of Georgia, they probably think that’s the biggest gift they’ve ever given in their life. If they see you squandering money on a $500 dinner that ought to be $100, they’re going to give their money to the First Baptist Church. They’re not going to give it to the University of Georgia. That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t ruin your reputation with the image you’re wasting money.’
“He did not like that one bit,” Knox said. “I knew after that dinner we had trouble on our hands. So we wrote the rules and there was always friction. He was always hedging. If he and Mary went out to dinner we got the bill for it. He would co-opt the system.”
And then comes the firing of Vince Dooley, which opened a Pandora’s box of Georgia tradition, university governance, the breaking of long-term friendships, high-profile hanky-panky, and, as always, intramural contests between the moneyed and the powerful. Through it all, it turns out that Adams held an ace hole card named Donald Leebern.
5
To many in the Bulldog family, the name Vince Dooley is synonymous with the University of Georgia. During his forty-one-year career at Georgia, Dooley became one of the most respected figures in college athletics, serving twenty-five years as head football coach and nine years in the dual roles of coach and athletic director before giving up coaching in 1988 to serve exclusively as AD until 2004. A member of the College Football Hall of Fame, he was successful in one of the country’s elite football conferences, bringing excitement and a sense of pride to his adopted state. His teams won six SEC championships, won eight bowl games and tied two in twenty appearances, and won a national championship. Rather studious for a football coach, Dooley has a master’s degree in history and devours literature about the Civil War. His Athens home and office is filled not only with football memorabilia but with books on a wide range of subjects.
Georgia fans adore Dooley not only because he was successful, but also because they see him as a decent human being. He exhibits patience and good humor, has made thousands of speeches to Bulldog Clubs in even the smallest villages, and remains close to his former players, many of whom—like Billy Payne, who brought the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta—have become leaders in their communities. Others, like the Heisman-winning Herschel Walker, have become icons. All of them love their coach. And high school coaches love Dooley because he made it a policy to recruit Georgia kids first.
During Dooley’s forty-one years with the school’s athletic program, the University of Georgia got its swagger back. Meanwhile, the state of Georgia was dramatically changing. It has grown and prospered and progressed in many areas, race relations being one of the most significant and most visible. Dooley had a low-key hand in that. He had quietly signed five African American football players to scholarships a decade before Herschel Walker burst onto the scene and carried Georgia to a national championship. Horace King, Larry West, Chuck Kinnebrew, Richard Appleby, and Clarence Pope entered UGA in 1971. Forty years later, Dooley can still tick off their names without having to think. He dismisses the notion that their signings were controversial or even courageous acts. The South was rapidly integrating. Integrated high school teams were already competing. Georgia had signed Ronnie Hogue to a basketball scholarship in 1970. By the time Walker arrived, just twenty years after Georgia politicians threatened to close the university rather than admit blacks, bumper stickers proclaiming “Herschel Walker Is My Cousin” began appearing on whites’ pickup trucks across the state. “I think sports did as much or more than any particular activity in the South to encourage acceptance of integration,” Dooley said. “People accepted it. They want to win.”
Although Dooley downplays his part in helping smooth the transition from all-white to integrated athletic teams, his role did not go unnoticed. In 2008, Dooley became only the second recipient of the Selig Mentoring Award given by a committee made up of fifteen Division I-A minority athletic directors. Established in 2007 and named in honor of Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig, the award is presented annually to a person in athletics administration who has been at the forefront in creating equal opportunities for minorities.
Vincent Joseph Dooley was born September 4, 1932, in Mobile, Alabama. He attended McGill High, a Catholic boys’ school run by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. A gifted athlete, Dooley won a scholarship to Auburn University (then Alabama Polytechnic Institute) where he played quarterback for Coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan and basketball for Coach Joel Eaves. After graduating in 1954, Dooley spent two years in the Marine Corps and then took a job as an Auburn assistant football coach.
In 1963, a scandal erupted at Georgia after the Saturday Evening Post published a story alleging that Georgia’s Athletic Director Wallace Butts and Alabama’s Coach Bear Bryant had fixed a football game the previous year. Butts sued for libel and won $3 million in punitive damages, then the largest libel award in U.S. court history (later reduced to $500,000). However, Butts had retired as head football coach in 1960 (succeeded by Johnny Griffith), and he resigned as athletic director before the Post story broke. Georgia then hired Joel Eaves from Auburn to fill the AD job and Eaves tabbed Dooley, then coaching the Auburn freshmen, to take over as head football coach at Georgia, replacing Griffith.
Dooley’s first game was an inauspicious beginning, as Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide gave the Bulldogs a 31–3 “whupping,” but he rebounded quickly and went 7-3-1 and beat Texas Tech in the Sun Bowl in 1964.
Dooley was only thirty-one when he came to Athens, and he had to overcome the lack of previous head coach experience and the stigma of being “an Auburn man.” Not only had he played and coached on the Plains, but he had married an Auburn girl. Auburn and Georgia have the oldest and perhaps most intense gridiron rivalry in the Deep South. After his best season at Georgia in 1980, Dooley received an offer from his alma mater to become head coach and athletic director. It was an overture Dooley felt he had to consider. But by this time he had been at Georgia for seventeen years and the Dooley children had grown up as Bulldogs. He recalls his son Derek, then ten years old, coming to him with tears in his eyes and saying, “Daddy, I hate Auburn.” That pretty much sums up the feelings of both schools’ fans.
Dooley refused Auburn’s offer and went on to beat Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl that year, finish 12-0, and win the national championship. By this time he was also the athletic director, having succeeded the retiring Joel Eaves in 1979. Dooley held both the AD and head football coach jobs until 1988, when he retired from active coaching and Dooley protege Ray Goff was chosen to replace him.
The New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that in his years as head coach:
Dooley would usher the Bulldogs into the era of big-time, big-business college football, winning 201 games . . . and suffering through only one losing season (1977) . . . Dooley was also celebrated for his good fortune against two of Georgia’s worst enemies: He had a 19-6 record against the Georgia Institute of Technology and a 17-7-1 record against the University of Florida. He was unable to go above .500 against his alma mater, however, posting a twenty-five-year record against Auburn of 11-13-1. Nevertheless five of Georgia’s SEC championships were clinched on the plains of Auburn.
. . . He was named National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) National Coach of the Year in 1980 and 1982, and was honored as Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year seven times. He has been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, and the Sun Bowl Hall of Fame.
As impressive as that record is as head football coach, Dooley’s accomplishments as AD were probably even more significant to the university as a whole. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, again:
During his tenure as athletic director, UGA sports teams won [twenty-two] national championships and seventy-five
