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5 Don Leebern and Vince Dooley
ОглавлениеTo many in the Bulldog family, the name Vince Dooley is synonymous with the University of Georgia. During his forty-one-year career at Georgia, Dooley became one of the most respected figures in college athletics, serving twenty-five years as head football coach and nine years in the dual roles of coach and athletic director before giving up coaching in 1988 to serve exclusively as AD until 2004. A member of the College Football Hall of Fame, he was successful in one of the country’s elite football conferences, bringing excitement and a sense of pride to his adopted state. His teams won six SEC championships, won eight bowl games and tied two in twenty appearances, and won a national championship. Rather studious for a football coach, Dooley has a master’s degree in history and devours literature about the Civil War. His Athens home and office is filled not only with football memorabilia but with books on a wide range of subjects.
Georgia fans adore Dooley not only because he was successful, but also because they see him as a decent human being. He exhibits patience and good humor, has made thousands of speeches to Bulldog Clubs in even the smallest villages, and remains close to his former players, many of whom—like Billy Payne, who brought the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta—have become leaders in their communities. Others, like the Heisman-winning Herschel Walker, have become icons. All of them love their coach. And high school coaches love Dooley because he made it a policy to recruit Georgia kids first.
During Dooley’s forty-one years with the school’s athletic program, the University of Georgia got its swagger back. Meanwhile, the state of Georgia was dramatically changing. It has grown and prospered and progressed in many areas, race relations being one of the most significant and most visible. Dooley had a low-key hand in that. He had quietly signed five African American football players to scholarships a decade before Herschel Walker burst onto the scene and carried Georgia to a national championship. Horace King, Larry West, Chuck Kinnebrew, Richard Appleby, and Clarence Pope entered UGA in 1971. Forty years later, Dooley can still tick off their names without having to think. He dismisses the notion that their signings were controversial or even courageous acts. The South was rapidly integrating. Integrated high school teams were already competing. Georgia had signed Ronnie Hogue to a basketball scholarship in 1970. By the time Walker arrived, just twenty years after Georgia politicians threatened to close the university rather than admit blacks, bumper stickers proclaiming “Herschel Walker Is My Cousin” began appearing on whites’ pickup trucks across the state. “I think sports did as much or more than any particular activity in the South to encourage acceptance of integration,” Dooley said. “People accepted it. They want to win.”
Although Dooley downplays his part in helping smooth the transition from all-white to integrated athletic teams, his role did not go unnoticed. In 2008, Dooley became only the second recipient of the Selig Mentoring Award given by a committee made up of fifteen Division I-A minority athletic directors. Established in 2007 and named in honor of Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig, the award is presented annually to a person in athletics administration who has been at the forefront in creating equal opportunities for minorities.
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 his brother, Grady Shepherd, confessed and claimed self-defense. Both Shepherds were indicted, tried, and acquitted. After Fate Leebern’s death, his only son, Donald M. Leebern Sr., ran the business until his own death in 1957, when Don Leebern Jr. took over the highly regulated but hugely profitable family-owned liquor empire while still a UGA undergraduate.
Today, the company that Fate Leebern began in 1938 is called Georgia Crown Distributing Company. An industry newsletter describes it as “a full-service beverage distributor, with wholesale operations doing business in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, selling imported and domestic spirits, wines, beers and specialty products.”
The company, like all liquor distributors in Georgia, operates as a monopoly thanks to a beneficent Georgia legislature. Georgia laws—largely unchanged since the 1930s—protect liquor distributors by requiring that retailers purchase through a wholesaler, rather than directly from distillers and brewers. To ship alcoholic beverages into Georgia, the producer must appoint a single distributor for a specified territory in the state. Once the producer chooses a wholesaler he cannot change wholesalers without demonstrating due cause and getting approval from the state Department of Revenue. Producers of alcoholic beverages are forbidden from owning a wholesale distributorship and wholesalers cannot own retail stores. Retailers are required to purchase from the designated wholesaler at whatever price the wholesaler sets. And once the alcoholic beverage is delivered to the retail store, it cannot be moved to any other licensed location, even to another store owned by the same retailer.
This three-tier system has long been criticized by consumer advocates as overly costly to consumers. A Georgia Public Policy Foundation study of the state’s liquor laws concluded that the laws stifle competition. “They protect a monopoly controlled by a small number of wholesalers, who siphon off 18–25 percent of the cost to retailers, increasing prices for consumers, hurting producers such as small to mid-size wineries and making liquor distribution the most expensive in the packaged-good industry. There is no public policy reason why producers should not be able to sell directly to retailers, the public or grocers whether on the Internet or through other traditional sales methods.” However, a state house legislative study committee looked into the liquor distribution system and concluded that it works just fine, a judgment that was a testament to the power of Georgia’s liquor lobby and distributors like Donald Leebern. They give generously and they don’t mind calling in favors.
Basically, Don Leebern inherited a cash cow and has grown it into a cash herd. He probably couldn’t have done any better even if he had that degree in business administration that he never completed at the University of Georgia, where he played varsity football in 1957–59 under Coach Wallace Butts but didn’t earn a diploma.
While at UGA, Leebern also courted and married a former Miss Georgia. Don and Betsy Leebern made a handsome couple, rich and rabid Bulldog backers. When Vince and Barbara Dooley arrived in Athens in 1963, they soon developed a close and powerful friendship with the Leeberns.
The Leeberns spent nights with the Dooleys and sat with Barbara when they attended Georgia’s home football games. After Dooley left the sidelines to become exclusively the athletic director, the Leeberns joined the Dooleys in their sky box at Sanford Stadium. In turn, the Dooleys stayed with Betsy and Don Leebern when they went to Columbus or to their beach condo on St. Simons Island. The couples took trips together nearly every year to New York for the annual College Football Hall of Fame dinner. Their relationships extended to their children. Daniel Dooley and Donald Leebern III (Little Don) were roommates at UGA. The Leebern and Dooley daughters were in the same UGA sorority.
A career like Dooley’s, spanning decades as head football coach and athletic director of an NCAA Division I power, is a magnet for attracting casual friendships. This was no casual friendship. Vince and Barbara Dooley have lots of friends in and outside of Georgia but few, if any, became closer to them than Don and Betsy Leebern.
“They weren’t just acquaintances. We gave their son and daughter parties when they got married,” Barbara Dooley recalls. “I thought they were really close friends. I considered them not just friends but close personal friends. He flew Betsy on his company plane up here with other close friends to celebrate my fortieth birthday. And there was nothing I felt like I could ask Don and Betsy to do for me that they wouldn’t do it.”
That cut both ways. Several times over the years, Dooley lent his considerable personal clout to Leebern’s business interests. One instance was after Leebern created a new Georgia Crown division, Poland Spring Water Distributing Company, and began selling Perrier’s Poland Spring bottled water. Quickly realizing the potential profits in bottled water, Leebern’s company opened a plant in Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1991 and began marketing its own brand, Melwood Springs, “Georgia Crown’s own private-labeled spring water.” The problem was that Melwood Springs water doesn’t come from a spring; it is pumped from a well in Dahlonega, just like city water. “Bottled well water” just doesn’t have the cachet of “natural spring water.”
Moreover, Perrier was threatening to quit marketing Poland Spring water in Georgia because new state agriculture regulations scheduled to take effect in May 1992 would not have allowed the product to be labeled as natural spring water. The regulation also would have affected Melwood Springs water. With Georgia Agriculture Commission Tommy Irvin about to put the kibosh on the whole venture, Leebern needed to do something—and quickly. He got hometown legislator Tom Buck of Columbus to introduce a bill in the 1992 legislature redefining natural spring water to include water that comes from wells. The bill easily passed in the state House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate. Undaunted, Leebern, then a newly appointed member of the state Board of Regents, called on his friends at the University of Georgia.
Both UGA President Charles Knapp and Dooley lobbied for the legislation. Dooley’s son Daniel was working for Georgia Crown at the time and Knapp was an employee of the Regents. UGA spokesman Tom Jackson said Knapp and Leebern were personal friends and that Knapp’s support of the legislation had nothing to do with his position at the university. After the full-court press by Dooley and Knapp, the Senate, which had voted 31–24 to defeat the bill two weeks earlier, reversed itself, voting 32–23 to approve the bill. Governor Zell Miller signed the legislation into law. Miller said he saw nothing wrong with the labeling or the lobbying. “In this age of where we want people to participate, there’s no problem with anyone calling . . . no matter what position they hold,” Miller told an AJC reporter. And as for the labeling controversy, Miller said he didn’t see any difference between well and spring water. It can all be traced back to an underground source, he said.
The Leebern-Dooley relationship, entwined across personal, family, and UGA lines, held firm through the 1990s. In 1997, Leebern and another of Dooley’s close friends, Sonny Seiler, personally called Dooley to give him a heads-up before the public announcement of the hiring of Michael Adams as UGA president. “You’ll like him,” Seiler predicted. “He has a real fondness for athletics.” Leebern also mentioned Adams’s fondness for athletics.
Like most Georgians, Dooley knew little about Adams and therefore had no concerns about his appointment. A self-described “good soldier,” Dooley was confident that he would get along well with the new president. After all, he had served four previous presidents at UGA without conflict. Nevertheless, Dooley thought it was a good idea to reach out to the man who would be his boss during his final years at UGA, so he telephoned his congratulations and left his number. “He never returned my phone call,” Dooley remembers. “This was a couple of days after he was named. So, I called him again in a couple of days and this time he took my call. I just congratulated him. That was the first time I talked to him.”
Dooley wanted a close relationship with the president and tried to convince Adams that it was important to have good lines of communications. The best way to do that, Dooley felt, was for the two of them to have monthly meetings, just as he had done with previous presidents. Adams wanted no part of it.
Dooley hasn’t said whether Leebern, in his heads-up call about the Adams selection, also explained that Adams was his personal choice, or that he had ramrodded Adams through the interview and hiring process. By then, Leebern had become the dominant personality on the Board of Regents. He was first appointed to the board in 1991 by Governor Zell Miller, then a Democrat. (Miller reappointed him in 1998 to another seven-year term; Republican Governor Sonny Perdue named him to a third term in 2005.)
Leebern has been a big contributor to the University of Georgia and to Georgia politicians. He has also been a lightning rod for controversy, not least due to his public flaunting of his relationship with Georgia gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan, with whom he lives openly on a $1.5 million estate outside Athens, though he is still married to Betsy Leebern, who maintains the family domicile in Columbus.
The Bulldog elite comprise a tight circle of friends and acquaintances where everybody knows everybody else. Barbara Dooley had heard rumors about Don Leebern’s girlfriends for years but had always dismissed them. Some folks are jealous of anyone with Leebern’s kind of money, she reasoned. “Anyway, if he was having affairs, he was being discreet about it, as far as I knew, and I assured everyone that he loved his wife, Betsy.” That changed in early 2000 when Leebern began a very public affair with Yoculan.
Leebern began showing up at the Gym Dogs meets with his wife Betsy and their grandson. Surprised to see her friend at a gymnastics meet, Barbara wondered about Betsy’s sudden interest in the sport. “She sort of rolled her eyes and said, ‘Well, Don had to come.’”
Betsy Leebern soon stopped coming to the gymnastics meets and then she stopped attending UGA football games. She’d make excuses to avoid weekends with the Dooleys.
“She just wasn’t going to tell me there was trouble,” Barbara Dooley said. “And I was too stupid to realize what was actually going on. Betsy always made excuses during football season that Don could no longer come on Friday nights and they were just going to fly in for the game on Saturdays. Next she started making excuses why they would not go to New York with us as we had done for many years. It was a wonderful tradition to be in New York for the [College Football] Hall of Fame dinner with good friends, but it just ended. Things just started changing! The next thing that I hear is that he’d actually taken up with Yoculan.”
One Sunday morning she awoke to a local newspaper article written by the late M. A. Barnes, announcing the engagement of Don Leebern to Suzanne Yoculan.
“I screamed for Vince and I truly almost fainted,” she said. “I could not believe what I was reading. And I must have read it three or four times to make sure I was actually reading it right. It was the talk of the town and most people were shaking their heads and saying, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ He had given Yoculan an engagement ring and is still married to Betsy. And put it in our paper! I am still in denial at this point and kept thinking that just can’t be true.
“Still even with this staring me in the face I thought our friendship was strong enough for me to call him and find out just what was happening. So, I called his telephone number. I said, ‘Don, what the hell are you doing? I just read an article about your engagement. Are you totally out of your mind? You are setting yourself up for the biggest lawsuit this state has ever seen.’ Well, he was silent for a minute and gave me an answer like, ‘Mind your own business. I know what I’m doing.’ At that point I realized our friendship was over and I needed to stay out of this mess. And so I told Vincent at the time, I said, ‘Let me tell you something. I am drawing a line in the sand. This is against every principle in my body. Betsy is a good friend of mine and I will not condone any relationship like this.’”
Barbara Dooley said she began to avoid all functions where Leebern and Yoculan might be present. “Every time we’d get an invitation I wouldn’t go. He would have to go by himself. And of course I would say I don’t know why you’re going.
“He said, ‘Well, look, I’m the athletic director.’”
“I said, ‘Yeah, and you should have fired her ass right away.’ I said if that had been a male coach moving in with a married woman, the male coach would have been fired. The press would have been all over it. There’s no way they could let that story alone. But it seems that it’s totally different with a female. It’s just amazing.”
Barbara Dooley’s sense of outrage wasn’t felt at the highest levels of state government where money apparently talks more loudly than traditional morality, even in the heart of Baptist Bible belt.
Barbara Dooley has kept up with her friend Betsy vicariously through mutual friends and relatives. “She quit returning my calls a couple of years ago. I feel very confident that Don told her to stay away from me, and because he pays her bills . . . But her daughter came into our box during one of the games and literally had tears in her eyes and said she missed us terribly. She said, ‘I just want you to know that we love you.’ And I have to say, every time I get sick—and I’ve been sick a lot in the last three years—I always get flowers from Betsy. I always get a card from Betsy on my birthday saying I miss you and I love you. But she won’t call me. I find it very interesting.”
Vince Dooley was Yoculan’s direct superior and tried to maintain a casual friendship with Leebern even after the couple moved in together and the affair became the topic of dinner conversations in Athens and Atlanta. Meanwhile, the athletics department was concerned about the NCAA watchdogs. The school was already in trouble with the NCAA for rules violations in the men’s basketball program. The UGA Athletics Department’s mission statement on integrity declares:
By their very nature, athletics inevitably involve character development; for this reason, especially, we must conduct ourselves with utmost integrity. All programs and the activities on our behalf by alumni and friends must be consistent with the policies of the university and the athletic bodies which govern us. We are to be at all times honest and forthright in our dealings with each other, the public, and the media.
The question was whether Leebern’s actions in living with a university system employee constituted a conflict, since the Regents have oversight of the entire university system.
Georgia’s NCAA compliance coordinator, Amy Chisholm, wrote to the Southeastern Conference in July 2001 inquiring whether Leebern and Yoculan’s living arrangement could be a violation of NCAA rules because of Leebern’s role as an athletics booster:
Specifically, a head coach [Yoculan] is engaged to a representative of Georgia’s athletics interest [Leebern]. The coach and representative have purchased a house together and will be sharing this house as of August. The coach would like to host meals for prospects and current student-athletes during official visits at their house without it being perceived as impermissible contact with an athletics representative. Although, legally at this time the representative is not considered a spouse . . . the NCAA has never legislated fiancés and other personal relationships.
Chisholm’s letter didn’t mention that the coach’s fiancé was already married. A few days later Chisholm received a reply from Beth DeBauche, then SEC associate commissioner for compliance, informing her that such contact would, in fact, be an NCAA violation: “According to the NCAA Membership Services staff, the answer to this issue is no. The athletics representative’s status is not changed by the fact he is engaged to the head coach. Accordingly, he cannot be involved in any recruiting activities.” A fiancé should not be present at any recruiting meals or activities either on or off-campus, DeBauche replied. The upshot was that the SEC and the NCAA said that Yoculan could host recruits at her house but Leebern should not be present.
This novel situation posed increasing challenges for the man who was the coach’s boss and the booster/fiancé’s longtime friend. By coincidence, Dooley’s relationship with Leebern began to sour just as Dooley was negotiating with Adams on a contract extension in 2001.
Riding the crest of her women’s gymnastics team’s SEC and national championships, Yoculan began angling for a promotion to become assistant athletic director. Her counterpart at the University of Alabama, Sarah Patterson, was an assistant AD and was using the title to aid in recruiting. Dooley ignored Yoculan’s complaints, feeling it would have been unfair to elevate her over other coaches who had more seniority.
Afterwards, Leebern dropped by Dooley’s office. Barbara Dooley recounts the conversation as her husband told it to her:
“‘Buddy, I need a favor.’ Of course Vince said, ‘Sure, what do you need?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, Suzanne really wants to be assistant athletic director.’”
Barbara Dooley said Leebern brought up that the Alabama gymnastics coach was an assistant AD and was flaunting it over Yoculan. Vince was against it but in his fairness to his longtime friend he said that he would look into it. Vince called the Alabama athletic director, Mal Moore, and found out that at one time Patterson had been an assistant AD with additional administrative duties, but that was no longer the case and she was no longer on the senior administrative staff. However, she didn’t drop the title and used it to her advantage. Vince told Leebern all that, but Leebern still wanted the favor. Vince told him that he would do almost anything for him in light of their longtime friendship, but he could not compromise his responsibilities, especially since Andy Landers, Jack Bauerle, and Manuel Diaz, all with similar great coaching records as Yoculan, could make the same case to become an assistant athletic director.
“Vince stood on his principles on this decision and Don left there, and I’m convinced—Vince is not convinced, but I’m convinced—that Leebern left there that day and made a pact with the devil—Adams. Because Vince told him no, and I’m not sure anybody had ever told Don Leebern no,” Barbara Dooley said.