re: South Carolina over the years ....

Dick Bestwick definitely got the ball rolling ... and he was very close friends with Paul Dietzel who, even after Dietzel had retired and moved to Boone. Coach would lobby for us and was instrumental in garnering a bunch of votes in our favor including Dickey at Tennessee who was going to vote against us along with Bama and Kentucky.

The real ally in our joining the conference was the AD at Florida at the time, whose name escapes me at the moment, Sloan maybe, who assigned a little known associate AD at the time by the name of Jeremy Foley, to work with the Committee at SC who also had Dietzel lobbying with them, in order to get SC the necessary votes. Foley may have had the contacts at Bama I think, and Dietzel handled Dickey at Tennessee and I forgot who it was at Kentucky.

Jim Carlen got involved too and got Vince Dooley on board full bore. Coach Dooley once told me how strongly Coach Carlen advocated on our behalf and Coach Dooley always said he thought we would be a perfect fit for the SEC.

It was a joint effort.

I never knew Dick Best wick very well - met him a couple of times. Loved Carolina - was a very nice man.

King Dixon power-played him out of office with the help of some friends. But in retrospect and considering the turmoil at the time, it was probably a necessary move. Dixon was connected and was a task master with a Marine Corp mentality. He was very organized and very focused and he commanded utter loyalty and respect.

The SEC expansion committee was impressed with Dixon and he made a lot of promises about facility improvements and other things that we needed done.

But Foley was instrumental and has remained a loyal friend to us, and us to him.

When John Palms and King Dixon decided Mike McGee was going to be the next step ... it was inevitable that we would eventually succeed.

McGee was embroiled in a dispute with an assistant coach he had fired at SoCal, a false discrimination claim that McGee won in court. But McGee was the best AD in the country at the time and Palms and Dixon convinced him to come back closer to home ... and he did.


McGee first set about cleaning-upa lot of the internal issues in the Round House, then he started working on the individual programs.