Editor's note: At a time when sports are shut down, we take a look (in no particular order) at some of the bizarre moments from Georgia sports history.
Here’s a beautiful bit of irony: Glen Mason’s son, Pat, is married to a UGA alum.
Perhaps that always was destined to be the case.
For those too young to have known it or too old to remember, Mason was the Georgia Bulldogs’ head coach for seven days in 1995. His son, Pat, was a high school senior at the time and actually attended Mason’s introductory news conference in Athens on Dec. 18 of that year.
“She’s a Bulldog through and through,” Mason said of his daughter-in-law, the former Jessica Johnston. “He didn’t meet her there; she’s from Minnesota. But as life went on, he met her and they married. ... During football season, she dresses the kids in Georgia outfits.”
Mason’s children were the main reason he did what seemed implausible then and absolutely bizarre now. He begged out of the Georgia head coaching job to remain at Kansas.
Kansas the football doormat, not the basketball powerhouse, just to be clear.
Mason confirmed this past week what has long been suspected as the reason he backed out. He was newly divorced, and custody of his two children, Pat and his younger sister Chris, was at the heart of his decision.
“I was just trying to be a good dad,” said Mason, now 70 and living in Minnetonka, Minn. “People ask me all the time if I have regrets that I didn’t go to Georgia. I say, ‘absolutely!' But that’s on one side. On the other side I feel good about the decision I made.”
Then teenagers, Mason’s children were attending Lawrence (Kan.) High School. He and their mother had divorced six months before Mason accepted the Bulldogs’ offer to become their 24th head coach.
That came at the end of what had been a whirlwind year. Following the divorce, Mason led the Jayhawks to a 10-2 season, the best in program history at the time. Also, Pat’s Lawrence High football team went 15-0 and won the state championship.
So, things were going nicely in Kansas.
“It was a heck of a year,” Mason said. “Here I was a single father, juggling kids, work. All of a sudden, things were rolling.”
The whole Georgia thing rolled up fast, too. Mason was interviewed by Vince Dooley on a Saturday, then accepted Dooley’s offer over the phone one day later. There wasn’t really any time -- or need -- for deliberation.
“I was on Cloud Nine,” Mason said. “Going to Georgia was a dream come true for a guy that’d been coaching at Kent State and Kansas.”
Mason was whisked to Athens on UGA’s airplane, introduced to the Bulldog Nation, then whisked back to Lawrence to join his team for its trip to Hawaii and the Aloha Bowl the next day. And that was that.
Or so it was thought.
In Honolulu, just before the Christmas Day kickoff of the Kansas-UCLA game, the world learned that Mason was going to stick with the Jayhawks. He informed his players shortly before kickoff.
Perhaps inspired by Mason’s surprising news, Kansas rolled to a 51-30 victory.
More than 4,300 miles from Aloha Stadium, Dooley also was surprised. Georgia’s athletic director was in Birmingham, Ala., at the family home of his wife, Barbara, celebrating Christmas. That morning he fielded a call from Mason. He said that he had a change of heart, that he was going to stay at Kansas.
It was a short conversation.
“I wasn’t going to argue with him about it,” Dooley said.
Within the hour, Dooley was heading east on I-20 with Barbara at the wheel.
“I was on my way out the door around 11:30 a.m. for Christmas dinner at the in-laws when my phone rang,” recalls Claude Felton, Georgia’s esteemed sports information director then and still today. “It was John Shafer, our senior associate athletic director. He said, ‘Merry Christmas. Are you sitting down?’ I said ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, sit down. … Glen Mason is not coming. Coach Dooley said for us to meet him at his office at 5 p.m.'”
By the time that meeting happened, Dooley had hired Jim Donnan from Marshall. In a day before everybody carried a cellphone, Dooley extended the offer from a pay phone inside a Holiday Inn in Anniston, Ala.
A close runner-up to Mason during the interview process, according to Dooley, Donnan accepted without discussing salary or length of contract.
“I’d gone to my office to pick up some Christmas gifts I had there,” Donnan said this week. “Mary (his wife) called me and said, ‘Hey, Vince Dooley’s trying to get hold of you. What do you think he wants?’ I said, ‘I guarantee he’s not calling to wish me Merry Christmas.’”
Dooley was more than a little relieved when Donnan accepted.
“As I recall, he saw it as a great opportunity,” Dooley said. “I’d known him for a long time through my brother, Bill. They’d worked together at North Carolina. So, I’d felt good about Jim all along.”
Donnan had a pretty sweet gig where he was. A week earlier, he coached Marshall in its fourth Division I-AA (now FCS) national championship game appearance in the past five years and was making exceptional money for that level. But as a longtime assistant coach at Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma, Donnan longed to get back to the big-time.
“I had a good situation, but it was a no-brainer because I wanted to reach the mountaintop of coaching,” Donnan said.
From there, all those intersecting paths diverged.
Mason went back to Kansas, accepted a $100,000-a-year raise and a new five-year, rollover contract. He got married the next summer, then bolted for Minnesota following a 4-7 season with the Jayhawks.
Mason would coach the Gophers for 10 years before he was fired after the 2006 season. He was 64-57 at his last coaching stop and finished his career with a 123-121-1 record.
Now a color analyst for the Big Ten Network, Mason laughs aloud when asked if he ever thinks about what might have been had he stuck with the Bulldogs.
“Of course, all the time,” he said. “You never know what might have happened, right? I know this: Kirby Smart would have played for me. How about that?”
Donnan had known Mason for many years. They attended several coaching clinics together, and Mason once visited Missouri as a member of the Ohio State staff when Donnan was an assistant in Columbia.
Donnan made a point of thanking Mason at his introductory news conference at UGA on Dec. 26, 1995.
"One of the first things I said was, 'I knew Glen Mason was a friend of mine, but I didn't know he was that good of a friend," Donnan recalled with a laugh.
The next year, Donnan and Mason found themselves on the same Nike-sponsored outing in Hawaii.
“I told him I thought that was a great line,” Mason chuckled.
Donnan strung together four winning seasons and four consecutive bowl wins in five years at Georgia. But he was fired by President Michael Adams over Dooley’s objections at the end of the 2000 season. He was 40-19 with the Bulldogs.
Donnan recruited well at UGA and brought some incredible talent to Athens. But overcoming an NCAA investigation he wasn’t informed about until the day of his introduction in Athens and facing Florida and Tennessee programs at their zeniths – not to mention a Florida State recruiting juggernaut -- proved too much to overcome.
Retrospectively, Mason said he would love to have taken on all that. Alas, he chose family over career.
“I guess I could’ve said, ‘B.S. on all that; you guys are going (to Athens),” Mason said of overruling his kids’ objections. “But they were old enough they might’ve said, ‘No, I’m not,’ and I didn’t want to strong-arm them. Unless you’ve been through a divorce, you can’t really appreciate the effect it has on an entire family. I was trying to be sensitive to that.”
Mason remains profusely apologetic to Georgia about the lurch in which he left the football program. It’s something that even 25 years later is hard to live down.
“It was an embarrassing situation I put myself into, needless to say,” Mason said. “But there’s a professional side to life and there’s a personal side, and besides being a coach, you’re also a dad. I was in an unusual situation having both my teenage kids with me at the time. I was a major college coach and a single dad.
“So, I went from Cloud Nine to reality pretty fast.”
