federal Title IX regulations, which require female teams to equal male teams) to twenty-one sports. Georgia’s prominence across the board in athletics is amply displayed in the annual results for the Sears Directors’ Cup, which recognizes the top collegiate athletic programs in the country. Georgia finished second in Sears Cup standings in 1998–99 and third in 2000–01.
Dooley led the athletic association’s effort to donate some $2 million to the University of Georgia for the recruitment of [non-athletes], and funds have also been made available to the university for the construction and expansion of many facilities on campus.
Dooley was also instrumental in bringing to Athens three sporting events (women’s soccer, rhythmic gymnastics, and volleyball) of the 1996 Olympic Games and served six years on the advisory committee to the Atlanta Olympic Organizing Committee . . .
(The former coach/AD also provided $100,000 of his personal funds to seed and to personally lead a fundraising effort for endowment of the university’s library. That leadership effort by Dooley has grown into an endowment now exceeding $4 million, UGA’s fourth largest single endowment.)
Dooley’s four decades in UGA athletics were not without tribulations. He was bruised in the 1980s when professor Jan Kemp ignited a national scandal and heaped scorn on Georgia’s reputation with a lawsuit charging that she was wrongfully fired for speaking out against preferential treatment given to athletes. Kemp accused UGA officials of recruiting athletes who could run like the wind but were not as swift in the classroom, then putting them in watered-down “developmental studies” programs to keep them eligible to play football. She won more than a million dollars and her job back. Dooley was also criticized for his choice of Ray Goff as head football coach and Ron Jirsa as head basketball coach, both of whom he later had to fire. Dooley didn’t actually hire Goff. He had taken a leave as coach and athletic director in 1988 to consider a run for governor. Goff was hired by President Charles Knapp before Dooley returned.
More recently, Dooley had to preside in his capacity as athletic director over the messy 2003 scandal involving head basketball coach Jim Harrick and his assistant coach son, Jim Harrick Jr., when the latter was caught giving players unearned grades so they could maintain eligibility. We will look at the Harrick controversy in more detail later.
The Kemp episode is well-remembered as a low point in Bulldog history and it especially burns in the memories of many who love UGA not for its football team but for its scholarly pursuits. The scandal cost then-UGA President Fred Davison and the two defendants—Virginia Trotter, vice president for academic affairs, and Leroy Ervin, director of the developmental studies program—their jobs, but when the dust-up was over, Dooley still had his. (Kemp returned to her teaching position in the developmental studies program for a time but then retired, and recently passed away.)
“Lest we forget,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Mark Bradley reminded his readers in 2003, “Dooley was both the football coach and athletic director when the Jan Kemp trial convened, and somehow he stayed above the fray.”
Of course, Vince Dooley had not yet even heard of Michael Adams. When he did, it was through one of his closest and oldest friends, Don Leebern. As it unfolded, the Dooley-Adams-Leebern triangle became one of the central elements in the dispute between Adams and the University of Georgia Foundation.
Donald Melwood Leebern, Jr., is the grandson of Lafayette D. “Fate” Leebern, who arrived in Columbus, Georgia, during the Great Depression and set about making a fortune in illegal liquor and gambling. Fate Leebern gained a measure of respectability in Columbus, where he ran a hotel and other legitimate businesses and where he founded a wine and liquor distributorship the day after Prohibition was repealed in 1938. That enterprise, the Columbus Wine Company Distributors, is said to have unloaded the first carload of legal liquor in Columbus following the end of Prohibition. Fate Leebern was shot dead in 1946 in the high dice room of the Southern Manor night club in Phenix City, Alabama, allegedly by Dixie Mafia gambling kingpin Hoyt Shepherd. Witnesses implicated Hoyt Shepherd in the murder, but his brother, Grady Shepherd, confessed and claimed self-defense. Both Shepherds were indicted, tried, and acquitted. After Fate Leebern’s death, his only son, Donald M. Leebern Sr., ran the business until his own death in 1957, when Don Leebern Jr. took over the highly regulated but hugely profitable family-owned liquor empire while still a UGA undergraduate.
Today, the company that Fate Leebern began in 1938 is called Georgia Crown Distributing Company. An industry newsletter describes it as “a full-service beverage distributor, with wholesale operations doing business in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, selling imported and domestic spirits, wines, beers and specialty products.”
The company, like all liquor distributors in Georgia, operates as a monopoly thanks to a beneficent Georgia legislature. Georgia laws—largely unchanged since the 1930s—protect liquor distributors by requiring that retailers purchase through a wholesaler, rather than directly from distillers and brewers. To ship alcoholic beverages into Georgia, the producer must appoint a single distributor for a specified territory in the state. Once the producer chooses a wholesaler he cannot change wholesalers without demonstrating due cause and getting approval from the state Department of Revenue. Producers of alcoholic beverages are forbidden from owning a wholesale distributorship and wholesalers cannot own retail stores. Retailers are required to purchase from the designated wholesaler at whatever price the wholesaler sets. And once the alcoholic beverage is delivered to the retail store, it cannot be moved to any other licensed location, even to another store owned by the same retailer.
This three-tier system has long been criticized by consumer advocates as overly costly to consumers. A Georgia Public Policy Foundation study of the state’s liquor laws concluded that the laws stifle competition. “They protect a monopoly controlled by a small number of wholesalers, who siphon off 18–25 percent of the cost to retailers, increasing prices for consumers, hurting producers such as small to mid-size wineries and making liquor distribution the most expensive in the packaged-good industry. There is no public policy reason why producers should not be able to sell directly to retailers, the public or grocers whether on the Internet or through other traditional sales methods.” However, a state house legislative study committee looked into the liquor distribution system and concluded that it works just fine, a judgment that was a testament to the power of Georgia’s liquor lobby and distributors like Donald Leebern. They give generously and they don’t mind calling in favors.
Basically, Don Leebern inherited a cash cow and has grown it into a cash herd. He probably couldn’t have done any better even if he had that degree in business administration that he never completed at the University of Georgia, where he played varsity football in 1957–59 under Coach Wallace Butts but didn’t earn a diploma.
While at UGA, Leebern also courted and married a former Miss Georgia. Don and Betsy Leebern made a handsome couple, rich and rabid Bulldog backers. When Vince and Barbara Dooley arrived in Athens in 1963, they soon developed a close and powerful friendship with the Leeberns.
The Leeberns spent nights with the Dooleys and sat with Barbara when they attended Georgia’s home football games. After Dooley left the sidelines to become exclusively the athletic director, the Leeberns joined the Dooleys in their sky box at Sanford Stadium. In turn, the Dooleys stayed with Betsy and Don Leebern when they went to Columbus or to their beach condo on St. Simons Island. The couples took trips together nearly every year to New York for the annual College Football Hall of Fame dinner. Their relationships extended to their children. Daniel Dooley and Donald Leebern III (Little Don) were roommates at UGA. The Leebern and Dooley daughters were in the same UGA sorority.
A career like Dooley’s, spanning decades as head football coach and athletic director of an NCAA Division I power, is a magnet for attracting casual friendships. This was no casual friendship. Vince and Barbara Dooley have lots of friends in and outside of Georgia but few, if any, became closer to them than Don and Betsy Leebern.
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