'Media Boys' Pat Dooley, Robbie Andreu take opposite retirement approaches. (2024)

For lifelong friends whose lives and careers have mirrored so remarkably, Robbie Andreu and Pat Dooley could not have approached retirement more differently.

Andreu embraced his respite from the deadlines, late nights and road trips that came with his job as the Florida Gators football beat writer for The Gainesville Sun from 1993 to 2020—the culmination of more than 40 years in sports journalism.

Dooley, the Sun’s sports columnist who retired from the newspaper the same day as Andreu, just kept on writing and talking about the Gators.

“Dooley’s like the worst retiree of all time,” said Mike Bianchi, who preceded Dooley as the Sun’s sports columnist and now holds the same position at the Orlando Sentinel. “He’s working harder now than he did when he was at the Sun.

“Robbie’s just the opposite. I don’t think he’s written a word since he retired.”

For more than a quarter century, Andreu and Dooley, who met in the halls of St. Augustine High School, powered the Sun’s coverage of the Gators. They retired on the same day in 2020, but Dooley did so with a sense of unfinished business so he picked up freelance jobs writing about the Gators for websites and magazines.

He continued his weekday “Tailgate” radio show on WRUF. He moved his twice-weekly “Dooley Noted” podcast to new platforms and secured Steve Spurrier as a weekly guest. And he continued speaking at Gator gatherings across the state.

Retirement may be chasing Dooley, but with encouragement from his wife, Karen, he has outrun it.

“My wife said to me, ‘All you’re gonna do is drink and play golf.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the idea,’” said Dooley, laughing. “But I wasn’t ready to stop having a voice in the community. And I know that voice isn’t as loud as it used to be, but it’s still out there.

“If you want to look for me, you can find me. And I still go out at night and people recognize me. I’m almost taken aback by it. But I will say this: We’re not as recognizable as when our pictures were in the paper every day.”

Dooley and Andreu were more than recognizable as deans of the media contingent, having covered Gator athletics since their days as UF students in the 1970s.

Their pairing at the Sun, however, required a bit of serendipity.

Leaders of the ‘media boys’

The year was 1993, and Dooley had created a quandary for Andreu.

Dooley was the Sun’s sports editor. Andreu was the Gainesville-based UF beat writer for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and he had recently learned that after several years covering the Gators, he was being summoned back to south Florida to cover its fledgling Major League Baseball team, the Florida Marlins.

Big promotion. Prominent newspaper. Most sportswriters would be thrilled. But Robbie was unenthused about the move or the 162-game grind of an MLB season.

Then Dooley stepped in to offer a kismetic alternative.

By coincidence, the Sun’s football beat writer was leaving the paper, creating an opportunity for Dooley and Andreu to team up professionally for the first time.

“I called Robbie and said, ‘We can’t afford you,’” Dooley said. “And he said, ‘Well, let’s just go meet and talk about it.’”

A few days later, Andreu accepted the job.

“I got him for a discount price, believe me,” Dooley said.

A year later, Dooley stepped down from his editor position to become the Sun’s sports columnist. And for the next quarter of a century, they teamed up to cover UF athletics during the most championship-laden era in its history.

“It was a tough decision, to take a pay cut and go to a smaller paper,” Andreu said. “But it was a quality-of-life decision, and that’s what got me and Dooley back together. I labored over that decision. And then when I finally made the call, it felt good.

“Over the years, I often think I’m sure glad I made the tough call to come here.”

Some might deem that “tough call” preordained.

Aside from their early years in sports journalism, when their careers blossomed separately at newspapers around the state, Andreu and Dooley led parallel lives.

They were born one day apart in November 1954. Both grew up in Gator-crazed households and attended their first UF football game in 1962. Upon meeting in high school, they discovered two shared passions: Gators football and golf. They helped form St. Augustine High’s first golf team. They even both have brothers named Tim.

After high school graduation, both went to St. Johns River Junior College, where they were roommates. They roomed together again at UF.

It was here that they found their path to careers in sportswriting.

“Even when we were in high school, I could tell that was the direction Pat wanted to go,” Andreu said. “I remember Dooley had a scrapbook, and he’d cut Gator pictures out of the paper, and then he’d write a cutline underneath. He was always that way.”

Truth be told, Andreu was kind of that way too. His wife, Jill, said he wallpapered his childhood bedroom with Gator newspaper clippings. And when he and Dooley attended junior college in Palatka in the early 1970s, they made day trips to Gainesville to watch UF football practice.

They would climb to the top of the Florida Field stands and look over the fence down on the practice field, which was located where the O’Connell Center now sits.

“Then we’d go to McDonald’s on the way back to Palatka,” Andreu said. “That was our big day together. Really boring stuff really.”

They may not have realized it, but they were training for their future careers.

Dooley picked up some assignments from the St. Augustine Record. As a student at UF, he worked as a sports information director for the wrestling team while freelancing as a stringer for newspapers around the state. When Dooley graduated in 1976, he handed off his stringing jobs to Andreu, who graduated in 1977.

They spent the next decade or so away from each other. Dooley was hired by the Sun-Sentinel out of college, then bounced to the Jacksonville Journal (covering the USFL, NFL and college sports) before joining the Sun as sports editor in 1987. Andreu’s path took him to the Bradenton Herald (covering the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and the Clearwater Sun (covering Gators football, among other assignments) before he jumped to the Sun-Sentinel.

During that stretch, Andreu and Dooley didn’t talk as much, but they never lost touch. In fact, Andreu’s father, Robert, a judge in St. Johns County who played on UF’s freshman football team before serving in World War II, officiated the marriage of Dooley and his first wife.

Their friendship was truly rekindled in 1988 when the Sun-Sentinel sent Andreu to Gainesville, where Dooley had resettled a year earlier.

In 1990, Spurrier arrived. SEC championships followed. Andreu joined the Sun. And when Bianchi left the Sun in 1994, Dooley lobbied for the columnist role.

Bianchi is sure he knows why.

“I think what was going through Dooley’s mind is, ‘Why is Bianchi getting to have all the fun and I have to do all this office work being the sports editor?’” Bianchi said. “So when I left, Dooley was like, ‘The hell with this, I’m gonna be the columnist. That’s the fun part.’”

Andreu and Dooley. Together again, this time as the hometown leaders of the “Media Boys,” as Spurrier liked to call those covering Gators football.

Life on the Gators beat

It was a glorious era that included multiple SEC championships, three national championships and two Heisman Trophy winners. There also were back-to-back NCAA championships for men’s basketball, along with national titles in baseball, softball, gymnastics… the list goes on.

For kids who grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s watching the Gators fall short of their championship aspirations year after year, Andreu and Dooley found it all a bit surreal.

Especially the 1996 football season.

“When we were growing up, nobody even dreamed about Florida winning a national championship,” Andreu said. “It was all about, ‘Will they ever win the SEC?’ You know, people thought they’d never live to see it, and a lot of Gator fans didn’t. And then in the ‘90s, it kind of hit everybody that Florida has a chance to win a national championship.”

That moment came at the 1997 Sugar Bowl facing Florida State.

“So we’re in the press box there and the game’s unfolding, and in the fourth quarter Terry Jackson had that touchdown run for about 50 yards and he dove into the endzone,” Andreu said. “It kind of hit me then, and I turned to Pat and I go, ‘Pat, the Gators are winning the national championship.’ We just looked at each other like, ‘What are we doing here?’ That was just a moment that really sticks out to me.”

Jackson ran for another touchdown with about two minutes left to cap a 52-20 victory, giving the Gators the 1996 national title. They added two more in 2006 and 2008 under coach Urban Meyer.

By that time, Andreu and Dooley had come to be seen as Florida football historians. Their recall of the most minute details in Gators lore amazed colleagues.

“It was always great having them in the press box together, because they would tell stories about when they would go to games as kids,” Bianchi said. “Those guys just remember things. It was like having two, not only friends and writers in the press box, but two Gator encyclopedias in the press box.”

Dooley authored a book in 2007 about Gators football titled, “Game of My Life.” Updated in 2022, the book chronicles great moments in UF football history through the eyes of 30 greats, including Spurrier, Danny Wuerffel, Carlos Alvarez, Wilber Marshall, Kerwin Bell, Jack Youngblood and Chris Doering. Dooley also was featured in the 2023 Netflix documentary series, “Swamp Kings,” that recounted the Urban Meyer era.

Both ventures were the product of decades spent cultivating relationships with players and coaches who became part of Dooley’s wide circle of friends.

But none are as dear as Andreu.

“I think it would not have been nearly as fulfilling or as fun or as remarkable a career for each if they didn’t get to share it the way they did,” Karen Dooley said. “The way that they got to talk about it day in and day out together, the way they got to travel together every weekend, go to every practice, and come back to the Gainesville Sun [offices] and sit at the desk and go over ideas and joke and laugh, it would not have been the wonderful experience for them without sharing it with each other.”

Their most memorable times came during hundreds of road trips together. When they didn’t fly, Andreu always took the wheel, while Dooley chose the music.

“He has the driving gene,” Dooley said.

And Dooley has the talking gene. He has hosted sports talk shows on Gainesville radio stations since the 1990s. As part of his duties at the Sun, he added his “Dooley Noted” podcast and did a “Swampcast” podcast with Andreu after every football game.

“We did one on the bus at the Orange Bowl at 2:30 in the morning,” Andreu said. “We’re sitting there on the bus and the guy won’t leave until they get more people on the bus. So we did it right there. We’ve done them in some weird places, I’ll tell you that.”

Throughout Dooley’s “talking” career, Andreu has served as a guest or substitute co-host on Dooley’s shows. “Kind of like a pinch hitter,” Andreu said. “My job is to just fill in a little bit and to kind of keep his ego in check. That’s my goal when I’m on the radio. When he gets too high, shoot him down. And he’s cool with that.”

Their on-air chemistry is undeniable as they take turns playing the funny man and the foil.

“The best thing you can do on radio is get Robbie telling stories,” Dooley said. “He’s got so many stories. And most of them are about his failed love life, so they’re always great.”

It’s a dynamic that extends to social settings, where the stories and laughter flow easily.

“Jill and I are always like, ‘We need to bottle this,’” Karen said. “They are like a comedy team, they really are. And they’re not trying to be funny. It’s just their nature. They just have this deep well of stories.”

“They’re a package deal,” Jill said. “When you talk to people, they think they’re so great together on the radio, or they’re funny when you meet them in person. And they don’t realize that they grew up together, that they’ve known each other for years and years.

“The way they mesh together is fun to be around, fun to watch, fun to listen to. They just click very well. There’s a brotherhood bond with those two.”

The bond extended to the way they approached their work on football weekends.

“We had the same goal, and that was to have an epic Friday night, and then bust our asses on Saturday,” Dooley said. “You just have fun on Friday night. And then on Saturday, you gotta strap it up, man. Let’s go. No matter how tough the situation, no matter how late it is, whatever you gotta do [to deliver the story], you just do it.”

The evolution of sports journalism, however, began to wear them down.

A profession in transition

Beginning in the late 1990s, newspaper readership and revenues began a much-chronicled decline, ceding to the rise of the Internet.

At the same time, athletic departments began to draw the blinds on the media. Practices and locker rooms, once open to reporters, became subject to restrictions. Coaches and players were made available by appointment only, if at all.

“People ask me if I miss anything about my job, and I say no,” Andreu said. “But I do miss the way it used to be back when we could access the players and coaches. It was all about the relationships. I remember the days you got to walk back to the locker room with a player [after practice] and get to know him. Or on a Sunday, you call an assistant coach to ask what happened in recruiting that weekend, and they’d tell you everything that happened.”

It’s not just athletic departments that changed. Today, with smaller budgets, few newspapers send writers to every road game. Long profile stories are mostly a thing of the past. Investigative reporting teams exist only at the largest publications.

Story topics also have evolved, having been overrun by the comings and goings of the transfer portal, NIL deals and pay-for-play in college sports.

Andreu and Dooley both said the timing of their retirement from the Sun was ideal.

“For me, it’s more about how the newspaper business was changing,” Dooley said. “All of a sudden it became about SEO [search engine optimization] instead of about what you were writing. Writing for substance meant nothing anymore. It was about how can you get something out as quick as possible, with a [star athlete’s] name in it. And I just kind of lost my appetite for it.

“We were very lucky in that when we [he and Andreu] got going on it together [in the 1990s], we were in the best of times. I think about all the things I was able to do, and it’s not like that anymore. Newspapers were printing money back then. Now they barely can stay afloat. I’m glad we got to experience journalism at its best.”

They also were very conscious of their obligation to cover the Gators honestly and objectively, despite having grown up as die-hard fans.

“They told it like it was,” Spurrier told the Sun at the time of their retirement. “If we messed up, they’d say we messed up and I’d agree with them. But overall, it was pretty complimentary, and they were always very fair with what we did. We had a wonderful relationship and some fun times.”

Case in point: While Andreu was still at the Sun, his wife, Jill, commissioned James Bates, the former Gators linebacker turned folk artist, to create a painting of Andreu and Dooley with Spurrier, depicting one of the coach’s memorable one-liners.

“They were watching preseason workouts, and they’re [players] out there running,” Jill recalls. “Coach was sitting in the stands, and Robbie went over to him and said, ‘They look pretty good.’ And [Spurrier] goes, ‘Yep, well, we also got a couple fat ones like you and Pat.’”

In the final painting, at Jill’s suggestion, Bates softened the line a bit to, “In his 30+ years of coaching, the Head Ball Coach coached some of the world’s finest athletes, but he also coached some that were built more like Media Boys.”

“And then of course, Robbie was upset that I didn’t go through with it [the ‘fat’ line] because he thought it was hilarious,” Jill said. “Only Spurrier can get away with saying something like that.”

It was also an indicator of the trusting relationship Andreu had developed with Spurrier.

“He had his dream job,” Jill said. “He’s one of the only people I’ve ever known who absolutely, 100 percent really loved what he did. They’re [Andreu and Dooley] just kids at heart. This is why a lot of men who make a ton more money than they do envy them because they made a living out of just continuing their child’s play.”

Life after the Sun

When Andreu and Dooley retired in 2020, they were at different points in their lives.

Dooley and his wife, Karen, were empty-nesters, having seen their daughter off to college. The Andreus, meanwhile, still had a daughter and son in high school.

Dooley continued working, while Andreu took on more responsibilities for maintaining the household and ferrying his kids to and from school and other activities.

“He became ‘Mr. Mom,’” Jill said. “He runs our house.”

But there is one thing they had in common post-retirement from the Sun: Both welcomed the opportunity to openly cheer on the Gators for the first time in decades.

“In retirement [Robbie] has very much enjoyed being a Gator fan,” Jill said. “When we’ve gone to a couple of games, there’s nothing more satisfying for me as a Gator fan and his wife than to sit with him for a football game in the stands. It’s a lot of fun.

“We went to the Tennessee game last year, and I looked up at the press box and said, ‘Do you miss it?’ And he said, ‘Not at all.’ He turned it right off.”

Dooley did not. He takes his role as a chronicler of UF athletics seriously “while it’s still in my head.” Many of his articles are historical in nature, whether it’s a profile of a Gator legend, a list of the best players ever at a given position, or the best UF Olympians of all time.

He also invests significant time and energy each year organizing the Bob Dooley Invitational golf tournament, named for his late father. The event, which benefits Stop Children’s Cancer, marked its 29^th edition in May at Ironwood Golf Course.

Dooley hasn’t committed to No. 30; he said a lot depends on Ironwood’s future.

Andreu is more certain.

“I’ll say this, there will be a tournament next year and probably for years after,” Andreu said. “Because for the last 20 years, Pat’s said, ‘That’s the last one, I’m not gonna do any more.’ And then he gets energized again, and it’s back on. But it is a lot of work to put that tournament on. So it is exhausting for him and his brother Tim.”

While the golf tournament’s future is TBD, one can count on Dooley continuing to share his thoughts and opinions through various forums.

“He’s definitely stayed relevant,” Andreu said.

Dooley closes each podcast with his signature line, “I am deep, I am way back, and I am outta here!” When asked when that closing might also mark his true retirement, he equivocates.

During a recent episode of his podcast, Dooley hinted at slowing down.

“It’s kinda sad this time of year… I can’t wait for football season,” he said. “But then I say, ‘Pat, you need to pump the brakes a little bit. You are way nearer the end of your life than the beginning.’ If I lived as old as my dad, I’d be on like the 16^th [hole].

“So pump the brakes a little bit and try to enjoy this summer. Play more golf. Read more. You don’t know how much time you’ve got left on this earth, and every morning you wake up should be happy. I think sometimes we worry too much—and I’m telling this to myself—‘When’s the next game? What are we going to watch all summer?’ OK, watch a movie. Go outside for a walk. I’m going to try to do that and have my best summer.”

And summer is sure to include more good times shared by the Dooley and Andreu families and their many friends, hanging out in their backyards or sitting at a bar, telling the same stories again and again, but never growing tired of them.

“When you’re friends with someone for that many years, that many decades, there’s a real bond. They really care for each other,” Karen said. “I don’t think there’s anything that the other one wouldn’t do for the other and their family.

“They truly are brothers. And they’ll never not be brothers.”

Mike Dame is a freelance writer and communications consultant who splits his time between Gainesville and the mountains of Virginia. After a career as a sports reporter and digital media pioneer at the Orlando Sentinel, he served as a senior marketing and communications leader at Virginia Tech and the Carilion Clinic health system based in Roanoke, Va.