The reluctant AD: Holder didn't want job

STILLWATER — The man who sealed Sean Sutton's fate as Oklahoma State's basketball coach never wanted to be an athletic director. Never gave it any thought, really.

Mike Holder was plugging right along as the nation's most successful golf coach until three years ago when his billionaire best friend threw him under the bus — or, as it were, into the OSU athletic director's chair.

"They were looking for a new AD and I said, ‘Well, you got the perfect guy for the job,' ” OSU alumnus and oil magnate T. Boone Pickens said. "They said, ‘Who?' I said, ‘Well, Holder.' It was so obvious to me that you had a guy who could do everything you want to have done.”

Pickens' word and wallet carried a lot of weight.

"(Former OSU President David) Schmidly said ‘We've got to go through a search process.' I said, ‘If you already know who the best man is, why waste money?' But that's what they wanted to do. As far as I was concerned, it was a sham. I was going to make a major gift, and I told them, ‘I'm not making a gift unless I have somebody I'm comfortable with as the AD.'”

Pickens made a record-breaking $165 million donation to the athletic department less than four months after Holder got the job.

But Pickens also had to sell Holder on the idea, which wasn't easy. Over 32 years as OSU's golf coach Holder had raised the funds for and completed an extraordinary golf course, won eight national golf titles, and was pretty content with, what he calls, "kind of our own kingdom for golf.”

But Pickens knew how to push the buttons of a man he considers "like a son.”

"I told him, ‘You figured out how to win in NCAA golf,'” Pickens said. "‘You proved to everybody you've got the best program. In the same way you're going through life with your feet on the handlebars. You figured out how to win, but you haven's had to think for a long time.' And that ticked him off.'”

Ticked him off to the point where he took the job.

It is ironic considering his current position, but in many ways the golf program was a self-sustaining universe Holder built despite an athletic director.

He tells the story of going into the athletic director's office the year after he became the coach and having the AD tell him he was cutting the program's already-small budget. Holder informed the AD that if the budget was cut he was worried the Cowboys wouldn't be able to compete for national championships.

"And he said, ‘Well, we don't necessarily want a national championship contender in golf,'” Holder recalls. "And I don't know of I just thought this or if I actually said it to him, but I thought, ‘Well, you may not want one, but if I'm going to be the coach you're going to have one.' From that day forward I understood