Sidelines and Bloodlines

by Ryan McGee

  By the time Dad graduated from East Carolina, Mom was back in Rockingham and they were married on August 15, 1965. One year later, he received the call from Mr. Gaddy about the possibility of officiating high school games. Mom and Dad sensed an immediate opportunity. She hadn’t been able to continue with school and was working as a librarian in Rockingham. So, they made the decision that whatever money Dad made from officiating would go straight toward paying Mom’s tuition. She was going back to college.

  When she graduated from Pembroke State (now UNC Pembroke) with her education degree, she was pregnant with me. I was born on November 2, a Monday, and Dad worked high school games on the Friday nights before and after. Sam was born three years later, somewhere in between two of the five games Dad worked during his second season in small college football.

  My mother was smart, sweet, and funny, and she had a Jedi mind trick ability to influence an entire room full of people without those people realizing it. She was five-foot-nothing, built from equal parts heart and, when she needed it, dynamite.

  The story goes that one night after Sam and I had grown up and moved out, Mom and Dad stopped at a gas station somewhere in rural North Carolina. While Dad was filling up the car, he pointed out a very rough-looking redneck exiting the convenience store. He joked to Mom, “Just think, you could have ended up married to that guy.”

  Mom, not missing a beat, replied, “Yep. And he’d be a university president and would have just refereed the Rose Bowl.”

  Dad

  When Mr. Gaddy first called me, he was a guy Hannah and I both knew. He was the father-in-law of one our best friends from high school. A lot of the officials who were already working with him were longtime friends of ours, too.

  When he offered me the chance, I said to Hannah that if I was going to do this, then I was going to do it all out. I was going to take every assignment offered to me, even that first year of high school when I had to work five games for free. And from 1966 through 2009, I turned down exactly one game, and that wasn’t until the later half of my career.

  She never questioned that plan. Not even once. Even as what started as a Friday night hobby turned into airplane travel and longer weekends. There were moments where it was tough, for sure. But Hannah always made it work. Always.

  She made it work so well, in fact, that as little kids Sam and I honestly don’t remember him ever being gone. Our lives at home hummed along so normally that it never felt any different. So, no, we don’t have a lot of memories of Dad as an official during the high school and small college days, aside from snapshot mental images and an immense sense of pride.

  During our time in Rockingham, when I was no more than a few years old, I distinctly remember seeing Dad in his black and white uniform, jumping into the car and leaving for games at local schools. Our neighbor across the street was Earl Yates, a former Duke offensive lineman, who was also a high school official. His daughter, Amy, was my best friend. On Friday afternoons, Amy and I would sit on our tricycles and watch our fathers leave for games. Sometimes they would leave together. Other times, they would leave at the same time, but headed to different destinations. Then there were the times that a carload of other guys would stop to pick up my dad and Amy’s dad, everyone with their uniforms in hand.

  So, as far as I knew in my little world, everyone’s father did this, right?

  Sam

  I do have small college football memories from when we were at Gardner–Webb, but Dad wasn’t there for them. He was off working a game of his own, so I remember going to games on Saturdays, but just with Mom and Ryan. That’s where I think we both started really loving college football.

  I remember very clearly walking up to the stadium at Gardner–Webb and seeing a guy running the opening kickoff back for a touchdown. And I remember the final score of that game. It was 84–0. They were playing Mexico. Not New Mexico or New Mexico State. Mexico.

  I remember those games, too. But my memories mostly involve playing tackle football behind the little concession stand as the real games were happening nearby, tossing a little black-and-red plastic football, given away by a local car dealer, and mercilessly hitting the other sons of the Gardner–Webb coaches and staff.

  No matter where we were, no one had any doubts that we were the sons of Jerry McGee, the ref. Because my brother proudly wore one of Dad’s black officiating ballcaps everywhere we went. Seriously. School, dinner, the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, church…when I say everywhere we went, I mean everywhere we went.

  Sam

  I have no idea how it started. Somehow, I picked up one of his old ref hats when I was three, and I wore it for several years straight. I mean that literally. You cannot find a picture of me during that timeframe when I did not have that hat on my head. I changed my Halloween costume to a referee uniform so I could wear the hat. Mom and Dad had to make me take it off when I got into the bathtub, and only then just long enough to wash my hair. I slept in it.

  Dad

  Like, it was a fight every single night not to wear it to bed. We would finally convince him to take it off and put it on his nightstand. Then later, when we’d check in on him before we went to bed, he would have put it on as soon we left the room and he was fast asleep.

  Sam

  The pinnacle of the insanity was the year two teachers and a school photographer couldn’t make me take the ref hat off for my school picture. The more frustrated they got, the more I dug my heels in. Even my classmates were joining in. “No way!” I still have that class photo of me wearing that worn out old hat. I drew pictures of baseball teams and army units in little notebooks, and all the soldiers and team members are wearing ref hats. I still don’t know why. I don’t look back on my childhood and see Dad gone; I see him there. But I guess when I was that young, he was on the road a fair bit for work, and we weren’t going to his games yet. Maybe I was just proud of him, or it made me feel closer to him. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I just liked the damn hat. What finally ended it? Baseball. I couldn’t take the field without wearing the official uniform hat. Guess who the coach was? Dad.

  In 1980, Dad left Gardner–Webb for another small college, but in a much larger locale. Meredith College (Go Angels!) was an all-women’s school. No football. But it was located in Raleigh, North Carolina, a longtime sleepy capital city that was about to explode with growth. Meredith was surrounded by the sprawling campus of North Carolina State University. Carter–Finley Stadium, home of the NCSU Wolfpack, was just across the highway from the Meredith campus. Only 20 miles to the west sat Kenan Stadium, home of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, and Wallace Wade Stadium, playing field of the Duke Blue Devils. A little further down I-40 was Groves Stadium, home of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons.

  We had moved to Tobacco Road, where in 1980 the home teams were playing football games against the likes of Penn State, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Clemson, and Auburn. North Carolina was a top 10 team. NC State had a roster full of future NFL talent. Wake Forest had a hot young coach in John Mackovic. Duke was going against conventional Southern football wisdom and starting to sling the ball all over the field, via plays conjured up in the mind of its brash new offensive coordinator, former Heisman Trophy–winner Steve Spurrier.

  This was big-time college football. It was all around us, and it was infectious.

  Dad

  I finished my doctorate (in education) in September of ’79. I accepted the job in Raleigh that December, moving in January. Right after that, I got a letter from the ACC office in Greensboro, from Mr. Neve, wanting to know if I would be interested in starting the process of becoming part of the officiating group of the ACC.

  Here I was, moving right into the middle of the conference, right on the road with four of the schools and within driving distance of a handful of others. Timing, right?

  Dad would still work a small college schedule, but now he would mix in trips to junior colle
ges, places where ACC schools sent their freshman and JV teams. That meant there would be evaluations from ACC coaches and film that Mr. Neve could watch.

  But the best part of the new arrangement was a direct result of the league’s conflict of interest rules.

  Because we lived in Raleigh, Dad was not allowed to officiate NC State games. But because we lived in Raleigh, he would also be called upon to work as many NC State scrimmages and practices as he could, spring, summer, and fall. For Dad, that was big news because it meant reps. He could see real live Division I football players in action, over and over again. And in the more relaxed atmosphere of practice, he could also quiz coaches on rules and situations, while they did the same with him.

  But most importantly, all of those scrimmages meant my little brother and I got full access and pretty much free reign to roam a genuine college football stadium. At Gardner–Webb, we’d played with a plastic mini football with other kids outside a stadium that sat a few hundred people. At NC State, we were playing with a real football on a grass hill that overlooked the end zone of Carter–Finley Stadium that sat 47,000, while a team scrimmaged below us, preparing to take on South Carolina or Miami.

  Sam

  We were on the sideline, meeting guys who were headed to the NFL. When we first got there, Mike Quick was on that team. He went on to be a key wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles for years. I think he should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But here we are, standing in the middle of their practices, and they didn’t care! I was just struck by the speed and the violence of it all. I was seven, eight years old when we first started going out there.

  Thanks to that time I have also always known why Gatorade has dominated the sports drink market. Back then there were only two choices, and State used No. 2. It tasted like swill. I know that because they let me drink it all the time. And I have also always known why every level of football ended up banning Stickum, the sticky stuff players used to put on their hands to help catch the ball. I watched those guys just slather that stuff all over themselves. It was like brown goo and it got all over everything. There would be empty packets of it all over the ground on the sideline at NC State.

  Sam was drawn to the duties of ball boy, an art he would perfect over the years, including a role with a national championship–winning football team. I was immediately drawn to the local media who were there to cover those scrimmages, particularly the TV reporters and newspaper photographers. I would follow them around, not to try and sneak onto television, but to observe how they did their jobs. I even managed to sneak into the Carter–Finley Stadium press box one night, only to have a security guard grab me by the arm. When he angrily asked, “Where are you parents?!” I sheepishly pointed down to the playing field.

  The head coach of the Wolfpack was Monte Kiffin. Today, he is renowned as a defensive innovator, inventor of the “Tampa 2” cover defense that won Super Bowl XXXVII for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and has been mimicked throughout football ever since. But in 1980, he was known as a funny, somewhat eccentric first-time head coach. Some days he would show up for practice in a Hawaiian shirt. One day he waited until the entire was team dressed in uniform and shoulder pads and walked out in a swimsuit to announce that it was too damn hot, screw practice, they were going to the swimming pool.

  When Sam and I would play those pickup games in ­Carter–Finley, we would play with and against the sons of Kiffin’s coaching staff. There was one of those boys in particular we came to loathe. He was younger than Sam, not more than five or six, and in the middle of our impromptu games on the steep, grassy hill he was constantly insisting that he was being held or that someone had committed pass interference or that someone was running the wrong receiving route.

  One evening, the kid got so loud that Monte Kiffin ran the length of the field, blowing his whistle and screaming in front of everyone in attendance, “Dammit, Lane! Stop crying! You’re messing up our whole damn practice!”

  Sam

  As the years went by, I had forgotten about those pickup games in the stadium. Then one day I was watching ESPN and they were reporting a guy named Lane Kiffin had just been named the youngest head coach in NFL history.

  I immediately called Ryan. “Is that little mouthy kid from NC State now the head coach of the freaking Oakland Raiders?!”

  When we weren’t fighting with future head coaches, we were watching Dad learn about the next level of football, and we were learning with him. When we weren’t with him at NC State, we might be with him working scrimmages at Duke or UNC. When there were no scrimmages to work, we would watch him study the rules changes for the upcoming season. He would have his little yellow NCAA rules book in hand at home, by the neighborhood swimming pool, or on the beach. Every flat surface in our house seemed to have some sort of rules papers on it, lessons and quizzes, easily identified by diagrammed football plays and these old, goofy, clip art cartoon football players and officials that were used to decorate otherwise boring breakdown of rules and on-field mechanics. They still use those cartoons.

  After Dad felt like he was sufficiently schooled on any new rule, that’s when his in–living room demonstrations would break out. I might be lined up at wide receiver, Sam at cornerback, and Mom at free safety, being moved around the room by Dad like we were action figures as he explained the difference between pass interference or a no-call, in bounds or out of bounds, and catch versus no-catch.

  Every morning before work, Dad would lace on his running shoes and log laps at my middle school. After I made the track team at that same middle school, I’d run with him. Many afternoons in-season, we wouldn’t know that he was yet home from work and thus be surprised when we saw him running 30-yard wind sprints in the yard…backward. It worried the neighbors to death. But hey, that’s how downfield officials run.

  As goofy as Monte Kiffin could be, he was also still a serious football man. Dad was merely one of a large group of college officials who lived in Raleigh, and Kiffin loved to bring them in to talk to his coaches and players about rules, new and old, and what an official was or wasn’t looking for to enforce those rules.

  Dad

  People don’t realize this, but when you see a head coach and a veteran official discussing a play during a game, a lot of times that’s a continuation of a conversation they’ve already been having for a long time. It might go back to a practice or a scrimmage or a meeting with the team, or a discussion at a summer conference officiating meeting. A lot of coaches would show up at the officials’ annual offseason clinic to listen in on what we’re talking about and see if they can learn something or explain something to us.

  It is perhaps the least-known aspect of an already widely misunderstood profession, the relationships between officials and coaches, especially veterans on both sides. See: Dad holding a baby on the sideline at Pitt.

  In some cases, that extends to groups of players as well, particularly if an official resides in that area and works a lot of scrimmages at a certain school, or has worked a lot of games with one team during a particular player or coach’s tenure.

  Dad

  I mentioned I like to remind people that officials are humans. They hurt and they make mistakes, just like other humans. Well, it’s easy to forget that coaches are human, too.

  I remember one day I was in the locker room at NC State getting dressed and Monte Kiffin just walked in and sat down. He said to me, “Man, I really hope this works. I hope I can do this. I’ve always wanted to be a head coach. I love this place. My family loves Raleigh. We just had another son. I really, really hope this works out.”

  A year later, with a three-season record of 16–17, Monte Kiffin was fired. As we know now, he would go on to have a legendary career—but as an assistant coach. He would never be a head coach again.

  The big leagues of college football, they are an unforgiving place. It’s a fact of football life with which Dad was about to become very fami
liar. After two seasons under the ACC microscope, he’d passed his tests, both the rules exams and the eye tests of the Mr. Neve and his evaluators. In 1982, he’d be working at least a few ACC games.

  I was a preteen and Sam was about to hit double-digits. Our school and after-school schedules were moving into overdrive. Mom was teaching elementary school and carting us from one end of Raleigh to the other. It was a lot to handle, and it was only going to get worse. So, Dad went to her and they talked. When he’d made the move to small college, the only real change in that routine was everything took place on Saturday instead of Friday and instead of getting home at 1:00 am Saturday mornings he got home at the same time Sunday mornings. But now, if he did his job and did it right…if this actually worked…it would mean airplanes and overnights and at least another 10 nights per year away, added to his already-growing weeknight travel schedule as a fundraiser for Meredith College.

  Dad

  Again, Hannah never hesitated. She would make it work. She always did.

  Now Dad needed to make it work on Saturday afternoons in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

  Coaches’ Timeout with Monte and Lane Kiffin

  “Hey, son, come here! I need you to retell that story you told me earlier!”

  It is November 18, 2017, in Boca Raton, Florida. The Florida Atlantic University Owls have just boat-raced their archrival, the Florida International University Panthers, 52–24 in the game known as the Shula Bowl. The head coach at FAU is Lane Kiffin. His offensive coordinator is his little brother, Chris. Listed on the staff as a “defensive assistant” is his father, Monte.

  It is Monte Kiffin who calls out to me now, after the ballgame and the ensuing celebration has wound down. Prior to the game, in the modest FAU Stadium press box, I had spotted the living legend grabbing a snack while the Owls went through their pregame warmups down on the field. I told him that we had met before, when we both much younger, at NC State. He smiled and said, “Those were good days. But I had no idea what I was doing.”