The history to which Vince Dooley is bound these days predates even the Sugar Bowl.
It does not invoke the names that stir Georgia Bulldogs senses, like Herschel, Buck, Lindsay or that most evocative of all, Meat Cleaver Weaver. Rather, it’s Lt. Col. William Gaston Delony, C.S.A., who has the old coach’s fullest attention.
A part of making history as the Bulldogs’ championship-winning coach – ancient as it seems to those awaiting another title since 1980 – Dooley is more interested in writing it now. He and co-author Samuel Thomas, Jr. just came out with a book detailing the life and correspondence of Delony, a Confederate cavalryman from Athens. “The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog,” is the eye-grabbing title.
Interesting times to be digging up the exploits of a Reb commander, seriously wounded at Gettysburg yet still a vital part of the retreat south.
Heroic by any measure: “He was a leader from the front, and if you’re leading from the front you’re a good leader, and they respect you. But you put yourself at risk,” Dooley said. He survived his wounds at Gettysburg only to die from others inflicted at Brandy Station, Va., in 1863.
Learned and successful: Before the war, Delony practiced law and taught foreign language at the university.
Yet, still a secessionist, the product of the slave-holding Southern aristocracy fighting for a lost and lamentable cause.
More than 150 years after Appomattox we find ourselves locked in heated debate over the legacy of men such as Delony and the monuments to them. Deadly violence during a rally in Charlottesville, Va. Statues toppling in New Orleans. Headline this week on myAJC.com: “Georgia Gears up for Fraught Legislative Debate on Rebel Monuments.”
And Dooley, the legendary football coach who also happens to be a passionate advocate for the preservation of history, is the unlikely figure in the crossfire, urging restraint.
Monuments, like the one in New Orleans, removed in April, celebrating an 1870s white-supremacist uprising, clearly had to go, Dooley knows.
Others need to remain, somewhere, recognizing those who shaped history both during and after the Civil War, he said.
But context is just so hard to come by once the emotions take the lead.
“We are distracted from addressing the issue in a rational way because the extremes at both ends grab the attention,” he said.
“There are justifiable concerns about (the monuments). But you can’t have a rational discussion because of the extremes that are going on. The emotions get in the way. I hope it will settle down.”
Dooley never exactly conformed to the one-dimensional view of a football coach. Just think of the diverse topics he has written about over the course of his life: Football, gardening and history.
He turns 85 on Monday. Rather than coasting into late life, he just finished a five-year research and writing project on Lt. Col. Delony and his wife, Rosa.
Dooley’s old enough to remember his fascination as a 9-year-old in Mobile, Ala., when Pearl Harbor was bombed, “sitting around in a drug store with a bunch of old men listening on the radio.”
It sparked an interest in military history that remained with him all through his consuming career as coach and athletic director. Even while coaching, during the offseason, he’d audit history and leadership classes at Georgia.
“The great thing about living around a university, if you have a curiosity about anything you can satisfy it,” Dooley said.
Yet, he’s not so old that he has given up an active relationship with his interests. He is both the chairman of the board of curators for the Georgia Historical Society and a member of the Civil War Trust, a group dedicated to saving battlegrounds from development.
And, as an aside, how many other men his age are out playing catch?
With the help of one of his former football managers, Dooley is actively preparing for throwing out the first pitch at Wrigley Field next Friday, a day in advance of Georgia’s game at Notre Dame.
Nervous about such an assignment? “I don’t know, I never been there before,” Dooley said. “The only problem with it, you only get one shot. Not like a pitcher who might throw a wild pitch but gets to come back and throw another.”
His is not the background of someone who would tear down monuments lightly.
Be that the obelisk on Broad Street in Athens honoring the Confederate dead of that city or the huge carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the side of Stone Mountain.
“I think we got to put the brakes on and somehow stop the extremists and somehow sit down and start having more rational discussions over a long period of time,” he said. “Go through the background and history of it and have people explain their concerns. Try to understand both sides of it.
“What about the individual? What about Robert E. Lee and his contribution after the war and his contribution as a president (of Washington and Lee University) and the example that he set in trying to bind the wounds of war?
“How far down are you going to take it? They’ve now brought up Jefferson, brought up Washington, who were slave-holders and could have been hung as rebels by the British. There’s no end to this. That’s why there has to be rational discussion about a serious issue. And it is a serious issue.”
Trying to preach reason in a climate deaf to it – and you thought winning a national title at Georgia was a next to impossible task.
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