If all had gone as initially planned, Dave Murray would have had a championship running career at the University of Montana, and perhaps gone on to coach the Grizzlies track team, or maybe flourished as a high school teacher in Sacramento, California, where he got his first full-time job.
But life is all about changes. Dave Murray’s life changed forever the day he moved to Tucson in the fall of 1962.
Thirty-six years later, on a brilliant autumn afternoon in Lawrence, Kansas, Murray drove across a bumpy dirt road to the Rim Rock Farm, arriving at the shrine of American distance running, the site of the next day’s NCAA Cross Country championships.
Murray, who had been a record-setting quarter-miler in his days as an Arizona Wildcat, 1962-64, wanted to run the course himself. He wanted to run past the statues of Olympic legends Billy Mills, Glen Cunningham and Jim Ryun.
He wanted to be able to tell his superstar distance runners, Amy Skieresz and Abdi Abdiraham, what to expect the next morning, when both would be among the favorites to win national championships.
Murray, who is No. 37 on our list of Tucson’s top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years, returned to his hotel with a lot to talk about. Tucson auto dealer Jim Click, himself an avid runner and one of Murray’s regular running and cycling partners, was waiting in the lobby.
“I didn’t want that run to end,” Murray told me that afternoon in Kansas. “It’s one of the greatest venues in college sports.”
The next day, Skieresz and Abdirahman both finished No. 2 in the nation. At times, Murray and Click ran alongside the two All-Americans, sometimes for a mile at a time. By 1998, success wasn’t anything new to Murray.
His UA men’s cross country teams had won a remarkable seven Pac-10 championships between 1983 and 1999, a feat made more impressive in that it came during a period when Oregon coach Bill Dellinger, WSU’s John Chaplin and Stanford’s Vin Lananna, were the equivalent of a 1990s college basketball coaching trio of Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith and Lute Olson.
Murray had coached so many All-Americans, Olympians and NCAA champions — among them Skieresz, Abdirahman, Marc Davis, Matt Giusto, Kim Gallagher, Aaron Ramirez, Martin Keino, Tom Ansberry, Thom Hunt and Ed Mendoza — that success was nothing new.
But over 35 years, his UA teams never slumped or trailed off or became also-rans. After Skieresz became the greatest female distance runner in Pac-10 history, winning seven NCAA championships and was four times voted the league’s track athlete of the year, Murray recruited the soon-to-be 2001 national cross country champion, Tara Chaplin, from Middlesex, Vermont.
Dave Murray retired from the UA in 2002 but hasn’t stopped coaching. He continues to advise Abdi Abdirahman, who competed in his fifth Olympics at the Tokyo Games.
Murray went out on top, retiring in 2002.
Recruited to Arizona out of San Bernardino Valley College in 1962 — he had transferred from Montana to his hometown community college after one year in Missoula — Murray was soon identified as a young man with an IQ and personality to coach and mentor young athletes.
When UA track coach Carl Cooper, the man who recruited Murray, left the school to become executive director of the U.S. Track and Field Federation, Murray was hired as the UA’s interim head coach. He was 26.
The son of a retired Army colonel from San Bernardino, Murray had also been a young basketball standout for the Pacific High School Pirates. After teaching one year at Bellas Vista High School in Sacramento, he returned to Arizona in 1967 as Cooper’s graduate assistant.
Murray has lived in Tucson since. And although he retired from the UA almost two decades ago, it didn’t mean he stopped coaching. He has been UA legend Abdi Abdirahman’s personal coach since he recruited him from Pima College in 1996.
“Dave is like my second father,” Abdirahman said. “He is the best you can get.”
Abdirahman made his fifth Olympic appearance at the Tokyo Games, in the marathon. The two speak daily, detailing workout schedules and coach-mentor strategies.
“Sometimes the kids say I’m too calm,” Murray told me the night Abdirahman qualified for the USA Olympic team at the 2000 Olympic Trials in Sacramento, “But tonight I couldn’t help but show my emotion. I was so happy I felt like I had made the Olympic team.”
And in a way, he has.
