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 Southeastern Conference championships, and the program broadened (thanks to 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