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Issue date: 10/15/02 Section: The Daily Extra

KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Debbie Higgins McCall saw herself mentioned in the press for the first time last month. She was surprised, frankly, that it took so long.

She is, after all, Dr. Phil's first wife, the ex-cheerleader he married on Nov. 27, 1970, at Southridge Presbyterian Church in Roeland Park, Kan.

That's Phillip C. McGraw, the TV psychologist Oprah made famous. The "get real" guru whose "Dr. Phil" show is considered the most successful new daytime series in a decade, serving up insta-consults to quarreling siblings and boyfriends with roving eyes.

McCall, who manages a liquor store in the Kansas City suburbs, sometimes calls herself the "secret first wife of Dr. Phil." She had never spoken publicly about their four-year marriage, which she claims failed because he had a roving eye. In recent years friends advised her to "call Oprah." But, she said, she wasn't emotionally prepared to go public.

McGraw mentioned the failed marriage in a recent Newsweek cover story: "I was the big football player, and she was the cheerleader. This was just the next thing to do." It just didn't work out, he said.

McGraw has not given interviews since the show began last month, his publicity staff said last week. In previous interviews and his own books, he has mentioned his Kansas City connection only in passing.

In fact, McGraw spent his formative teen years here, playing football and being just one of the guys in the Class of `68 at Shawnee Mission North High School and working part time at Hallmark Cards Inc.

McGraw is remembered fondly by his coach and the guys who played football with him. He played all three years, recalled Larry Taylor of Overland Park, Kan., former head football coach and teacher at North.

McGraw was a tackle his senior year on a varsity team that finished 9-0, the best in Kansas in 1967. Ed Dallam was the quarterback of that team.

"(McGraw) was really an outstanding member of that team, high-quality, hard-worker type of player," said Dallam, now a dentist in Kansas City. "I think he was singularly focused. I think he saw, obviously, furthering his educational pursuit was going to do things for his life and make his life better, easier, more fun. And that sports was a vehicle for him pursuing that. I think that was a major motivating factor for him."

Other than the time he spent on the field, Taylor's dominant memory of McGraw is "seeing him and the gal that was the cheerleader. They spent a lot of time together as time went on through his school career."

In fact, that gal _ Debbie Higgins _ and McGraw were inseparable once they started dating in their junior year. Mr. and Mrs. McGraw, some people called them, years before it became official.

Though McGraw's publicity handlers say he has talked about his first marriage on several occasions, those mentions have gone largely unnoticed by his classmates.

It was the reference in Newsweek last month that started McCall's phone ringing. Lots of friends called. So did reporters. And to avoid the media, she got caller ID. She has since heard that out-of-town reporters trying to get the story have offered her friends as much as $200 for their high school yearbooks.

"If he had mentioned our marriage from the very beginning," she said, "I think the public would not have made an issue of it and find it more endearing that he had some insight being involved in a failed marriage."

McCall's parents didn't allow her to date until she was 16. Even then dating was slow. She quickly discovered that her older brother was threatening to beat up any boy who asked her out.

So when McGraw asked her for a date one day between classes, she said yes, even though she didn't know him. McGraw was taller than her brother so she figured he wouldn't be intimidated.

On their first date, McGraw got her home five minutes late and her mother grounded her for a month. But he called her every day. As a boyfriend, McGraw was kind and sensitive, McCall said, a gentleness captured in a yearbook photo of them dancing at the 1967 homecoming dance. McCall is wearing her homecoming queen tiara, and McGraw, in a white dinner jacket, is holding her close.

They continued the romance long-distance after they graduated. In the fall of 1968 she moved to Springfield to attend Southwest Missouri State and he went to play football at Tulsa. Unable to pay for more than a year in Springfield, McCall moved home to Roeland Park and enrolled at Johnson County Community College and hairdressing school, she said.

McGraw, injured while playing football at Tulsa, had also moved closer to family. He went to Texas, where his dad had begun practicing psychology.

McCall said McGraw asked her to move to Lubbock, where he had taken a job at a health spa. In November 1970 they returned to Roeland Park to get married in McCall's childhood church. Both were 20 at the time.

Eventually they moved to Topeka, where McGraw built and owned a health spa, McCall said. In marriage he was not the kind, sensitive boyfriend he'd been in high school, she claims. He did not allow her to get involved in the business; her domain was their home. He wanted her to always "look nice," which included lifting weights to bulk up her chest, she said.

McGraw, who has been married to his second wife since 1976, has admitted that as a young man, his entrepreneurial efforts in everything from health clubs to motivational seminars often came at the expense of his second family.

He and his wife, Robin, have two grown sons. He and McCall had no children together.

Under his domineering personality, McCall said she felt like a tightly coiled spring that finally popped back to life. The marriage ended when friends and neighbors questioned his commitment to the marriage.

"When I confronted him about his infidelities he didn't deny these girls and told me that it had nothing to do with his feelings toward me, to grow up, that's the way it was in the world," McCall said.

The relationship ended when she left him in 1973 and moved back to Kansas City, she said.

"I understand that in any relationship there are two sides to the story," she said. "In my relationship with Phil, I have kept my side quiet for all these years because I couldn't see any good coming from sharing it."

For his part, McGraw told Newsweek: "We never had a cross word. We just sat down and said, `Why did we do this?'''

McCall is talking about it now because people and the media are asking. The last time she saw McGraw was at their 30th reunion a few years ago, just as he was making a name for himself as Dr. Phil.

Hey, isn't that guy on TV, some classmates said. As curious classmates watched, McGraw and his first wife spoke only briefly

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