director in athletics. Dooley said that Claude Felton, widely regarded as among the very best sports information directors in the country, was targeted by Adams to be one of the staff members that Evans would replace. “While Damon agreed to let go some other staff members that Adams didn’t like, he was smart enough not to let the best communications director in the business go,” Dooley said. “If he had, it would have haunted him the rest of his career.”
The press leak had obviously irritated Adams, but Dooley felt it was incidental. Dooley asked for a meeting with Adams after he had not heard from the president for over two months. He wanted to stem the public controversy that was stirring over his request for a contract extension. Dooley suggested a compromise in order to stifle the controversy. Adams responded that “we will stick with the original contract,” Dooley said, and handed him a copy of a press release scheduled to be sent out immediately announcing the search for a new athletic director to be brought in six months before Dooley’s scheduled retirement. When this was released Dooley still had almost a year and a half left on his contract. Dooley claims that “it was unprecedented and vindictive. Adams was pouring salt on the wound.”
While the controversy over Dooley’s contract was raging, the men’s basketball program was undergoing an NCAA investigation. The NCAA probe centered on basketball players who allegedly were given grades by assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr., without attending class and other violations. Harrick’s father, head basketball coach Jim Harrick, was forced to resign on March 23, 2003.
Adams had personally interceded to bring Harrick to Athens. The two men had become acquainted when Adams was a vice president and Harrick was head basketball coach at Pepperdine University. Harrick later moved to UCLA where he coached the Bruins to a national championship in 1995. But, he was fired the following year for cheating on his expense account and had moved on to Rhode Island, where he was also having success as head coach of the men’s basketball team when UGA went after him.
Harrick wasn’t Dooley’s choice to succeed Ron Jirsa as head basketball coach at UGA. “We didn’t have him on our short list,” recalled Dooley. “We didn’t even have him on our long list to consider because of his past transgressions. We didn’t know him; and he was beginning to get up in age.” Dooley said Adams called him and started talking up Harrick. “Adams said, ‘I knew him when I was at Pepperdine. He’s a good coach.’ I said, ‘I know he’s a good coach. That’s beside the point.’” But Adams insisted that Harrick be added to the list of finalists and it became clear to Dooley that Adams wanted to give him top priority. And after Dooley’s first choice, Delaware coach Mike Brey, cooled to the Georgia job, Dooley said he felt Harrick was the next best choice. In retrospect, Dooley said, it was apparent Brey had gotten “bad vibes” from Adams during his interview. He had been very interested in the job but decided to stay at Delaware, a program with a lesser classification and without the potential of Georgia. A few years later, Dooley said he visited Notre Dame and talked with Mike Brey who had then become Notre Dame’s head basketball coach. Dooley said Brey told him, off the cuff, “I could have worked for you, but I could not have worked for that president of yours.” Dooley said that he was somewhat stunned but later realized what had happened. Adams had shrewdly maneuvered the hiring of Harrick.
Dooley said that he became even more convinced of that after he received a copy of a letter that Adams had written to the father of a high school recruit on June 28, 2002, in which he took credit for hiring Harrick. “I think you know that I was instrumental in hiring Jim Harrick . . . I chair the Athletic Board, which recently approved a contract extension and a pay increase for him . . . Jim Harrick is a longtime friend and an excellent coach,” Adams wrote.
At that time Harrick’s team was doing well and Adams was quick to step out front and take responsibility for hiring him. That would not be the case a short while later.
Not long after his arrival in 2000, Harrick began recruiting talented but troubled athletes such as Tony Cole, a point guard who had left several colleges amid controversy. Cole was dismissed from UGA after female student accused him of sexual assault. After his dismissal from the team, Cole went on ESPN on February 27, 2003, with allegations that he received money and favors from the Harricks while at UGA and that he and two other basketball players were given “A’s” in a “Coaching Principles and Strategic of Basketball” course taught by Jim Harrick, Jr., an assistant basketball coach.
Dooley and Adams made a joint decision to withdraw the basketball team from Southeastern Conference and NCAA tournaments. In a 2003 Athens Magazine article Dooley said, “We’ve had bruises, black eyes and strong winds of criticism, but we’ve always landed on our feet because we had a solid foundation of integrity as a base value.”
The NCAA and the university both quickly began investigations. In April 2004 university officials—including Adams, Dooley, and Harrick—met with the infractions committee in Indianapolis. Harrick by this point had already been forced to resign and his relationship with Adams had soured. Dooley recalls Adams proudly opened the meeting with a ten-minute dialogue mostly about himself and his qualifications and his experience in intercollegiate athletics.
As they broke from the meeting, Adams walked past Harrick and made a light-hearted comment. Harrick was in no mood for levity. “You are the sorriest sack of shit I’ve ever known,” he told a red-faced Adams. “If Adams had said anything back to him there’s no telling what would have happened,” Dooley said, but Adams wisely got out of the way in a hurry.
At the height of the Harrick controversy Adams called a meeting with senior UGA staffers Steve Wrigley, Hank Huckaby, and Tom Landrum. “I’m there with Damon Evans [assistant athletic director] and [sports information director] Claude Felton,” Dooley recalled. “I guess everybody was looking to the president to set the tone of how this crisis was going to be handled. I was shocked and rather suspect others were as well, when Adams said, ‘I want to cut his balls out,’” Dooley recalled.
Dooley said he thought to himself, “What in the hell am I listening to? What kind of leadership is that? Instead of him laying out an overall plan to address the crisis, his primary and only concern, at the moment, was to annihilate Harrick. I wanted Harrick to go and he needed to go, but I wanted us to find the best way of addressing the crisis for all concerned, especially the university. Adams wanted to make it as bad as he could on his old friend.” The incident gave the school a black eye at a time it had been making progress in climbing the academic ladder.
After one staff meeting to consider how to handle the Harrick matter, Dooley said Adams pulled him aside and said, “We both have a stake in this situation. Your legacy and my national reputation.”
Typically, Adams’s concern was more for himself than the university, Dooley said.
Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the NCAA investigation to university officials was the release of a final examination in a course on basketball taught by Harrick Jr. The questions included: “How many points does a three-point goal account for in a game?” “How many halves in a basketball game?” The university, which regularly makes the list of top party schools and had been trying to shake its image as a “football university,” briefly became a punching bag for late-night TV hosts. “I don’t know who was more embarrassed,” quipped Tonight Show host Jay Leno, “the college president, the coach, or the six players who got it wrong.” “It makes us look silly,” Scott Weinberg, then chairman of the faculty’s University Council, complained to the Associated Press.
The NCAA investigation, Adams’s well-known role in hiring the renegade basketball coach, and the ongoing feud over Dooley’s contract extension all came together. It looked as though Adams would be sucked into the vortex of a perfect storm, so widespread was the discontent both on and off campus. But to the media it looked like a sports story.
As tensions mounted, Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports columnist Mark
