Twenty years later, Pat Dye reunited with pants

By Kenneth Boone and Carl Holcomb

Published Friday, July 11, 2008

We're going to put this as delicately as possible: Pat Dye lost his pants.

And his wallet.

And his car keys.

Twenty-three years later Shannon McDuffie found them, setting off a remarkable, humorous and fortuitous chain of events with a fairy tale ending.

Last winter, when a record-breaking drought pushed lake levels down 15 feet below full pool, people begin hunting for all sorts of things on the lake's suddenly-wide shoreline.

Shannon McDuffie was one of those who went hunting one warm day in December.

She was in the Emerald Shores area near Still Waters looking for old bottles along the water's edge when she came upon an object sticking out of the mud. As she reached down to retrieve it, she realized it was a pair of golf pants. They weren't just any golf pants either. They were big-check green-and-blue Madras pants, like something you'd expect to find in Rodney Dangerfield's trailer on the set of Caddy Shack.

As McDuffie picked up the pants, she found a mud-caked, alligator leather wallet in one of the pockets. She rushed straight home with the leather-bound treasure to wash it off and see what she had unearthed. (Unlaked? Demudded?)

A little cleaning revealed a number of credit cards from the mid '80s: an Alabama driver's license, an honorary Alabama State Trooper card, a Delta Frequent Flyer card, a Chevron "government credit card" with that included these exact words: "University of Auburn Athletic." The wallet also included American Express, Visa and Gulf credit cards.

All the cards bore the same name: Patrick Fain Dye.

"Patrick Fain Dye - who is that?" McDuffie said she asked herself. "Then I got to thinking, Pat Dye, Pat Dye, there was a Dye who was an Auburn coach ... and about that time my husband came home from work and we both suddenly realized, in fact, that this was a wallet that once belonged to the famous Auburn football coach Pat Dye.

"After we had shared all the excitement with my mom and dad, we got in our golf cart and rode back down to the lake to retrieve the pants that were left in the mud," McDuffie said. "In the golf pants, which were still folded and had retained their crease, we also found a set of Toyota car keys, an Auburn football helmet key chain and a plain white handkerchief."

In case you've been stuck in the mud for the past couple of decades, Pat Dye is a national football figure, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and something of a legend in Alabama.

Dye was head football coach at Auburn University for 12 seasons, from 1981 to 1992. As a head coach at three universities, his career football record was 153-62-5 in 19 years.

Dye started out on the gridiron as an All-State and All-American high school lineman on the Richmond Academy team that won the 1956 Georgia 3A state championship title. In college, he was twice selected for All-American honors while playing for the Georgia Bulldogs and was named the Most Valuable Lineman in the SEC in 1960. After college, Dye played three years as linebacker for the Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football League. He worked for coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, serving as an assistant coach at the University of Alabama from 1965 to 1973, and went on to head coaching jobs at East Carolina and Wyoming before landing in Auburn as head coach from 1981-1992. Dye won 71 percent of the games he coached at Auburn, piling up a 99-39-4 record, making him the third winningest football coach at Auburn behind Mike Donahue and Ralph "Shug" Jordan. He won four Southeastern Conference championship titles and was the SEC Coach of the Year three times.

Dye retired as Auburn's athletic director and head football coach after an intense NCAA investigation into Auburn boosters making payments to a player. He's now employed by Auburn University as a special assistant to the president and spends a considerable amount of time managing his property. The 786-acre track where he lives called Crooked Oaks, and a adjacent 740-acre commercial hunting plantation called Auburn Oaks, are located in the small community of Notasulga, about 10 miles southwest of Auburn and about 20 miles southeast of Lake Martin.

McDuffie said her first reaction was to contact Coach Dye and ask him if he would like his wallet returned. It turned out to be easier said than done. With the aid of her bosses' wife, Gail Butcher, McDuffie attempted to contact Pat Dye and relay information about the wallet being recovered. Unfortunately, while Dye did eventually hear about the wallet's recovery, McDuffie and Coach Dye never made contact until Lake magazine got involved with the story.

So now we're back to the delicate part of the story.

"Coach, how'd you lose your pants?" we asked.

"Was there any money in there?" he answered.

Not surprisingly, Coach Dye said he has no recollection of losing his wallet or his pants. This was the Reagan era, after all.

And it was more than 20 years ago.

And really, who would 'fess up to a question like that, especially after seeing those pants.

"Well, I had a place in Still Waters in the early 80s ... I don't remember losing it, but now listen, that was a long time ago," Dye said in a telephone interview.

Lake arranged for a photo shoot with McDuffie and the coach at Dye's home in Notasulga.

When the two met, Coach Dye was pleasant, courteous, interested and at times, amused.

"Is that the wallet?" he asked after they greeted each other.

McDuffie said yes and held it out to him. The two stood together, shuffling through the expired credit cards with laminated covers that had separated and come apart.

They looked over the loot for a while, then took a tour of Dye's home, which ended up on a rock bridge over a small waterfall that flowed into his pond.

McDuffie held up the raggedy, mud-stained pants.

"I do remember those pants," Dye said, smiling and holding them out to give them the once-over.

"I don't have any idea how I lost 'em ... but we can make up a good story," he said, breaking into a smile.

"Tell you what let's do, you can be my guest and come to the Blue Jean Ball and auction them off," Dye said. "Everything that was in my pants."

McDuffie's face lit up and she quickly agreed.

The Blue Jean Ball is an annual event held every year on the weekend of the Auburn-LSU football game. The exclusive and expensive charity event is held at Auburn Oaks, one of Dye's properties, to benefit the Auburn University School of Nursing. This year it will be held on Friday, Sept. 19.

And so, when you really think about it, what Shannon McDuffie pulled out of the muddy Lake Martin shoreline back in December was ... an invitation to a ball.

If that's not a fairy tale ending, we don't know what is.