all it did on McGraw’s watch. And it did a ton.
She remembers one time in 2001, when both Notre Dame basketball programs still had office space in the Joyce Center. The men’s program, which had staggered through 10 seasons between NCAA Tournament appearances, had won the Big East West Division regular-season championship. Head coach Mike Brey printed up T-shirts to pass around the office. They raised a Big East West Division banner in the arena. They celebrated something that has little significance now but once meant everything.
That same year, the women’s program went 15-1 and won the Big East regular season championship. Their rewards were pins or watches or whatever the conference trinket. McGraw barely noticed.
“I was like, pick up your stuff at the secretary’s desk; we’ve got bigger things to do,” she said of a season that ended with the first of two national titles. “I wish we would have celebrated along the way, just the big wins and the big moments, but you were like, I never want to get too high, never want to get too low. I think I stayed in the middle.”
∎∎∎
On April 22, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and on the heels of a disastrous 13-18 season that often left her in tears after losses, McGraw called it a career. After 33 seasons on the Notre Dame sideline, there wouldn’t be a 34th. All those nexts would become nows.
With it has come a certain freedom that she never knew as a head coach, when she was married to the calendar as much as she was to Matt, her husband of 49 years and counting.
A family member’s wedding that fell during basketball season? Probably not going to make it. An impromptu vacation that might conflict with summer recruiting? Maybe next year. For 33 years, it was the job and often the job alone for McGraw.
Walking away from basketball allowed her to walk into a different chapter of her life. Don’t call it retirement. That’s for someone to sit alone in a chair and stare out over the same landscape for hours at a time with little to occupy their time.
These days, the 70-year-old McGraw has so much she can do that the next time she stops and thinks about how much she misses basketball, how much she misses coaching, how much she misses her previous life might be the first time.
Seriously. When McGraw walked away and walked off into the Zoom sunset that April day, she never thought about going back. Not ever.
To the gym. To the grind. To anything. To everything. It was like she woke up the morning of April 22, 2020, a basketball head coach, then woke the morning of April 23, 2020, someone else. Someone set to enjoy a new life.
Go back? Get lost.
“Oh, no, never,” McGraw said of scratching even the slightest coaching itch just once more. “I don’t miss it at all. You have such tunnel vision when you coach that my whole life was about ‘did we win’ or ‘did we lose’ and ‘am I recruiting?’
“All of a sudden, I quit coaching and was like, ‘Oh, my God. There’s a lot going on in the world and I can do so many more things.’”
Like volunteer at the Food Bank of Northern Indiana. Like help write a children’s book. Like “work” as a studio analyst for Atlantic Coast Conference games. Like travel. On this day, the McGraws had recently returned from a trip that took them to Budapest, Prague, Salzburg and Vienna. She has gone days without staring at her cell phone.
Like play golf. Like swing over to their “vacation” home in Chicago where she spends time with her son Murphy and his family, which includes a two-year-old granddaughter, Sienna Olivia.
On most days, she’s Muffet. In Chicago, she’s MiMi (grandma definitely won’t fly). On so many days in a row, she can just be in the moment. She doesn’t have to worry about UConn. She doesn’t have to recruit against Duke.
“I love traveling,” McGraw said. “I used to think, ‘Thank, God. Can I just not get on a plane for a month?’ It’s a different kind of travel now, just to be able to see the world. I would go to really nice places (as a college coach), and I wouldn’t see a thing except for the gym.”
Gyms are so yesterday for McGraw, who feels an absolute disconnect to the program that she once called her own. She couldn’t be happier.
She talks with head coach Niele Ivey “all the time,” but she doesn’t drop by Rolfs Hall unannounced for practice. She rarely attends home games, save for a special occasion.
She didn’t realize on the day she sat and spoke at Martin’s that it was the same week as ACC spring meetings in Florida. She might call the basketball office to connect with Ivey or an assistant and not realize that they’re on the road recruiting.
Everything she knew about the college basketball calendar, she’s forgotten.
“I left it all behind,” she said.
She didn’t leave everything about that past life behind. After all those winters — and all those wins — she and Matt had their pick of places to call home. They could move to Arizona. They could move to Florida. Thedy could pick a place to enjoy year-round sunshine — and year-round golf.
They stayed in the same home in the same Granger subdivision where they raised Murphy.
“I love this community,” she said. “The people here are so generous. They were so supportive of us throughout my career here. This community, the people make the place.”
There was a time in her previous life when spending 38 minutes talking about a subject she preferred not to discuss — herself — felt like 38 years. These 38 minutes roll by in a breezy, easy snap, so much so that when the recorder is turned off and it’s just two people in a side booth talking, McGraw doesn’t immediately move.
There’s nowhere to be.
No more staff meetings. No more film study. No more practices or seasons. No recruit to well, recruit. If it wasn’t so blustery and raw this May morning, she might squeeze in nine holes of golf. Maybe tomorrow.
Myriad options abound for how to spend this day. And the next and the next. Now, she’s married only to Matt, not to the calendar and definitely not to the game. Someone she might not have heard from in too long might call and say, let’s do this. Let’s go there.
She can. She will.
What’s next now? Nothing. Something. Anything. Everything.
McGraw’s final words before she leaves the booth on this May day best put a period on it.
“Life is good.”
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This is the first part of a three-part series of stories on Muffet McGraw as part of an ongoing “America 250” celebration by USA Today Company, spotlighting sports figures who have made an impact in the communities we cover. The second part will be a wide-ranging Q&A, with part three covering her viral women’s equality speech ahead of the 2019 Final Four. All stories will be published online at southbendtribune.com and ndinsider.com.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: The new normal for Notre Dame women’s basketball legend Muffet McGraw
Reporting by Tom Noie, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
