Sixth in a series. Every day this week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will present a story on the many influences of Vince Dooley at the University of Georgia. The field at Sanford Stadium will be named in his honor Saturday.
It’s fitting that, on the same weekend that Georgia is naming its football field after Vince Dooley, the Bulldogs are expected to announce plans their latest major facilities project.
The UGA Athletic Association’s board of directors will conduct its fall meeting Friday, at which time it is expected to vote on a proposal to build a new multi-million dollar football operations building on campus.
Dooley said he remembers vividly when he first arrived in Athens in December 1963 and surveyed the football fiefdom he’d inherited. He knew immediately that he had a lot of work to do.
To start with, he couldn’t find all his new players.
“The first thing I realized is we needed a dorm,” Dooley told the AJC. “Alabama had what they called the Bear Bryant Hilton and Auburn had Sewell Hall. I get to (UGA), and it took us three days to find the players. They were all over the place. So that had to be the first thing.”
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Construction of McWhorter Hall was completed in 1967, and it housed UGA’s student-athletes until 2004, when it was demolished.
Even more pressing needs soon would become evident. Once the 1964 season began, Dooley realized the Bulldogs desperately needed a better locker room at Sanford Stadium. At the time, the Bulldogs dressed inside their still new digs at the Georgia Coliseum (it wasn’t named Stegeman then). They’d bus down East Campus Road, disembark and enter the stadium through the steps of the East grandstand, where the early-arriving freshmen students and fraternity members would surround them in the earliest version of today’s “Dawg Walk.”
“It was actually a great thing the first two or three years,” Dooley said. “They’d get you ready to play.”
At the time, there was only a small fieldhouse on the eastern end of the field – “more of a shed really,” Dooley said -- and that’s where the Bulldogs would gather at halftime. Only all of them wouldn’t fit inside.
“Only those that had been playing in the game could go in,” Dooley said with a laugh. “There wasn't enough room to let everyone else in. So, if you hadn't played, you had to stay outside.”
The next thing that needed to go was “those damned light poles,” Dooley said. At the time, Georgia had them placed on the sidelines, just outside the field of play. They were an annoyance to both TV cameras and to the team film crews trying to scout games and practices. “They’d blot out the view of two or three players at a time,” Dooley said.
Eventually, the Dooley’s football success would take care of all that. After the Bulldogs won the 1966 SEC championship, Georgia double-decked Sanford Stadium. The light poles eventually were moved to Woodruff Practice Fields, where they remained into the 21st century, and were replaced with state-of-the-art lights around the stadium’s upper rim. The East End was enclosed after Dooley’s 1980 team won the national championship, and new locker rooms were added underneath. The stadium would continue expanding until reaching its current capacity of 92,746. There were seven expansions during Dooley’s tenure.
Taking the stadium from where it was when he showed up to where it is today is one of the reasons UGA is naming the playing surface after Dooley. That will be done in a special ceremony before Saturday’s 4 p.m. game against Murray State.
Georgia Athletic Director Greg McGarity believes that to be a very fitting honor. Perhaps better than any person around, McGarity knows how far the Bulldogs’ athletic department has come in the 56 years since Dooley first showed up. McGarity has been there, literally, every step of the way.
McGarity was just a schoolboy when Dooley came to town. But he was very much involved in UGA athletics.
At the time, Georgia’s entire athletic department was housed inside the Coliseum. The ticket and business offices were on the second floor, Athletic Director Joel Eaves and Dooley were on the third floor, as was the sports-information office. All the assistant football coaches were crammed into one office up on the fourth floor.
McGarity was a budding tennis player. As such, he was befriended by tennis coach and sports-information director Dan Magill, who put McGarity to work as an unpaid assistant, or “go-for.”
“I was that kid that was always around,” said McGarity, who turns 65 on Oct. 1. “Proximity and the small number of staff back in the day, you couldn’t help but know each other. So I'd see coach Dooley every day. You were always around each other, whether it was sports information, the head basketball coach, coach Dooley, coach Eaves, they were all on that floor. So if you were in the office much, you crossed paths with all those people.”
As it turned out, Dooley was a tennis player, too. That was his exercise outlet at the time, and he’d usually play at lunchtime.
“The coaches would exercise at lunch almost daily,” McGarity said. “Handball was a big sport back in those days, so coach (Erk) Russell and coach (Jim) Pyburn would play almost every day. Coach Dooley was a tennis player. A lot of times there wouldn’t be anybody around to play with him. So, I used to be fodder for coach Dooley and some of the other coaches when they needed a match. I remember often being on the tennis courts with coach Dooley and coach Russell and all those men. So I really got to know them.”
Sure enough, McGarity would rise through the ranks of UGA athletics. After lettering on the Georgia tennis team in 1973, he worked as a student assistant in sports information, became assistant sports information director after graduation, coached the women’s tennis team for a season, and eventually became assistant athletic director for facilities and event management under Dooley.
Soon thereafter, Dooley initiated the construction of Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall. Its opening in 1987 meant the abandonment of the Coliseum by the football team and most of UGA’s athletic administration.
“It all changed when the Butts-Mehre Building was built,” McGarity said. “When we were in the Coliseum, everybody was so close with each other; everybody knew everything that was going on because everything functioned out of there. The Coliseum served us so well for probably the first 20 years of coach Dooley’s time here”
And so did the Butts-Mehre. Dooley worked out of the fourth-floor corner office overlooking the track and football practice field for 17 years. McGarity’s office now occupies that space.
The view outside those windows soon will include a multi-story football operations building, the latest addition to what is now quite fittingly known as the Vince Dooley Sports Complex.
On Saturday, another prime piece of UGA real estate will bear Dooley’s name. To McGarity, nothing could be more appropriate.
“The day that the President Morehead and I went over to coach Dooley’s house to tell him about Dooley Field is one that I’ll always remember,” McGarity said. “Those opportunities don’t come around often, if at all. Just to be a part of it and to reflect on all the years that we’ve known each other and to see how everybody has responded and reacted while Coach is able to see it, I just so appreciate it. It’s gonna be a fun day. The sun will be shining on Sanford Stadium and coach Dooley for a pretty special occasion.”
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