Dabo and his dogs: Clemson coach’s canine companions are part of the Swinney family

CLEMSON – Near the end of a press conference to preview the opener with Georgia Tech, Dabo Swinney snapped his fingers to mark the passing of time. Just like that, it seemed, two decades as a coach at Clemson had flown by.

He thought of his boys, two on Clemson’s football team, another just graduated. He then thought of his dog, Hershey, who has been with the family for all 14 seasons of Dabo’s tenure as head coach. Hershey, the Boykin Spaniel, was just barely limping along.

“Hang on, we gotta get through one more year,” Dabo said, smiling. “Come on, Hershey.”

Dabo doesn’t just love that old dog, with his dark hair and oven-mitten ears, because he’s some kind of good luck charm. Hershey part of the Swinney family. An important part.

A college football coach lives in a fishbowl, where every decision between the lines is scrutinized, where every word spoken publicly is dissected.

But Dabo has someone at home who is unconcerned by Clemson’s secondary after a shootout at Wake Forest. Someone who would be far more interested in the concept of a wolfpack than N.C. State. Someone who would love D.J. Uiagalelei whether he was completing passes or not, especially if he left some barbecue unguarded on the Swinneys’ counter.

That is Hershey, a renowned “counter-surfer,” who, even in his ripe old age, likes to stretch his paws toward the marble and sniff out some grub. He loves his walks, even if they are at a much slower pace than before. His hearing isn’t quite as sharp, but Dabo still banters with Hershey.

Never about the game.

“I mean, I used to love to come home to my kids … but sometimes, your kids can challenge you, too. I come home, it’s like ‘Dad, why did you do that? Why did you do this?’ Whereas my man Hershey, he just never cared,” Dabo said. “No matter what, coming off a great win, or a bad loss, man, I get home and Hershey just still wants to snuggle up to me and always loves me the same.”

Dabo is undoubtedly a dog person. He speaks with joy about his current twosome of Hershey and Levi, the latter a fluffy and energetic Golden Doodle named after the stadium where Dabo won his second national title.

Long before those two, though, Dabo grew up in Alabama at a time when there were no leash laws. Fences were rare. Dogs just roamed the neighborhood.

Snoopy, Bonnie, and Clyde

Snoopy was one of Dabo’s childhood friends. Like the Charlie Brown character, he slept on the top of doghouses in the backyard. He faithfully arrived to the bus stop every afternoon, insistent on grabbing Dabo’s lunchbox and running it back to their territory.

Then Snoopy ran back to Dabo and escorted him home.

“Snoopy, he was unbelievably smart but he was mean. Snoopy was meeeeeean,” Dabo said. “He loved his family. But if you weren’t in his family, man, he was ready to fight all the time.”

Relatable, maybe, because Dabo has always had to fight for his share. He didn’t grow up rich. He had to walk on as a receiver at Alabama. In fact, while he was on the football team, he cleaned gutters to help afford tuition.

One customer in 1990 happened to be selling dogs. 

Clyde, a sheepdog that Dabo Swinney got while he was in college at Alabama, stands next to a snowman. Courtesy photo/Clemson Athletics

Courtesy photo/Clemson Athletics

“So we swapped out cleaning her gutters for a dog. Named him Clyde,” Dabo said, before letting out a laugh. “All my teammates remember Clyde. Everybody who knows me, definitely before I came to Clemson, they allllllllll remember Clyde.”

Clyde was a sheep dog, a Briard, specifically, and Dabo likes to say Clyde was like two people in a wild-haired, brown dog suit — and those two people weren’t on the same page.

Some of Clyde’s eccentricities may have been trained into him, because Dabo and his roommate weren’t supposed to have a dog in their tiny apartment. They’d throw him out a back window so he could run to the bathroom.

And then he’d return to the window and jump back in.

“He would have been better named as Houdini,” Dabo said, “because you could not corral Clyde.”

Clyde was always with Dabo. At home, or on the beach during spring break. So he grew somewhat possessive, which made Clyde and Dabo’s relationship complicated when Kathleen came into the picture.

Clyde tried to push the future Mrs. Swinney straight off the bed.

That started a tit for tat between Dabo and his dog. Relegated to the floor at night, Clyde retaliated by chewing up the bed. Then, he was tethered to a leash hooked to the bottom of the washing machine, right by the kitchen. Clyde commenced destroying shelving.

Kathleen, a teacher, came home to check on Clyde one day, because a storm was coming. Clyde hated storms. He found shelter by wriggling the door to the washer and dryer open, jumping on top of the machines, and spilling an entire box of Tide powder all over the kitchen floor.

“It look like it snowed,” said Kathleen, who was fully pregnant with their first son, Will, and wasn’t exactly thrilled to clean it all up.

“I’m like, alright, that’s it,” Dabo said. “I’m putting him in the garage.”

That didn’t exactly work. One day, Kathleen came home and Clyde’s head was popping through the wall.

“It was like a prison break, like something from Shawshank,” Kathleen said, referring to the famous 1994 jailhouse drama with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. “He chewed on it all day, on the sheetrock, and he made a hole between the garage and our dining room. That’s how crazy Clyde was.”

These antics didn’t dissuade Dabo and Kathleen, whose family owed Chow Chows, from their love of dogs. In fact, Kathleen found a litter of puppies abandoned in a field near the school where she worked in rural Alabama.

She brought one of them home. To complement Clyde, she was Bonnie.

“There no cell phones back then, I couldn’t call Dabo and say ‘I’m bringing home a puppy.’ I put her in my car and drove home,” Kathleen said. “If he saw her, he was going to be in love.”

Dabo was. Clyde, predictably, was not.

But it was hard for Clyde to protest too long.

“Bonnie was chill,” Kathleen said. “She was just the sweetest.”

From left to right, Clyde, Kathleen Swinney, Dabo Swinney, and Bonnie stand in front of a Christmas tree. Dabo got Clyde in 1990 as payment for cleaning a customer’s gutters, while Kathleen found Bonnie among an abandoned litter outside of a school years later. Courtesy photo/Clemson Athletics

Courtesy photo/Clemson Athletics

In time, Bonnie and Clyde were inseparable, as their names suggest. Bonnie lived 14 years. Clyde — well, they have no idea how long he lived.

One day in 2007, Bonnie and Clyde found their way around the fence, which happened from time to time. Usually, a neighbor let the Swinneys know the dogs has gotten out, or the two just came home.

This time, Bonnie came back. Clyde, who was 16, did not.

“My buddies like to say he probably went and got into an 18-wheeler and is riding across the country to this day,” Dabo said. “Because there’s no way Clyde died.’

Hershey and Levi

Bonnie eventually succumbed to old age. Her gravesite is by a trail behind the Swinneys’ old house, with a gravestone that reads “Here lies a loving and faithful friend.”

At times, Kathleen and Dabo will jog there, taking a moment to spruce up the site and think of her.

For several months in 2009, Dabo and Kathleen were dog-less, but that would change before Dabo’s first season as head coach. Bill D’Andrea, then-head of IPTAY, the athletic department’s fundraising arm, received a call from a chiropractor in Greenwood, Matt Durham.

Durham had some Boykin Spaniel puppies. Boykins are the state dog.

“Do you think Dabo would want one?” Durham asked.

Oh yes, Dabo did.

So “Billy D,” as he’s known in the Clemson community, made a trip to Greenwood to fetch a Boykin. He put a towel down on the passenger’s seat, just in case the little guy had an accident. It’s surreal to realize that the puppy who peed in his car that day is fast approaching his 14th birthday.

“Seems like yesterday,” D’Andrea said. “Time flies.”

Hershey, the Swinneys’ Boykin Spaniel, poses on the beach.

Courtesy photo/Kathleen Swinney

A lot has happened since Billy D brought Hershey home. Dabo had a rough start, falling back from a nine-win season in ’09 to just six victories the next year. But then came 11 straight years where Clemson posted at least 10 victories. Twice, the Tigers won it all.

Hershey has been to the football office, even posing for a picture at Memorial Stadium with Dabo. But he, obviously, has no idea what’s going on in Dabo’s world. He’s been known to just sit at Dabo’s side as the coach finishes work in his office, in a way the coach’s eldest, Will, finds almost humanlike.

Dabo will talk to him. Hershey listens.

“Like he’s one of the kids, ‘Hershey, let’s go, come over here.’ ‘Hershey, you want to do this?’ ‘Hershey, you want this?’” Dabo said. “Most of the time he acts like he understands what I’m saying.”

Boykins are very alert, and athletic, which makes them perfect hunting dogs. But that was never going to be Hershey’s life with the Swinneys.

He sleeps in the bed with Dabo and Kathleen, despite their efforts to provide him a perfectly good doggy bed. He’s never had to retrieve a dead bird to earn his keep.

“I believe he’s on scholarship,” D’Andrea joked.

In fact, Hershey doesn’t like water. Will, Drew, and Clay always threw him in the pool, but he just swam right out. He was fond, though, of running around the yard with the boys. He’d put the moves on Optimus Prime, a Pit Bull owned by P.A.W. Journey director Jeff Davis, when they played.

“Hershey, he’d look like Reggie Bush,” Will said. “He was jukin’ him out.”

The wily Boykin will surprise the Swinneys from time to time. Hershey has been known to use his vertical leap to hop onto the kitchen counter and steal some snacks. Even now, he finds a way.

“When he was younger, he could really run and jump,” Dabo said. “There’s been some food come up missing, or desserts come up missing, because Hershey got to ‘em. But he’s really just been an easy dog. Nothing real crazy.”

The only real scare with Hershey came on Lake Keowee a couple of years ago, when their reluctant swimmer just dove in. Kathleen wasn’t even sure if he could even swim, but he paddled all the way to another boat in the cove.

There was a female dog on the boat. Her humans brought Hershey aboard.

“He just smelled the pheromones or something,” Kathleen said. “Dabo just told him, ‘Girls will do that to you, Hershey.’”

Hershey, left, has been with Dabo Swinney for his entire tenure as Clemson’s head coach, while Levi, right, joined the Swinney family after the Tigers won the 2018 title in Levi’s Stadium.

Dabo loves that old dog, who has been around for so many wins, and a few tough losses. Without really knowing, or caring. He just knew Dabo’s lap was a comfortable place to rest his head.

He has a youthful companion now in the Golden Doodle Levi, who, in his calmer moments, will curl up next to Hershey on the floor.

Hershey has been a very good boy.

“It will be a sad day when Hershey goes to doggy heaven. We’ll miss him,” Dabo said. “He doesn’t have many teeth left, he doesn’t hear well, but he’s hangin’ in there. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make it through another season.”