by Ryan McGee
The next morning, I had a speaking engagement at a church in Charlotte. I was on Independence Boulevard, the busiest road in the city, and a big Cadillac pulled up next to me. The woman driving it saw me, did a double take, and rolled down her window. She had to be 90 years old and was dressed immaculately, obviously on her way to church.
She said, “Are you Dr. McGee, from the college?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“You refereed the North Carolina game yesterday.”
“Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“Well, that call against Dre Bly SUCKED!”
And she rolled up her window and drove off.
Mom, Sam, and I learned to work around those Sunday morning conversations and complaints. We would field the early morning greetings of “Is your Dad going to make it to church today? I have a question for him about that ballgame…” and we would wait an few extra minutes to depart for post-church lunch at the Morrison’s Cafeteria so that Dad could hold impromptu mini press conferences in the church vestibule and parking lot.
One morning, I was watching Dad explain a call to fellow parishioner and felt an arm around my shoulders. It was Ted Jackson, another Raleigh-based ACC official who attended our church. Today, he is one of the gurus of instant replay. Then, he was in the seventh season of his 28 as an on-field official. He said to me, “Everyone was mad at me last week, Ryan. You know what the preacher said to me? He quoted Jesus. ‘Forgive, Ted, father. For he knows not what he does.’”
The most memorable example of such Sunday morning ire came during that first full ACC season of ’83. It was Halloween weekend and the third-ranked Tar Heels were playing at No. 13 Maryland. With Clemson still on probation, it was a game that was going to determine the ACC championship as well as a New Year’s Day bowl bid. There were representatives in attendance from the Orange, Sugar, Cotton, and Fiesta Bowls. The game was being broadcast on ABC, with Al Michaels and Lee Grosscup on the call, and with a late afternoon start it was guaranteed to end under the lights and in prime time.
It was a very big deal. It was also a very tight football game.
Quarterback Boomer Esiason led the Terrapins to a late score and two-point conversion to take a 28–17 lead late. But the Heels came back and with 22 seconds remaining UNC scored to trail 28–26. When they failed on the two-point conversion that would have tied the game, a very large percentage of the 51,200 fans at Byrd Stadium stormed the field and tore down the goal post in the enclosed west end zone, the very space of real estate where Carolina had just come up short.
But those 22 seconds were still on the clock and they had to be played. It took more than a half-hour to clear the field and restart the game. What happened next is still, more than three decades later, the play that Dad still finds himself forced to defend.
Dad
Everyone in America knew that Carolina was going to attempt an onside kick. Back then, that was a very aggressive, physical play. Today, the front line of the kicking team isn’t allowed to run in there and start blocking the receiving team. In 1983 they could, like a flying wedge.
The kicker skulled the ball and then ran along behind it waiting for it to roll the 10 yards that it had to before he was allowed to pounce on it and recover it. His guys up front had cleared the path really well, and he scooped it up. But I had him just short of 10 yards. I mean, it was nine yards and two feet, but it was definitely short. I threw my beanbag to the turf to mark that spot, and I immediately looked across to Doug Rhoads on the other side of the field, and he had thrown his bean bag at that exact same spot. We both had the kicker touching it too soon, so it’s Maryland’s ball. One snap later, the game was over.
Once again, the fans flooded the field. This time, Dad and Doug Rhoads—a college administrator and an FBI agent—had devised an escape plan. During the long delay to get the first Maryland mob off the field, they’d decided that if a second wave came at game’s end, they would sprint to the wall that lined the field and walk along against it, letting the crowd jump over them as they safely sneaked toward the locker room. It worked. Unfortunately, the other four members of the crew hadn’t followed them.
Dad
Doug and I were sitting in the locker room, drinking water and talking about the game, and five minutes went by. Then ten minutes. Then fifteen minutes. We could hear helicopters and sirens, and we thought, “Damn, are they still playing?” Finally, the rest of the guys came in and they had lost their hats and their penalty flags, everything. They’d gotten caught up in the mob, and there were a handful of injured fans being airlifted out.
We had long talk there in the locker room about what we would have done had Carolina recovered that onside kick and had a chance to score in the end zone that now didn’t have a goal post. We decided that if they’d gotten into field goal range, we would have flipped the field and moved them down to the end with a goal post.
That game actually caused a national rule change. From then on, until now, a stadium has to have a backup goal post ready to go in case that happens again.
Remember, this was my first real TV game during my first full-time season in the ACC. I was like, man, are they all going to be like this?
Oh yeah, speaking of TV, that’s how we other three McGees were watching the game back in Raleigh. The images were dramatic. Al Michaels was even more dramatic. Especially when the grainy standard definition camera images of the onside kick captured under the dim lights of The Byrd were, well, just grainy and standard definition enough to create shadows of doubt in the court of public opinion, particularly those dressed in Carolina Blue. The difference between the ball rolling 10 yards and it rolling only nine yards and two feet was a little difficult to see on a 1980s 21-inch Zenith tube television.
Our phone started ringing. It didn’t stop for quite a while. Mom was answering the calls from neighbors and family members, all of whom were Tar Heels loyalists. They were mad and they wanted to talk to Dad. They told her that there was already chatter on local radio that the game had been botched so badly by Dad and his crew that it would have to be replayed. She sent us to bed. Sam and I were a little stressed out.
Sam
I feel like over the years I, way more than Ryan, felt real stress during Dad’s games.
Everyone else who is watching a football game, on TV or in the stands, they are rooting for one team or the other. My feelings were always that I didn’t care who won. At a bowl game, I might buy a sweatshirt of one team and pull for them because I just thought they were a cool story, or I liked a certain player. But I just wanted was to see a great game and for Dad to have the chance to be a part of a great game. And I really wanted them to get it right.
That fear I’m talking about, what I never wanted was for the officiating crew to become the story. People would probably assume that as we got older, that stress level about that would come down. But as I grew up and understood the game at a higher level, I almost knew too much. You can’t relax then, right?
Dad
When I would come home from a game, Hannah would say, “Great game. Ryan taped it for you.” Ryan and I would go on runs together and we would talk about the game.
But Sam would come to me with a little sheet of paper, and it would have a handful of plays written down that he wanted to discuss, like: “3 minutes to go, 3rd quarter, 2nd and 8, pass interference…” I would say, “Okay, let’s go get the tape and look at it.”
The amazing thing was that the three or four plays Sam would have written down would always be the same three or four plays I was already thinking about, the ones I wanted to go back and review as soon as I got home. And he was in middle school!
Sam
I could get a little intense. If you know me, that’s not a surprise. I can get a little intense now.
I always knew all the names of the officials and who was graded high and who was graded low, everything. So, when I
would watch a game, whether Dad was on the crew or not, there was a pretty good chance that I knew that crew and everyone who was in it.
So, if I knew that the crew in the game I was watching was the best, and yet they still had a bad day and got some big calls wrong, my reaction was, “Geez, if these guys, the best, can foul up in the Rose Bowl or the Florida–Florida State game, then no official is immune to the nightmare game.”
So, when Dad was on the field I was always thinking, Let’s not let this be the nightmare game for Dad, okay?
Sam and I, ages 10 and 12, laid our heads down that night convinced that Dad had just had the nightmare game at Maryland. Mom never went to bed because she also believed her husband had just had the nightmare game. Meanwhile, Dad and referee Courtney Mauzy, both based in Raleigh, were laughing it up on their flight home, talking about Mauzy losing his hat and yellow flag as he fought his way through the celebrating Maryland crowd.
Dad
I got home at, like, two o’clock in the morning and every light in the house was on. Hannah was pacing the floor and all worked up. I asked her what was going on and she said, “They’re talking about replaying the game because you guys screwed it up so bad!” I assured her that we hadn’t screwed anything up and they damn sure weren’t going to be replaying the game.
But then I thought, Okay, maybe I should go check the tape before I go to bed. Just to be sure.
At the start of the 1980s, there were still only a handful of college football games on TV each Saturday. But already Dad was starting to show up on TV quite a bit. My Dad! On TV!
It was such a big deal that we even took a family trip to an electronics trade show to purchase a new not-so-big-screen TV and our very first VCR. My job on Saturdays, starting perhaps that very night, was to make sure Dad’s TV games were recorded. I would dutifully sit there with Mom and Sam, remote control in hand, pausing the recording during TV timeouts so that when Dad returned home, he could enjoy the luxury of commercial-free screening sessions. That remained my job throughout my teen years and even after I left for college, calling Mom from school to make sure she had the VCR timer set to roll tape on Pops, wherever he was.
As the years went on and I befriended other officials’ families, I would quickly bond with my fellow audio-visual tech cohorts among each family. We shared horror stories of recording the wrong games and timers that were set too short and missed the ends of games. Then there was the worst tale of them all, when one ACC official rushed home from his first career bowl game, settled in with his beer and chips to take in his glorious performance…and the family had recorded over it with Robin Williams in Popeye.
Sam
It was real film study. As real as you could get watching a Jefferson-Pilot broadcast on a VHS tape. As much as he traveled, Dad never missed church. Sometimes he would meet us there straight from the airport and we’d eat lunch and go straight home and he would already have one or two plays in mind that he wanted to review. I watched how serious he was about it, and that’s how I learned football. But it wasn’t just watching a great play. It was watching how that play was covered by the officials on the field.
It was never just, “Man, look at how Keeta Covington from Maryland just outran everyone to the end zone on that punt return.” It was, “Man, look at how the official adjusted in time and got back there to beat Keeta Covington to the end zone on that punt return.”
Dad
I still have every game. Over the years, I collected this library of games that I would go back to all of the time. Those first days in the ACC, I had so many Maryland games with Bobby Ross. Over the next couple of decades, I had him again as the head coach at Georgia Tech and Army. Or Steve Spurrier, who was head coach at Duke and then went to Florida. Or Bill Dooley, who was at Virginia Tech and then Wake Forest. Or Lou Holtz at Notre Dame and then South Carolina. If I was going to see a coach or a team again, I would watch some old games of theirs to get ready. It couldn’t hurt.
Plus, and I’m only sort of joking here, if one of those coaches still had a question about a call I had against them 10 years earlier, I could say, “It’s funny you bring that up, Coach. I was just watching that play last Thursday…”
The Sunday morning after the UNC-Maryland onside kick, the church complainers were indeed lined up. How could Jerry—a North Carolinian(!)—have possibly believed that football hadn’t rolled 10 yards?! Hadn’t he heard Al Michaels and Lee Grosscup express their doubts?! And what the hell had they planned to do if Carolina had gotten to that end zone, trying to win the game without any goal posts?!
That Tuesday, Dad and Courtney Mauzy were both in attendance for a big Raleigh Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Everyone there was well aware of what the Meredith College VP and the hugely successful construction contractor did during their fall weekends, just as they were well aware of what game they had worked a few nights before. Dad asked Mauzy if anyone had spoken to him all day. “Nope.” Dad replied, “Me, neither. Let’s get out of here.”
To the rest of the nation, that game has long been forgotten, even among Maryland fans. If they do remember it, they talk about the field storming and the goal post, not the onside kick. In fact, the story about the game that ran in Sports Illustrated the next week, titled Carolina’s Cookie Crumbled Again, never mentioned the onside kick.
But back home, because we are, you know, North Carolinians (!), the kick is what everyone remembers. A decade after the game, at a Baptist church conference, Mom was approached by an old friend she hadn’t seen in years. When she tried to introduce her friend to Dad, the woman replied, “I don’t have any interest in meeting your husband. He’s the man who got the onside kick call wrong in that Carolina-Maryland game.” Even now, as we were writing this book in 2020, I tweeted out a photo I found of Dad and the officiating crew at that game. The very first response was from an UNC alum and former employee: “Wait. Your dad was the FJ during the missing goal post and on-side kick fiasco?!”
Dad
By the way, here’s the part no one remembers from that play. A flag had been thrown. Carolina was offsides on the kick. So even if it had gone 10 yards—which it still hasn’t, by the way—they were going to have to kick it again.
And it so it was we learned early on that we would have to make room in our lives for confusion, misinformation, and unreasonably long stretches of anger from strangers and friends alike. That was all going to be a big part of this gig—and not just for Dad.
As Sam and I started attending games on a more regular basis, we developed a little bit of a comedy routine, though we were the only ones in on the joke. The comp tickets provided to the families of officials are typically in the cheap seats, located among the townies and those who love their team but who have never been in a campus classroom—only the campus bookstore. No matter what game it was or where, there would always be the one guy who believed the entire section was there to listen to him rag the refs. We would identify him early, and being the great fisherman that Sam McGee is, we’d let the guy run with the line in his mouth for a quarter or so, becoming braver and brasher with his comments to the men in stripes stationed below. Then, at precisely the right moment, I would stand and shout, “HEY! Stop picking on our dad!” Then Sam, a spot-on stand-in for the kid, Elliott, from the film E.T., would drop his little head in puppy-dog sadness.
We’d hear nary a peep from that guy for the remainder of the game.
In case you hadn’t already recognized a pattern when it came to those who were doing the shouting, complaining, and blaming, it has always been delivered 100 percent of the time from adults. At school, to our sports-loving friends who dressed head-to-toe daily in the colors of their favorite college teams, the McGee boys were looked upon as awesome.
Sam
Back then, you think about what TV coverage was, the only way that most people could consume college football was from a camera angle that was like you sitting in Ro
w ZZ of the stadium. Well, our seats, bad as they might have been sometimes, a lot of times they were almost on the field. And then, at scrimmages and eventually games, we were on the sidelines! The only people who were getting closer to the game than us were the people who were actually playing in the game.
On one occasion, Sam got that close, too. Too close. It was during that same ’83 season and it was a night that changed the direction of my life.
Sam
Dad was on the local news there in Raleigh after the UNC-Maryland game. They came to his office to ask him about that last play. Can you believe that? I remember he was totally confident about it as he explained it, but the Carolina fans still didn’t want to hear it.
Then the reporter ended the interview by saying something like, “And hey, Carolina fans, you can see Jerry McGee in action again in another big game for the Tar Heels when they travel to Virginia in two weeks!”
In his second season at Virginia, George Welsh had the Cavaliers football program on the cusp of the turning the corner. UVA was 5–4 with two games remaining when the 19th-ranked Tar Heels came to Scott Stadium, another televised game as UNC was once again playing to impress the bowl scouts.
But the real story of that afternoon was that Dad and his crew had scored a sideline photographer’s pass. It would be rotated per quarter between myself, Sam, and another official’s kid. The previous Christmas, I had been gifted a brand-new, very fancy Sears-branded SLR camera and telephoto lens, delivered by Santa Claus himself. I had just completed a very successful football season as the yearbook photographer for the West Millbrook Middle School Wildcats. Now I was going to be snapping pics at Scott Stadium, standing alongside photographers from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, and the Washington Post. They all looked at me with a perpetual WTH facial expression. But they also went way out of their way to help the just-turned-13-year old who stood among them, all 5-foot-5, 90 pounds of me.
The game was a tractor pull. UNC ran the ball behind the duo of Tyrone Anthony and Ethan Horton. Virginia was powered by a machine of a running back named Barry Word. The contest ground into the fourth quarter, the scoreboard still struggling to climb into double digits. When that fourth quarter started, I would be back on the sideline with the coveted credential. But before that, it was Sam’s turn.