by Ryan McGee
We had no idea how badly Dad was going to need them.
Players’ Timeout with Ray Lewis
“Your dad is the Doc I used to talk to on the field?!”
It is winter time in Bristol, Connecticut, the dark, snow-buried days that always close out one year and start the next. I am in the SportsCenter newsroom, the always-bustling nerve center of the ESPN campus, where college bowl games are on countless TVs around the room. I am discussing one of those games with Ray Lewis, who is in town as an NFL analyst. His Miami Hurricanes have just lost, and he isn’t happy about it. We talk about The U, past versus present. That leads to talking about his time at The U. And that leads, naturally, to talking about Dad sharing the field with Lewis during his college playing days.
When someone does remember Dad, it’s typically a coach or a staff member, the people he worked alongside for years. Players aren’t around very long. I suppose all officials look pretty much the same to most people, but especially teenagers who are a little busy during game days.
But when I recall the “You gonna play?” story from Boston College, perhaps the most intimidating eyes in football history light up. Lewis tells me about the first time they met, when the Miami coaches invited a group of Big East officials to fly in for a Saturday scrimmage and also hold a rules session to answer any questions the Hurricanes players might have ahead of the 1995 season. When the officials were introduced, their day jobs were also announced. “Dr. Jerry McGee, field judge, he’s the president at Wingate University in North Carolina.”
Lewis saddled up to Dad and said, “Man, you ain’t no college president out here refereeing football!’”
Dad responded, “Then you ain’t no linebacker.”
Lewis laughed. “Oh, I am definitely a linebacker!”
“The next day at practice we talked some more,” Lewis remembers. “Some of it was smack. But most of it was real football questions. What’s he looking for on penalties? What’s my best argument going to be with a referee if I really think I am being wronged? From then on, we had a running conversation for like two years. I knew he wasn’t going to give me anything just because I thought we were boys, just like he knew I wasn’t going to not play as hard as I could just because we had had a conversation about what I maybe could or couldn’t get away with. It was like a teacher. They are going to help you do your best, but they are still going to grade you the same as everybody else.”
Ray Lewis tells me it always made him smile when he saw Dad was on the field for a Miami game. I tell him Dad always felt the same way.
“By the way, that day at Boston College, when he asked me if I was going to play, you know what I said. ‘Oh, I am definitely going to play!’ And I did, didn’t I?”
8. Love the Good Days, Own the Bad Ones
When Dad returned to the ACC in 1998, his schedule wasn’t the best he’d ever worked, but it was also far from bad. The conference had five teams ranked the AP Top 25 during the season and Dad’s crew saw all five of them at least once. The top team was Florida State, led by Peter Warrick and Chris Weinke and on its way to the inaugural BCS Championship Game.
Dad had indeed received the cold shoulder from more than a few of his ACC colleagues at the summer rules clinic. When it was time for a veterans-only meeting, he was asked to leave the room with the other rookies. He also knew that as a de facto rookie he wouldn’t be receiving a bowl assignment at season’s end. But despite all of that, he still remembers ’98 as the most fun he ever had in college football.
Dad
They called us the “Virginia Crew” because five of the seven of us lived there. They were all old-school ACC guys, and none of them were mad at me about the Big East thing. I was back with Booker again. Tom Lock, Doug Rhoads, and Bud Elliott, too. So, two guys who were on my very first ACC crew in 1983 and my best friend. Robin Wood was the referee, a UVA Law grad who’d been in the ACC since 1975. Watts Key was the side judge, and I think he was in his 10th year in the league.
Key was lovingly known by many in the ACC as “Snake Bite.” One year, when he was studying his rulebook on his back deck, he stepped into his backyard to quiet his overexcited dog. The dog was worked up over a snake, a fact Key didn’t realize until after the copperhead had already struck the side judge in the foot. Rhoads once told me the story and said that Key’s foot “swelled up like a damn watermelon.” He didn’t miss the football season, but the injury did excuse him from the summer clinic and the universally dreaded timed one-mile run. “I think some of the guys thought it was all just a scheme to get out of the mile run,” Rhoads explained, laughing. “So, from then on he was ‘Snake Bite.’”
Sam
The Big East was great, but it had taken some time for us to learn the new names and who was a good guy and who was not, all of that. When Dad went back to the ACC, we instantly knew everyone again. We knew their backstories. It was like we had never lost touch, because while Dad was gone, we were still watching plenty of ACC football and every bowl game, and there were all of the old ACC guys.
When Dad got back with those guys, it was like getting back together with your old college friends. The real friends, where no matter how long you were gone, you just picked back up right where you left off.
Dad
It wasn’t just those guys, either. I was going back to Clemson and North Carolina and Maryland, all of the places where I worked so many games before. The coaches and the players were different at most of them, but the chain crews were the same. The security guys. The trainers who were taping my ankle. They were all still there.
As were the comedy stylings of Booker and McGee.
Somewhere on the road, the crew decided to have their pregame meeting at the hotel, in Dad and Booker’s room. Before the others arrived, Booker made one of the beds, but only one. During the meeting, their crewmates kept looking over at the two beds, one that had obviously been slept in and the other looking like it hadn’t been touched.
Dad
Finally, someone spoke up and said, “Did you guys sleep in the same damn bed last night?” I said, “Hell guys, we always sleep in the same bed. I get cold.”
All of the worry that Hannah and I had about what might happen if I came back to the ACC, it disappeared fast. It was like that day at Wake Forest in 1983, when she talked about the smile I had on my face, being with my friends, and how much she loved that.
But she never forgave Bradley Faircloth.
It was a year of transition for the entire family. In May, Sam married Marci Timm, a college athlete who grew up in Florida Gators country and graduated high school with Miami Hurricanes legend Warren Sapp. I committed the ultimate college football sin and got married on an autumn Saturday, November 21. My bride was Erica Allen, who’d grown up in Knoxville, attending games at Neyland Stadium and whose mother had gone to Georgia games as a teenager, traveling up from Savannah with Uga the Bulldog mascot riding in her lap. The weekend after our wedding, Dad and the Virginia Crew worked a classic edition of their state’s biggest rivalry, a top 20 Commonwealth Cup showdown won by Virginia over Virginia Tech 36–32.
Without a bowl game to work, Dad accepted an invitation to officiate in an NCAA Division II All-Star event, the January 9, 1999 Snow Bowl, played in Fargo. The attraction was to have Dad, president of a Division II university, come give a speech and officiate the game. Doug Rhoads once said to me, “How bad was that hit at Louisville, really? Because he had to have suffered some sort of brain damage to voluntarily fly into North Dakota in January.”
Dad
I have never laughed as much as I did during the 1998 football season. Never. We officiated the heck out of every game and we loved being together.
Unfortunately, the laughter stopped on February 28, 1999. Mom and Dad were on a much-needed sabbatical in the Caribbean when Mom woke up in the middle of the night complaining of a headache. In no time at all, she was gone,
having suffered a fatal brain aneurism.
She was only 54.
Dad
Hannah McGee went to the Gator Bowl, two Citrus Bowls, the Orange Bowl, and the Rose Bowl. She went to Virginia, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Clemson, all of the Tobacco Road schools. She saw some of the biggest games in college football history.
I think about how I would make sure I knew where the tickets were and then make sure I spotted her from the field and stopped to wave at her. Usually, the boys were sitting right there with her, from the time they were these little guys all the way up until they were married young men.
What an image.
There is a beautiful line that Bruce Springsteen has used when describing the death of his longtime saxophonist and on-stage wingman, Clarence Clemons. When asked what life would be like not having the Big Man around, The Boss said that was like being asked what life would be like without the rain.
When Mom passed away, it was the opposite of that. It started raining the morning of her funeral and I swear it didn’t stop for six months, an emotional downpour so thick that it choked us all. It was dark. It took away our ability to see anything around us. It created perpetual disorientation. When that is what your world has suddenly become, drenched in grief, you find yourself desperately squinting and reaching into that darkness, hoping for any tiny speck of light, hope, something to grab ahold of. Something to tell you that it is okay to finally take one step forward.
As autumn ’99 drew closer, it was football that appeared as that light for the McGee family.
The summer rules clinic had always meant a time of fellowship. Now it meant badly needed hugs, handshakes, and company. The arrival of Dad’s game assignments had always meant so much to our entire family, the list of what games and where they would be played and how long before we finally got to go. Now the delivery of the schedule meant target dates, something to look forward to. Actually, 12 somethings to look forward to.
Sam
Football was always the escape, but before 1999 it had been an escape from work. Now it was an escape from everything. You hear athletes talk about stepping between the white lines and nothing else matters, only that game and that moment, right there.
Dad needed to get back in between those lines.
The season started with the No. 1 team in the nation, Florida State, starting a season that would see them run wire-to-wire, all the way to a national title. From Tallahassee and Chapel Hill to Morgantown and Clemson, the coaches and support staffers with whom Dad had reconnected upon his return to the ACC the year before were now all waiting in impromptu sideline receiving lines, eager to offer up their support. And he needed all of them.
When it got to be too much, the Virginia Crew would run interference, trying to let Dad enjoy his fall Saturdays instead of being saddened by them. Booker was essentially his bodyguard, deflecting well-intended mourners when he needed to and keeping Dad laughing whenever possible. When we all made the trip to the 1990 Orange Bowl, Booker’s father had just passed away a few days before. I had no idea. And why was that? Because Dad made it his mission to protect his friend and ensure that the game was the great experience it was supposed to be. Now, nearly a decade later, Booker was returning that favor.
At season’s end, Booker wasn’t selected for an on-field position in a postseason bowl game, but when Dad earned a trip to the Liberty Bowl, Booker accepted a job as the alternate official for that game, just so that he could travel to Memphis and keep an eye on Dad.
Sam
My wife and I made the trip to that Liberty Bowl. Booker was always the one who was going to instigate a good time, but on this trip, he was especially dangerous, because unless something went very wrong, he wasn’t going to be officiating in the game, and because he was working so hard to cheer Dad up.
At the hotel, there were two hospitality rooms set up. At bowl games there was usually one set up for the officials and there was at this game, but it was pretty bad. It was just a room with some chairs in it. But the hospitality room next door was completely stocked with liquor. Booker walked in there and looked at the bar, looked to see if anyone was around, and said, “Man, this is nice in here, isn’t it, Sam? Help me carry it into our room.”
The game was played on New Year’s Eve. It was a weird matchup, and Southern Miss beat Colorado State. But that night it was New Year’s Eve and it was Y2K. People thought all the computers were going to shut down and all hell was going to break loose. Dad and my wife, Marci, were both really sick. I’m not sure how Dad even worked the game. But there was no way I wasn’t going to see Beale Street the night that the world was going to end. I dragged them down there and I met this crazy guy in a purple zoot suit and we went dancing down Beale Street screaming “Happy New Year!” and stuff about Y2K. Marci and Dad just sat there and waited on me, patiently.
It was a release. It was a great time, and that year hadn’t had many.
By the way, I am happy to report that the next day, the world had not ended.
Dad
And I am happy to report that 1999 was finally over.
“Ryan, you’ve never seen anything like that season,” Doug Rhoads once told me, recalling the way that the college football community had embraced Dad, hoping to help him. Rhoads had endured a similar experience years earlier, when his son, Randy, was killed in an accident during his college spring break. I had befriended Randy on ACC sidelines in the 1980s. I even snapped a photo of him during a Maryland-Duke game in ’86, crouched along the sideline at Wallace Wade Stadium, intensely watching his dad.
Rhoads said of Randy and Mom, “If you can live through losing a son, or a wife, then being called an idiot by a football coach because you might have missed a pass interference call? That’s a damn cakewalk, man. But after those tragic losses, you know who were among the first people to keep checking on me, or who kept checking on your father? Those same guys who called you an idiot.”
Dad
For 30-plus years, when I officiated football, deep down I really thought that football needed me.
In 1999, I realized how wrong I had been. I realized that I needed football.
Coach’s Timeout with Lou Holtz
“You know, I like to joke about that photo, but the reality is that this image tells a much different story than anyone outside of a very few of us were aware of.”
It is summer 2013 and I am showing Lou Holtz a photograph on my phone. The College Football Hall of Famer has been retired from coaching for nine years. We are at ESPN’s annual preseason college football seminar, sitting together during a lunch break, the TV analyst and the sportswriter.
It’s the photo from Dad’s Wall of Screaming, the one from the 1999 Clemson–South Carolina game, when Dad is on his way to deliver bad news to Holtz, his head buried in his hand. This is the picture that Holtz had kidded about, saying that in the final game of a winless year he was thinking, “Now, where exactly am I going to take my wife, Beth, on vacation once this season is finally over?”
“But look at us both,” Holtz is saying now. “These are two men who are just trying to make it to tomorrow.”
From a purely football standpoint, 1999 is the year that Lou Holtz returned to coaching and endured an 0–11 year. But in addition to rebuilding the Gamecocks program, he had also been taking care of his wife. That season, Beth Holtz was in the middle of a years-long bout with throat cancer that pushed her through a ringer of more than 80 chemotherapy treatments and multiple surgeries.
So, the two men in that photograph aren’t just a football coach and a football official. There are a widower and a husband of a cancer fighter. Before that game they had talked. Holtz said he was so sorry about Mom, the woman whose name he had so impressively recited from memory on the Orange Bowl sideline a decade earlier. Dad told Holtz how amazed he was at the strength of their family, including assistant coach Skip Holtz, in the face of their wife
and mother’s cancer battle.
“That whole year people asked me how in the world and why in the world would I keep coaching while Beth was so sick. But Beth is the one who insisted that I do it! She said she liked the smile on my face when I was coaching. She said, ‘I never see you look happier than when you are out there on that football field.’”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Like Hannah McGee talking to Dad back in 1983.
9. Hey Ref!
Before we hit the stretch run of Dad’s officiating career, it feels like a good time to take this project to the people.
As we (hopefully) have convinced you by now, growing up in a football officiating household teaches you so much about the game and the rules that govern that game. It also teaches you how to handle daily deluges of questions from friends, family, sports-loving strangers, or anyone who is curious about your father’s life in stripes. Perhaps that’s why Sam and I grew up to become a lawyer and a sportswriter, both of us asking other people questions for a living.
And while we have (hopefully) helped you achieve a better understanding of the what, how, and why of a college football official’s career, we want to (hopefully) make sure we hit as many of the usual officiating questions that we can.
In the years following Dad’s retirement from the field, I wrote a regular column for ESPN.com titled Hey Ref! where readers could send in questions they had about his career, his thoughts on current officiating issues, and even what he thought about calls made in big games those very weeks.
As we were finishing up this book, one night I posted a tweet in the old “Hey Ref!” spirit, saying that it was now or never if anyone had any questions for Dr. Jerry McGee about his whistle blowing days. We received hundreds of replies. I boiled them down to a list of the most popular questions as well as some topics we haven’t already hit. I also threw out all of the “What’s it like to be blind?” and “Why do you hate my team?” comments.