Born in Missouri, Graves was one of ten children of a doctor, and his two given names were surnames of two physicians. He played college football at Missouri from 1906 to 1908, and after his eligibility was used up in the Midwest, he moved to the Northwest and played at Idaho on the Palouse for a season in 1909. After college, Graves played baseball in the minor leagues.
Coaching career
Baseball
Graves was the head coach at Alabama, Texas A&M, and Washington, where he led the Huskies in Seattle for 24 seasons. Graves had a long-standing amicable rivalry with Buck Bailey of Washington State, whom he coached in baseball and football at Texas A&M.
Football
After several years of playing baseball in the minors, he coached football at Alabama, Texas A&M, and what is now Montana State. From 1911 to 1914, he led the Alabama program to a 21–12–3 record. In his only season at Texas A&M in 1918, he compiled a 6–1 record. He then served as an assistant coach at Texas A&M in 1919 under head coach Dana X. Bible. At Montana Agricultural in Bozeman, he had a 5–5–1 record over two seasons. While head coach of the baseball team at Washington, Graves also served as an assistant coach in football to several coaches.
Basketball
Graves was a head basketball coach for six seasons, the first three at Alabama, where he was the program's first coach and compiled a record of 20–12 from 1912 to 1915. He later headed the Texas A&M program for a season and two at Montana Agricultural. At Washington, he was an assistant coach for 24 seasons under head coach Hec Edmundson. Graves had met Edmundson at Idaho when they were undergraduate athletes, and both were head coaches at Texas A&M in the spring of 1919, Edmundson in track and Graves in baseball.
After coaching
After stepping down as baseball coach at Washington, Graves became an assistant athletic director at the university, where he remained until his death. He was also involved with horse racing in the state as a race steward at Longacres in Renton and Playfair Race Course in Spokane.
Death
While visiting Pullman in the spring of 1959, Graves fell and broke a hip. That December, he was hospitalized in Seattle for treatment of a liver ailment and died several weeks later in January 1960 at age 73. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Seattle, about a mile northeast of the university. The UW athletic office building and the two former baseball fields were named for Graves; he was posthumously inducted into the Big W Club, the UW athletics hall of fame, in 1980.
