by Ryan McGee
Dad
The meeting started to break up and Holtz kind of shouted to get everyone’s attention. He says, “I have a question. How the heck does this work with the buffalo?” Everyone laughed and started leaving again. But he repeated himself. We all realized he was serious. He was talking about Ralphie, the Colorado Buffalo that they run down the sideline before every game. They had hauled his butt all the way from Boulder, so you knew they were going to run him. Holtz wanted to know exactly where and when that animal was going to be taking the field. He said, “What I don’t need is for my All-American defensive star Chris Zorich to get run over before the game even starts!”
He had a great point. Now all of us who were going to be on the field were like, This is a great question. Now we wanted to know how this was going to work, too!
For Dad, the most notorious case of pressurized coach plus dealing with problems no one knew about plus losing a game you shouldn’t equals sideline explosion took place on Halloween 1996. Boston College was visiting Pitt for a coveted Thursday night national showcase game on ESPN. The 4–4 Eagles were an 11-point favorite over the scuffling 2–6 Panthers. But BC never got into gear and lost an ugly contest 20–13.
In the middle of it all, Boston College head coach Dan Henning, a former NFL quarterback, two-time NFL head coach, and two-time Super Bowl–winner, totally and completely lost his mind.
Dad
Honestly, it escalated so quickly that it didn’t seem real.
The back judge had a penalty against Boston College for 12 men on the field. We actually had some disagreement on that. I had counted, like I always did, and had 11, but the back judge was adamant and he was a good official, so the penalty stood. That triggered Henning, and as always, I was the guy who was right there next to him, so I was the one catching hell. At one point I even tried to explain, “Coach, if you’ll notice, there’s a flag on the field out there, but my flag is in my pocket.” I was trying to let him know, stop screaming; certainly stop screaming at me.
For the next little while, he is following me up and down the sideline, just f-bomb after f-bomb, and finally he says, “My job is on the line, and you motherf--kers are out here half-assing the game…” and then he said something that ended up triggering me. “I don’t know where the f--k they found you guys!”
Now I turned around and walked toward him. I said, “Well, I’ll tell you where they found me! In a university president’s office, where I work Monday to Friday. The question is where they found you. You’re losing to Pittsburgh. On national television on Thursday night, with everyone in the country watching. If I was president at Boston College, you’d be looking for a job!”
I shouldn’t have said that. And I wish that had been all that I said. I tried to walk away, but he followed me. He said something and when he walked away, I followed him. It was the only time I just lost the handle. But I was a university president now, and there was a lot of stress in my job, too. Football was supposed to be my stress release, but on a Thursday night, getting screamed at by this guy, who was supposedly known as a good guy, I just couldn’t take it gracefully anymore.
Once it finally started to calm down, I looked over and I saw a kid holding a sideline microphone for ESPN. I said to him, “You didn’t get all of that, did you?”
He didn’t get all of it, but he absolutely got some of it. Most of the exchange had taken place during a TV timeout, so the nation didn’t hear it. But I was two years into my entry-level career at ESPN, and at the Worldwide Leader in Sports we don’t see commercial breaks during games on our air. The satellite feed that is beamed back to our offices is what we call the backhaul, a clean feed that includes everything at the stadium during those breaks when the viewing audience is watching ads or SportsCenter score updates. In the booth that night was play-by-play man Mike Patrick, a man with deep ACC roots, having called many of Dad’s earliest TV games on Jefferson-Pilot back in the ’80s. The sideline reporter was Dr. Jerry Punch, a coworker I knew very well.
This particular night I was in our ESPN Charlotte office. The only sound in the building was from BC at Pittsburgh, echoing throughout every room. But then, during this one commercial break, I heard a familiar sound that made me look up from my paperwork. Was that…Dad? And did he just drop an f-bomb?
I heard Doc Punch reporting to the production truck, not to be aired, but just in case it became a bigger problem once they returned from the commercials: “Guys, Coach Henning is really going at it with an official down here. That’s the field judge. Dr. Jerry McGee. Ryan McGee’s father.”
In the closing moments of the game, Henning walked over to Dad. This time he didn’t scream. “Jerry, if I offended you, I apologize.”
“Me, too, coach. We both lost our cool, didn’t we?”
Dad
That night neither one of us adhered to Mr. Neve’s rule about watching what you said.
After the game, when cornered by a very nervous officiating coordinator, Dad refused to divulge the content of his conversation with Henning, saying only that they were having a disagreement over where to get the best steak in Pittsburgh after the game. In fact, he’d never fully explained what happened until now, not even to Sam or me.
Dad
I’ve never gotten into that much because I’m not proud of it. It was not my finest moment. Nor was it Dan Henning’s finest moment. He didn’t know the kind of stress I was under at my job. And, as we know now, that night we had no clue what a total and complete mess he was in the middle of at Boston College.
The following week, the entire nation knew. That’s when Henning announced that he was suspending 13 Boston College football players for gambling. The game before Pitt, the Eagles had been crushed by Syracuse 45–17, and rumors were rampant in the Boston College locker room that some of the players on the team had placed bets on the game, against their own team. In the days leading up to the Pitt game, Henning held a team meeting to address those rumors and asked anyone who had bet on the Syracuse game to come forward. No one did. But as the night at Pitt turned ugly, so did Henning’s mood. In the locker room after the loss, before leaving for the airport, he exploded on his team, promising that he would get the bottom of the gambling chatter. By the end of November, the county district attorney had become a regular in the BC football office, a campus gambling ring had indeed been exposed, eight Eagles were off the team permanently, and Henning would never coach college football again.
Dad
In the early 2000s, Dan Henning lived in Charlotte, not far from us. He was offensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers. I used to wonder what would happen if we ran into each other at the grocery store. We never did.
Sam
I think, looking back, we understand why Dan Henning was in the frame of mind that he was that night at Pitt. But when he was calling the offense for the Panthers, if they had a bad day, I don’t think any of us went out of our way to cut him much slack when it came to criticism.
By the way, there is no photograph of the Dan Henning versus Jerry McGee exchange on the Wall of Screaming. But there is videotape in the ESPN library. I know, I checked. Maybe I should have erased it.
TV Timeout with Dr. Jerry Punch
“Hey Ryan, remember that deal between your dad and Dan Henning…”
It is October 11, 2014, a Saturday night, and I am talking to Dr. Jerry Punch at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The green flag for that night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race is still an hour away and we have taken up a position on pit road, where one of the race teams has set up a television to watch college football.
We are reminiscing about the mid-1990s, our earliest days working together, on a nightly ESPN2 auto racing show, RPM 2Night. I have always referred to him as “the other Dr. Jerry in my life,” because I have worked with or alongside Punch for most of my adult life. He was always a hero of mine because he reported not only from college football s
idelines, but also from the pits at NASCAR events and the Indianapolis 500. His was the dream job. He had been with ESPN since 1984, and I couldn’t believe that I had been fortunate enough to work with him.
In 1996, we worked together nearly every Tuesday morning, shooting a recurring feature story that went behind the scenes at NASCAR race shops. We titled it Dr. Punch’s House Calls. Cute, right? That gig included a shoot on the Tuesday morning following Dad’s Thursday night throwdown with Dan Henning, an altercation I’d first gotten a heads-up on when Punch reported on it during a commercial break. He had also known Dad for a long time. So, the shock of seeing him completely lose his cool hadn’t worn off. All these years later, I think it still hasn’t. It certainly hadn’t during this night in 2014.
“Ryan, I’ve been doing this for a while. I’ve seen some heated sideline arguments. I’ve seen some big arguments here at the racetrack between teams and officials. But I’ve never seen an argument go nuclear like that on both sides.”
“Hey,” Punch said, adding what he always has when we recall that night. “Do you remember what I asked you when I saw you that next week at our shoot?”
I remember. I will never forget it.
“I said, ‘When we get done with this House Calls shoot today, let’s pay your dad a house call at his office. I think we might need to check his blood pressure.’”
7. Go (Big) East, Young Man
When the final horn sounded on the 1990 Orange Bowl and the other New Year’s Day games of 1990, it also signaled the end of the college football world as we knew it. The term “realignment” was being introduced into our collegiate sports lexicon.
During the December days leading into those games, the Big Ten offered a membership invitation to Penn State, the most successful independent college football program not named Notre Dame. It was Joe Paterno who had years earlier pitched the idea of his fellow eastern football independents joining forces with the membership of the Big East basketball conference. Now, with Penn State off the table and the Big Ten threatening to suck up all of the potential TV money from the region, the Big East moved quickly to do what JoePa had once dreamed of, expanding their league into the realm of football. Syracuse, Pitt, and Boston College were already solid football schools. When they went recruiting for football partners, they swung for the fences and stunned the sports world by landing Miami. The Canes were soon joined by fellow previously independent programs Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Temple, and Rutgers.
In 1991, the Big East would be playing football, and it needed football officials.
That job fell to Art Hyland, the Big East’s legendary coordinator of basketball officials. He reached out to his member schools for recommendations, and Jerry McGee’s name kept coming up, especially from Frank Beamer’s staff at Virginia Tech. Same for Bill Booker. The best officials from the Northern independents were on board immediately. Talent from the South also signed on, especially when Hyland hired Dan Wooldridge to take over as Big East football officiating coordinator.
Wooldridge, a longtime basketball and football official with a career that included officiating the 1976 Olympics and being the first commissioner of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, was an even-keeled Virginian, beloved throughout the sports officiating community. He quickly filled up the remaining slots on the roster Hyland had started.
There was a time when Dad could have never imagined leaving the ACC, but life was changing. I was out of the house, a student at the University of Tennessee, where I had landed a job working for the Volunteers football team on the film crew. Yes, I had figured out a way to get back into practices and press boxes. Sam would also be leaving for school soon.
Sam
Now my daughter is approaching the age when we need to start thinking about scheduling visits to college campuses, trying to determine where she might go to school, and Ryan is in the same boat. But the truth is that neither one of us really knows how to do that. When I started looking at colleges, I was looking at Virginia, North Carolina, Wake Forest, schools like that. Ryan was looking at places like Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
When it came time to visit schools, I think we both were like, “Hey, we’ve already been to all of these places, some of them a dozen times or more.” Ryan probably would have never set foot on the campus in Knoxville if Dad hadn’t had officiated the Duke-Tennessee game during Ryan’s senior year of high school. I ended up at Wake Forest. By that time, I’d probably been to Wake at least seven or eight times for to watch Dad work football games. At least.
An emptying nest also meant that Mom could finally graduate from being our chauffeur, cook, schedule keeper, and nervous Saturday football TV viewing partner. She told me that she was very excited about the prospect of being free to hit the road with Dad more often, really for the first time. But she also admitted that she was a little worried that he might get his feelings hurt if she went with him on the game weekends, but chose to skip out on some of the actual games. It wasn’t about football for her. It was about seeing different parts of the United States during the fall and experiencing that with Dad.
As for the football, Dad looked at the Big East schedule and ran it up against the ACC. It felt like a new day versus Groundhog Day.
Dad
At that time, the ACC schools were getting away from the big out-of-conference games. They’d started playing down. I was returning to a lot of games that I had already worked. And there was an unwritten rule about postseason games that I thought was unfair. If you’d had two bowl games in a row, then you wouldn’t get a third, no matter how high you’d graded out or how good of a season you’d had.
When I talked to the Big East, I asked them how they would determine bowl bids. They said the best at each position would go, period. Also, in addition to the eight Big East schools, their office would be assigning crews for Louisville, Army, Navy, and Notre Dame. With all of those schools, I was guaranteed a lot of games. And the chance to work Army-Navy? And guaranteed trips to Notre Dame?
I was never upset with the ACC. This was a chance to see new places and have new experiences, and at that stage of my life that was really the whole point of officiating for me, someone who loved college football.
So, I said yes.
The Big East experience wasn’t a trip to another planet, but it was close. Out were the drives to Durham and Winston-Salem, replaced by Friday afternoon flights into Philly and Boston. The style of play was different, still very much tied to its old school granite-fisted Eastern football roots. There was a lot more artificial turf. The coaches and staffs were much more artistic in their use of curse words. And Dad’s new crewmates, hailing largely from the northeastern corridor, certainly had a lot more vowels in their last names. During that first season I asked Mom about the Big East experience and she said, “It took me a couple of games to get used to all of the kisses to both my cheeks. I felt like I was in a Godfather movie.”
It was a lot to process, but it was immediately fun. The only tension came from the blending of officials from so many different parts of the college football map. For the most part, everyone got along and enjoyed the cultural crash course. But there were those who definitely chose to draw a Mason-Dixon line between the North and the South.
Dad
I think that was inevitable. It was never widespread, but there was definitely some of that pretty early on. That first year of the Big East we had officials from 18 different states. Hell, we didn’t know one another. Seven guys who came in from seven different cities on seven different airplanes, and now here we were on the field together to work Pitt at Ohio State or Michigan at Notre Dame or Rutgers at Texas.
We figured each other out pretty quickly, though. We had to. The good news was that Booker came with me. Bill had become my best friend in football, and we were going to get to experience this together.
They did so with smiles on their faces. Dad worked a
whopping 13 games in 1991 and five on national television, a stunning number for the early 1990s, and that included the Army-Navy Game, held on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Over the course of the year he shared the field with nearly half of that year’s New Year’s Day bowl teams. During his seven years in the Big East, Dad averaged over a dozen games per season.
Sure, he had worked games with Penn State before, but those were on the road. Now he was walking onto the field in Happy Valley, with 96,672 fans chanting “We are!” He had been to Virginia Tech, but not this Virginia Tech of Beamer Ball and half-smashed lunch pails. And yes, he had called games involving the Fighting Irish, but now he was actually in the House that Rockne Built.
Mom was in those places, too, and she was at the actual games most of the time. But where you could also find her was walking the New Jersey Boardwalk, having dinner atop Mt. Washington overlooking the Pittsburgh skyline, and riding the Maid of the Mist to the edge of Niagara Falls.
A few hours of being called a moron by a football coach and some fans? It felt like nothing more than a luxury tax.
Dad
What does the field judge do when it’s time for the coin toss? You go get the captains. So, at Notre Dame I go to the locker room to get the captains, like I had done a hundred times. But then we started down the stairs, and I look up and there it is. The sign. “play like a champion today.”
To look up and see that…a little boy from Roberdell, North Carolina, doesn’t think he’s ever going to see that. And then you come out of the tunnel and take the players in their gold helmets to the 50-yard line, and standing across from you are the kids in their Michigan winged helmets. And then you see an older gentleman there for the game, and he looks familiar, and you realize, wait, that’s Johnny Lujack. He won the Heisman when I was just a little guy. The first football I ever owned had his name on it. It got run over and flattened by a school bus. I cried until Daddy took me to the store to get a new football, and it had to be the Johnny Lujack model. And there he is, reaching out a hand to introduce himself.