Dooley was around even when I was at UF. I largely ignored him even then.
Was he ever competent? Did he once have sources and actual insight? He obviously, astonishingly, doesnt know much about the game but that I guess seems to have been common for that era when the qualifications seemed to be that you were comfortable getting drunk at any sort of sporting event (Verne Lundquist types). However I do wonder if he got lazy in his old age and if he was once good at his job. Anyone have opinions?
When Dooley was a cub reporter at the Sun, he protégéd under Jack Hairston, who was the Sports Editor when I was in school at UF. Hairston was far and away the worst sports editor I've witnessed in my half-century walking this earth. Hairston was lazy, formulaic and trite, brutally mundane and redundant, and had, for years, developed a sports page that was almost unreadable. He knew he was the only game in town. There was no internet then, and the Gatorbait tabloid was still in its infancy, publishing only sporadically. So, Hairston had the easiest job in the industry. You HAD to read his crappy sports section, which was basically pablum fed to his second-rate reporters by the UF SID. The atmosphere of not having a bonafide Fourth Estate in Gainesville had an enabling affect. Charlie Pell and a group of awful boosters were able to run roughshod over rules and ethics without fear of any local investigation, and the resulting sanctions devastated our football program for almost a decade.
Hairston was comfy in his decades-held job and viewed his fiefdom as a small town community newspaper with cozy relationships that made his job easy instead of as an important part of a growing city and college sports community facing serious modern issues. Meanwhile, the understaffed and inexperienced writers at the Alligator were doing all the heavy lifting. The vast number of major stories that broke during those times came from the Alligator or from papers around the state, all while the Sun just kept printing press releases and raking in the print ad revenue. It was from this environment that Pat Dooley got his mentoring. Dooley's expectations were rooted in a job and career meant for the lazy. He would be a fat and happy eater of SID "news," he reckoned, and that suited him just fine.
Dooley did become fat, but it's clear the road his career took him down has made him far from happy. His bitterness toward his readers and former readers is present in nearly every passage he types. The declining readership and 1950s journalistic style have made him a laughing-stock and an easy target for internet message boards like ours. Pat Dooley is nothing more than a punch line at this point; a sad visage in an outdated Hawaiian shirt with a 1980s haircut, trying to prop up a dying sports page in a dying industry in a town and era that have completely passed him by.