Vince Dooley wakes up at 5:30 just about every morning. And while the rest of us are probably still sleeping, he’s getting started on his floor exercises before hitting the weights.

Yet when I tried to point out to the always-humble, soon-to-be 77-year-old that he’s probably in better shape than most students on campus, he laughed at the idea.

Thankfully, he didn’t laugh at me when I asked him to talk on the eve of a new football season. I thought it would be great not only to catch up with the coaching hero, but also to hear a little bit of football history.

Luckily, I got a whole lot of it.

Coach Dooley said he starts his days early because he “.found out a long time ago that if you don’t do it then, you’ll never get it done.” Probably true for most of us, but certainly true for Vince Dooley.

He’s as busy as ever. So much so, he doesn’t even consider himself retired. “You have to remember that you can’t retire if you’ve been around a place for forty-something years,” he said, “for me to retire – I’d have to go to California.”

So instead of moving, he lets his kindness get in the way of his free time, and admits he finds it hard to say no to people like me who want to talk to him.

That’s why he found himself in Atlanta two days before we talked, and Augusta the night before.

Coach Dooley gets so busy he hardly has time to take a look back at all the years of Georgia football – or Georgia athletics – as he quickly corrected my narrow terms.

But occasionally, when people like me ask him, he’ll take a look 40 years back to tell some of the greatest football stories ever heard.

And what makes these stories greater are that they’re being told by a man who was right in the middle of all of them.

There was the time he beat the Crimson Tide and Bear Bryant in Athens as a 32-year-old, 2nd-year coach. He said he didn’t consider his youth to be an issue at the time. “I didn’t know I was that young,” he said laughing, “that’s the beauty of youth-you don’t know any better.”

But, there were some in this fierce college town who thought they knew better, and until that 1965 Alabama win, they didn’t appreciate the hire of a kid coach who played and graduated from Auburn.

Dooley said now that he doesn’t blame them so much. “When I look back on it as an administrator, I never would have hired myself,” he admitted. “I was 31 years old, I was the freshman coach at a rival school . my wife Barbara and I say we were the only ones that thought it was a good hire.”

Boy was it a good hire.

It doesn’t take an expert to appreciate a coach coming in off of several three and four-win seasons to not only beat Bryant’s Tide, but also give us a one-loss SEC title season two years after his arrival.

It isn’t just the plays or the titles Coach Dooley remembers.

He told me about the time when the often-stuffy Prince Charles came to Athens for a game, and was offered a stick of gum. When asked, “Gum, Prince?” by Kentucky’s Coach, the heir to the throne, who probably wouldn’t have yawned in public, was predictably taken aback.

Coach Dooley says he’s just now getting to draw satisfaction from memories like that, which he said flew by too fast.

But at least now, even though he’s still busy, Coach Dooley can take a little extra time to catch up on the stories, the years and the fruits of his labor – the players.

He said the opportunity to reconnect with former players is the best part of being (semi) retired. He told me those relationships are much stronger now than they ever could have been when he was an active coach, and he appreciates them now more than ever.

“I’ve always said the greatest reward that coaches have, like teachers, is when one of your former players will come back and say two simple words: ‘Thanks, Coach,” he said.

That may be true, but those words don’t have to come from former players only-they can be echoed by the entire Bulldog nation.

On those glowing Saturday nights, when we look out and see his image reflected in the lights of that stadium he helped build, we can all say those two, simple words:

“Thanks, Coach.”

- Marc McAfee is the online editor of The Red & Black. His columns will appear on Wednesdays.