Sidelines and Bloodlines

by Ryan McGee

“Next week I’m working at Syracuse, Coach.”

  Once the applause and the pats on the back were through in the ESPN screening room, I suddenly realized that the game wasn’t being carried on TV back home in North Carolina, so Mom likely had no idea what was happening. Right there at my screening station, I ignored my game to try and reach her before people started calling to tell her that her husband’s neck was broken or that he no longer had any teeth. She was audibly relieved when I said that he was okay. But she was audibly conflicted when I told her that he was back in the game.

  “But Mom,” I said, “the man who was already my hero has just now done the impossible. He made a room full of hardened sports fanatics actually cheer for the guy they grew up hating. A damned referee.”

  Sam

  I have always taken a lot of pride in that, making people whose first instinct is to always run officials down, making them start to double-clutch on that little bit. I’m not an idiot, so I know how people are generally always going to feel about officials. Most people don’t care for them by nature. But if I can make them start watching that third team on the field, even just a little, and understand that those guys are out there getting booed and hit and called all sort of names, but still work as hard as they can to protect the integrity of the rules, only because they love the game so much…if I can make someone understand that even just a tiny little bit, then that’s a win.

  That mission means forcing education on rooms full of football watchers, whether they want that lesson or not. And yes, that strategy applied to my time in ESPN Screening, just as it applies to my time in the press box now as a sportswriter. You know the one guy in the room who says the one thing that causes everyone else to scream in unison, “Okay, we got it! Now shut up!”? Yeah, that’s totally me.

  Back in those early days at ESPN, when a big play in a big game would dominate the entire campus, I would always make sure everyone knew it if there had actually been two big plays. Let’s say Randy Moss would break off a 75-yard touchdown reception for the Minnesota Vikings. Just as the volume of the reaction in Screening was dying down, I would shout “He beat everyone to the goal line, but not the back judge,” often to a wadded-up piece of paper being winged off my head. During the most recent College Football Playoff National Championship in New Orleans, I excitedly spent an entire TV timeout pointing to the Pac-12 officiating crew as they huddled, explaining to my ESPN.com coworkers that the white hat was having to also referee an argument among his crewmates, the officials from one side of the field clearly irritated that a personal foul had been flagged on their sideline from an official who was all the way on the other side of the Superdome floor.

  As always, my press box colleagues indulged me. But I totally saw their side-eyes.

  Sam

  To me, if you’re going to be one of those people who just rips officials all the time, wouldn’t you want to be educated on what they really do and how they do it? If people got tired of me talking about Dad and where he was officiating that weekend, then okay. But none of my close friends did. They enjoyed the college football more because of it. I know they watched games that they wouldn’t have otherwise because of it.

  Say, the 1993 Peach Bowl in Atlanta. If Dad’s recovery from his concussion at Louisville was his Willis Reed NBA Finals moment, then this night was his version of Michael Jordan’s “Flu Game,” officiating a boxing match of a football game while also running a fever. Clemson escaped with a win over Kentucky, via a fumbled red zone interception that still haunts Wildcats fans to this day. But what we remember most about that night was the fact that it was one of the first major sporting events in the year-old Georgia Dome, and that referee Al Hynes damn near shattered the fiberglass roof of the building when he forgot to turn off his microphone after announcing a penalty, blowing his whistle into that microphone, over the dozens of massive public address speakers and directly into the eardrums of the 63,416 people in attendance.

  Or, the 1995 Plymouth Holiday Bowl between Colorado State and Kansas State, a Rocky Mountain team that was always pretty okay against a midwestern squad that had always been pretty awful. What we know now is that K-State was in the early stages of an incredible era of success under Bill Snyder, and that two young assistants in the game, Snyder’s defensive coordinator Bob Stoops and Rams wide receivers coach Urban Meyer, would one day become Hall of Fame head coaches. But that night, all the McGee family knew was that the San Diego Zoo was awesome and so was Holiday Bowl grand marshal and original Mercury 7 astronaut Wally Schirra. I know this because I basically ran out into traffic during the Holiday Bowl parade to shake his hand. I also thought it was awesome to pose with my mother for photos as I wore a green and yellow Colorado State pom-pom on my head like a wig. I don’t think she thought it was as awesome as I did.

  But it didn’t take any encouragement from any McGees to convince our friends and family to watch Dad’s next postseason game, the 83rd edition of the Rose Bowl Game, played on January 1, 1997, between the No. 4 Ohio State Buckeyes and the No. 2 Arizona State Sun Devils. If ASU and its showman quarterback Jake “the Snake” Plummer won the game, they would also win at least a share of the national title, their first in 100 seasons of trying.

  Sam

  This was Dad’s 10th bowl game. We count Army-Navy as a bowl game. The Big East assigned it like it was, and he’d had it twice. He had also worked two Gator Bowls; the Peach, Citrus, and Holiday Bowls; an Orange Bowl that had determined a national championship; and the year before this one, he’d worked Notre Dame and Colorado again in the Fiesta Bowl.

  Those are great games. But they aren’t the Rose Bowl.

  I’m not sure we ever saw my mother so excited. From the time we landed at Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport, deplaning via open air steps with a backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, she started smiling and never stopped. We went to Disneyland with Mom’s niece and my cousin (she made Dad stay back at the hotel because he was in “bowl game mode”). We strolled the streets of Pasadena. We attended the pre–Rose Bowl luncheon with the teams, marching bands, and grand marshals Carl Lewis and Shannon Miller. And, most importantly, we went to the Rose Bowl Stadium the evening before the game. We were allowed to step inside the empty bowl, and this time there was no Orange Bowl-ish disappointment. The place was a living postcard. But Mom rushed us through it. She wasn’t there to gawk at the playing field or even the thousands of Arizona State fans, camped out NASCAR infield–style in the lot surrounding the stadium.

  Nope, she was headed straight for the floats. Hundreds of people were frantically gluing rose petals to the giant mobile parade floats, sculpted into the shapes of birds, landscapes, and even sci-fi characters. Never one to take a lot of pictures, Mom snapped away. At one point, she looked at me and said, “If I crawl up into one of these floats, you think they would let me spend the night here watching them finish these for tomorrow morning?” The next morning, we were sitting on that parade route. While the tickets allotted to the families of officials for games were never great, these seats were incredible. We could hear Bob Eubanks talking from his TV broadcast perch right behind us.

  “How many times in my life have I watched this on TV, and here it is,” Mom said at one point, not caring a bit that it was overcast and drizzly. “It doesn’t seem real, does it?” She sounded exactly like Dad when he talked about taking the field at places like the Orange Bowl, Georgia, Notre Dame, and, just a few hours later, the Rose Bowl.

  If you will recall, we mentioned earlier in this book that Dad had three plays he’s never been able to shake. You already know about the onside kick at UNC-Maryland ’83, the call people still bring up all the time. You’ve also learned of the BYU touchdown in the ’85 Citrus Bowl, the one he still thinks he got wrong, but we still think he got it right.

  Now you will learn about that the third play, the one that lives somewhere in between those first two. Some people still bring it up. Some people still think he got
it wrong. But we still think he got it right.

  Because Sam and I are mean, we recently invited Dad into my basement, fired up YouTube, cued up the play, and watched it with him, revisiting the ’97 Rose Bowl with a little over 10:00 remaining in the second quarter. Arizona State, trailing 7–0, had the ball at Ohio State’s 25-yard line. After the snap, Plummer pulled off a beautiful pump fake and then went deep, toward the left front corner of the end zone. His target was wide receiver Ricky Boyer, who was covered tightly by Buckeyes cornerback Antoine Winfield.

  Boyer left his feet at nearly the 5-yard line, flying through the air behind Winfield, over the pylon, and right past Dad, casually walking by the 1-yard line because his mechanics had him in the right position as the play came toward him.

  Suddenly, a whole lot happened at once. Boyer, his arms completely outstretched, grabbed the ball with his fingertips, and he and a flailing Winfield hit the grey-painted grass with a thud, both rolling and popping up as Dad stepped into the end zone behind them and signaled touchdown.

  Dad

  Now…freeze it [the video is at the very moment Boyer’s fingertips are touching the football]. Today, this is an easy call. It’s incomplete. In the middle of all this debate over what is or isn’t a catch, you have to hold the ball a lot longer now than you used to. But back then, if you had possession of the ball even for a brief time, you had possession of it, especially when you are down there at the goal line.

  On our TV, Boyer is frozen over that goal line.

  Dad

  The call, when I made it, wasn’t that hard to me, because if I stick that ball over the goal line, that’s a touchdown. You can even slap it out of my hand now and it doesn’t matter. In the end zone, if you have possession and your foot hits the ground, it’s a touchdown.

  Dad walks to the TV and points to Boyer’s left foot. His right leg has been crashed into by Winfield and is back in the air, but his left toe is on the turf.

  Dad

  Again, today this is a different call. But on this day, all that had to happen was that he had possession of the ball and his foot touches the ground, no matter how much a split-second it is for. Now, hit play…

  It indeed does all take place in a split-second. The touch of the ball, the toe touching the ground, and the hand with the football crashing into the ground right behind it. On the two replays that follow, color commentator Dick Vermeil points to the hands hitting the turf, saying that Boyer had trapped the ball against the ground and so he believed it wasn’t a catch.

  That’s what the audience at home heard. It’s also what the folks in the press box heard, including Big East officiating coordinator Dan Wooldridge. The Ohio State–slanted crowd in the bowl itself also didn’t like what it had seen on the replays featured on the end zone big screen.

  Dad

  I was never worried about it. My only thought when I determined that he had caught the ball was, what hit the ground first? His foot or his hands? I knew his foot had hit first.

  It’s fascinating to think about the college football world as it was on January 1, 1997, versus what it is today. When Dad made that call, there was no replay booth or conference replay command center. Instant replay of any kind wouldn’t debut in the college game for another seven years. The 2020 Rose Bowl telecast on ESPN utilized nearly 50 cameras, all set to the newest level of high definition and including cameras mounted in goal line–pylons. In 1997, ABC Sports used less than a quarter of that camera count and the idea of a Pylon Cam would have sounded like something taken from the Jetsons.

  In other words, the officials back then were operating without a safety net. When Dad tells today’s up-and-comers about those times and those games—like this, a touchdown in arguably the biggest game he’d ever worked—those youngsters get the shakes just thinking about it.

  Dad

  At halftime of the game, Dan says to me, “I don’t know, I think we might have missed that catch on the touchdown.” It was the first time I even thought of worrying about that. It wasn’t on my mind in the second half of the game; there was too much to do to worry about something that had already happened. But as soon as it was over, I was like, dammit, do I need to be worried about this?

  Arizona State did not win the Rose Bowl or a national title, though it seemed like they were going to both. Plummer scored on a snake of a play to make the score 17–13 with only 1:40 remaining in the game. But ASU inexplicably came back with a short kickoff, setting up a 65-yard game-winning touchdown drive for Ohio State. During that drive, Arizona State was flagged for pass interference twice, including one call from Dad. There was nothing controversial about those muggings. His only criticism of the crew watching that final drive in my basement?

  Dad

  I believe we could have called a third one.

  The flight back to North Carolina wasn’t unlike the ’85 drive back from the Citrus Bowl. Dad needed to get home to see the videotape.

  Sam

  Again, we thought it was the right call, but Dad was not convinced. The exchange with Dan certainly hadn’t helped. But we also reminded him that no one else on the crew had disputed it. He still wasn’t happy about it. The video of the play, we watched it so many times, and it was close.

  Thank goodness for Sports Illustrated.

  Later that year, long after the Rose Bowl game, Sports Illustrated published a “Best Photos of the Year” type of spread. In it was a two-page photo sequence of Arizona State’s Ricky Boyer, body outstretched, with his fingers spread out over the back of the football and his left toe stuffed into the end zone turf. The image was captured in literal space of an eyeblink. But oh, what an image it is.

  It has hung on Dad’s wall ever since, but not on the Wall of Screaming. It occupies its own special place, as it should. Particularly if any complaining Ohio State fans come around.

  A decade after that, I was working at NASCAR Productions (think NFL Films, but with racecars). A coworker across the hallway was a former Arizona State athletics employee and always said he was pals with Plummer, who by then was the starting quarterback of the Denver Broncos. One day I walked into his office and, lo and behold, he had the Snake on speakerphone.

  “Jake!” my coworker shouted into the phone. “The guy from the office next to me just walked in. His dad was one of the referees in the Rose Bowl!”

  “That’s cool. Did he make any big calls in that game?” Plummer asked through the speaker.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “He had that crazy touchdown catch in the front corner of the end zone in the first half.”

  “Good call,” Plummer said.

  “But he also had one of the pass interference penalties against you guys on that final drive.”

  “Oh. Well, screw this.”

  The line clicked. The Snake was gone.

  Dad

  When I wear my bowl rings or a bowl watch on a trip or somewhere, and it happens to catch someone’s eye, they will ask what it is and where it’s from. As soon you mention the game, some people’s eyes will light up. It makes you think, for a split-second, oh man, if this guy is a real Colorado fan or an Arizona State fan, or whomever, they might try to push me out of this plane!

  Dad’s last bowl watch earned during his Big East days came from the 1998 Florida Citrus Bowl, when Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators defeated Paterno and Penn State 21–6. In seven seasons he had worked seven postseason games, two Kickoff Classics, and been everywhere from Austin to Columbus to Tulane. But at season’s end, Dan Woolridge retired as the Big East coordinator. He had managed to keep the simmering Mason-Dixon Line tension from becoming a real issue. But then Dad was tipped off by one of his dearest friends among the Northerners that one of the guys who had always seemed bitter about North vs. South was going to marginalize anyone with a Southern accent as soon as he was put in charge.

  Dad

  No matter what you do
for a living, there will always be people who have decided that if you got an opportunity they didn’t, well, it couldn’t possibly be because they hadn’t earned it, right? It had to be politics. In this case, the Southern guys taking care of the Southern guys. That was never the case. Anyone who thought that Dan was cutting me slack because I was from the South certainly didn’t see our discussions that night at the Rose Bowl. The highest-rated guys went to the bowl games, just like Dan had promised. I officiated football because of my love for the game, and I certainly didn’t need any extra drama in my life.

  I had worked with some great officials in the Big East, and many have remained treasured friends. But it was pretty obvious where this was going. So, with that writing on the wall, I started looking for a new conference. Gerry Austin was now the coordinator of Conference-USA, so I was talking to him. I had discussions with several conferences.

  But before I committed, I called Bradley Faircloth at the ACC. Ernie Cage, one of the most beloved downfield officials in the history of the conference, had just passed away after a heroic battle with cancer. So, Bradley needed an experienced guy. He suggested we spend the weekend thinking about it. The next week he called and invited me back, but he promised nothing. I said yes.

  Then I had to go home and tell Hannah.

  Mom was pissed. Like, Dan Henning–level angry. When Dad and Booker moved to the Big East in ’91, it had stung a lot of their ACC colleagues. But Booker, citing the rigors of Big East travel, had returned the ACC after only one year. He had long ago mended his fences, but there was still anger at Dad for leaving the club.

  As a family, the last time we had seen Bradley Faircloth was just a couple years earlier, at the beach. He had coincidentally rented a house next door, and when Dad walked over to say hello, Faircloth had stared at him, ignored him, and driven away.

  Mom had never forgotten that. She said, “How can you go back and work for him?!”

  Dad

  It was a fair question. But I had missed my friends in the ACC. I wanted to hang out with those guys again.