asked me when Dooley was going to retire. I said, ‘Why would the king want to abdicate his throne?’” Bestwick said Adams seemed disappointed with that answer.
Dooley recalled another early incident that gave him pause. In the fall of 1998 Uga owner and breeder Sonny Seiler asked Dooley to participate in a “changing of the dogs” ceremony at halftime of an upcoming Georgia football game. Dooley was to remove the collar from the retiring Uga V and ceremonially place it on the new mascot, Uga VI. A week before the ceremony, Dooley got a telephone call from Senior Vice President Tom Landrum saying that Adams wanted to participate in the ceremony. “Landrum said, ‘Mike sees it as a great photo-op.’ I said by all means but I thought to myself that the photo-op was typically political Mike Adams,” Dooley said.
When the cast of characters assembled on the field at Sanford Stadium during halftime, Dooley said he wanted Adams as president to have a prominent part in the ceremony. Dooley suggested that he remove the collar from Uga V and ceremoniously hand it to Adams to then place on Uga VI. Adams nodded his approval of the idea. But when Dooley knelt and removed the collar from Uga V, Adams snatched it from his hand and displayed it for the cameras before Dooley could even stand up. It was a trivial matter, but Dooley was taken aback.
“Up until then, I had not worked for someone whose primary motivation in all things would be so politically self-promoting and ego-driven,” said Dooley. “Prior to that incident, I had many people tell me about the ego and pompous attitude of [Adams], to which I’d paid little attention. But I have to admit that after encountering his display at the changing of the dog, I saw it firsthand.”
Dooley also encountered Adams’s famous temper early one morning in 2002 when he received an irate telephone call at home. Dooley recalls the testy telephone conversation thusly:
“Hello?”
“This is Mike Adams.”
“How are you doing, Mr. President?”
“Not good.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like what I read in the paper this morning.”
“What did you read?”
“I don’t like reading about an unauthorized stadium expansion.”
Dooley said he explained, as the paper stated, that it was only a preliminary study but Adams replied that neither he nor any members of the athletic board had authorized the study “and this kind of unauthorized action upsets them.”
Dooley said he was by this point in the conversation becoming irritated at Adams’s abruptness. He reminded Adams, who chairs the athletics board, that he had brought the matter up at the previous board meeting.
“I have no recollection of that,” Adams said.
“That’s your opinion.”
“My opinion counts.”
“Mine does, too,” Dooley responded.
After the conversation, Dooley said he researched the minutes of the athletics board and found reference to the study. He had a copy of the minutes hand-delivered to Adams’s office later that morning. Adams never again mentioned the matter even though the two men sat together that very night at a dinner event.
Dooley said he tried to convince Adams that to have good two-way communications between the president and athletic director they needed to meet monthly. The arrangement had worked well with Adams’s predecessors Fred Davison, Henry King Stanford, and Charles Knapp, but Adams rejected the idea.
“I think because I recommended it and it worked well with other presidents he didn’t want that kind of relationship. In fact he told me once that under different circumstances he would have had me reporting to a senior administrator. But the fact is this kind of communication between president and athletic director has become standard procedure among universities and is highly recommended by the NCAA. He didn’t want that. Now he does it with [Dooley’s successor, Athletic Director Damon] Evans and I am pleased that is the case.”
Adams’s tendency of not following traditions established by former presidents also showed up in other relationships. For more than fifty years it had been a tradition of Georgia presidents to join the Athens Rotary Club. Presidents O. C. Aderhold, Fred Davison, Henry King Stanford, and Chuck Knapp were all Rotarians. This association served them well in establishing good relationships in Athens. Adams wanted no part of any local civic group, and his critics allege that this attitude was a major reason for a less than friendly “Town-Gown” relationship that developed.
Dooley said it became clear early on that Adams would use his role as chair of the UGA Athletics Board to make his presence felt more than most presidents in intercollegiate athletics. Soon after Adams’s arrival, Dooley brought in two outside consultants to evaluate UGA’s athletics program and to make recommendations for improvements.
Eugene F. Corrigan, former athletic director at the University of Virginia and Notre Dame and retired commissioner of the ACC, and Chuck Neinas, Big Eight commissioner and former executive director of the College Football Association, spent two days on the Athens campus in January 1999 interviewing administrators and coaches. Their official report, written by Corrigan and addressed to Dooley, generally praised UGA’s athletic programs and facilities and particularly Dooley’s tenure as AD. The report noted that a good relationship and direct access between the athletic director and the president was critical to both parties. The report said:
“It has always seemed to me that one of the main jobs of the AD is to protect the interests of the university (and the president) from all the sources both within and attached to athletics which can bring discredit to the institution. It allows the president to spend his time running the university—while always being aware of what is going on in athletics.”
Writing privately to Dooley, Corrigan was more blunt. “In my conversations with Mike Adams I was struck with the fact that this guy from Pepperdine and Centre College seems to want to be involved more closely with football,” Corrigan wrote. “I was quite direct with him and suggested that it was best to leave football issues to his AD (who knows just about everything there is to know about the game). However, he seems to want his board to know that he has contact with the football coach. I hope he heard what I told him, and more important, that he heeds the warnings. Mike should only talk to [head football coach Jim] Donnan at your request, and they both need to know that.”
Corrigan offered his friend Dooley this advice: “Victory is wonderful, but hardly sustainable in a league as competitive as the SEC. Don’t stay too long, because it can eventually only take away from the incredible accomplishments which you have achieved at Georgia. They should name the place for you.”
Corrigan further noted that in his interview with Donnan, the football coach felt he was underpaid compared with other Southeastern Conference coaches. And not long after that assessment Donnan began agitating for a new multi-year contract.
Dooley had hired Donnan from Marshall University, a Division 1AA school in December 1995, a year and a half before Adams arrived. After a 5-6 season in Donnan’s first year, the Bulldogs bounced back in 1997 to post a 10-2 record, losing only to Tennessee and Auburn and beating arch rival Florida 37–17.
Suddenly Jim Donnan was a hot commodity in the coaching ranks. The University of North Carolina, where Donnan had coached for several years under Vince Dooley’s brother, Bill Dooley, came calling with a $1 million offer to coach the Tar Heels. So Dooley began
