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An AD’s job is a killer, take it from his experience

by John Clendenon

Mike Hamilton is Doug Dickey with people skills and no Florida ties. That’s why the UT men’s athletics director will be accepted as the new King of The Hill.

Dickey’s blunt manner and escape to Florida 35 years ago somehow managed to override the tremendous job he did in building one of the nation’s preeminent athletic programs.

Running through the T. Checkerboard end zones. The T on the helmet. Dickey. Dickey. Dickey.

“Things UT fans hold dear to their hearts were Dickey’s creations,” Hamilton said recently as he surveyed his mentor’s former office after getting a heads-up from his new secretary, Rita Wilson, Dickey’s point person for 17 years.

Hamilton has inherited a boatload of knowledge from Dickey, who will keep an office at UT for another 12 months in his $100,000 consultant’s role. Dickey pushed Hamilton, hired from Wake Forest as a fund-raiser in 1992, to be his successor. It was another in a long line of battles Dickey won when Hamilton’s promotion was announced at a news conference May 10, 2003.

As usual in anything involving Dickey, the skeptics came out of the East Tennessee woodwork. Hamilton, then 39, was too young. He hadn’t been an AD. He’d be a lap dog for Thunder Thornton and Jim Haslam, and the other influential boosters.

True to form, Dickey put everyone straight at the media event.

“Look around at who else got promoted,” he said. “Phillip Fulmer got promoted. He won a national championship as UT’s football coach. Jeremy Foley (of Florida) is another example of an athletic director who got promoted. David Housel got promoted to AD at Auburn.

“You want to compete? Line up with Florida and Auburn sometime and try that one on.”

Dickey never minced words, but it was his decision to leave for his alma mater Dec. 31, 1969, that still slices and dices much of the Vol Nation.

“I’ve got mixed emotions about Doug, and so do most of my customers,” said Harold Shersky, who has owned and managed Harold’s Deli on Gay Street for 55 years. “He did a great job here as coach and AD, and he’s a nice guy, but it’s hard for us to forget him leaving Tennessee for Florida after the Gator Bowl.”

That says it all about the narrow-minded thought process in East Tennessee. Florida wasn’t even a rival of the Vols in 1969. In fact, the Gators were pretty good at being mediocre. It was 23 years before the Southeastern Conference split into two divisions. Twenty-two years before the arrival of Visor Boy. The Swamp was a quiet zone.

Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams left Ohio State to coach at his alma mater and eventually won a Final Four. Hard to believe he wasn’t hung in effigy in Columbus, Ohio, isn’t it Vol-heads?

A former prominent member of the Knoxville sports media told me a few years ago there were two people in the UT athletics program who never lied to him—Pat Summit and Doug Dickey.

So now, at the mere pittance of $230,000 a year, Mike Hamilton gets to follow a man who was highly valued by his peers—Dickey was the first recipient of the John H. Tonor Award, the highest honor given to an AD by the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame.

For those who think Hamilton won’t be tough enough, consider this. He’s had several frank conversations with Fulmer about issues like staffing and the future of the program. He’s told basketball coach Buzz Peterson his team needs to show progress next season, and not to let the program become known as Transfer U.

Hamilton has improved communications with the women’s athletic program by initiating monthly meetings. He signed off on a 20-year $50-100 million renovation of Neyland Stadium. And he weathered a stink about grandfathered football tickets that involved about 1,000 fans and 2,300 seats.

He’s already got the AD lingo down. “No easy decision will reach your desk.... Ten to 15 percent of the fans will disagree with whatever you do.... Unquestionably I’ll be judged by the hiring and firing of coaches.”

Hamilton lost his privacy 12 months ago (“It never lets up.”). He’s taken about five vacation days since assuming the mantle, so he eagerly awaits a week’s vacation with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyo., this summer.

If you think he’s got it made, try it for a week.

John Clendenon is a former executive sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Atlanta Constitution and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse