by Ryan McGee
Saturday afternoons were also when my brother and I learned how to cuss, listening to people lob colorful adjectives at my father and his crewmates. We spent holidays at bowl games, from Pasadena to San Diego to Memphis to, finally, right here in Miami for the ’09 BCS title game. Almost exactly 21 years earlier, on January 1, 1990, we were also together in Miami, just 14 miles to the south at the old Orange Bowl Stadium for another national title game, between Notre Dame and Colorado. There had been four of us there that night, too, but it wasn’t Uncle Dan who was with us. It was Hannah McGee, our mother and Dad’s wife. Nine years later, she was taken from us unexpectedly. That fall, it was college football that helped heal our hearts. We experienced that together, too.
To us, “Hey, Ref!” was “Hey, Dad.” Every new team he saw on the field meant another pennant on the wall of our home basement, covered with the banners of every school he’d officiated, more than 150 of them. Every family dinner out meant another person asking to see Dad’s bowl rings or watches, and then us all pausing to see if the person who’d asked ended up making a connection between their favorite team, the games on that jewelry, and Dad. “Wait…you didn’t have that pass interference against us in the fourth quarter, did you?!”
So, that’s what was ticking away with the clock at Dolphin Stadium on the night of January 8, 2009. Sure, the game was huge. The biggest stage and biggest stakes that the sport had to offer, played by some of the biggest names in college football history. With all due respect to them, for us the moment was even larger than that. The goodbye was imminent. But it wasn’t sad. It was a celebration.
As the four zeroes popped up on the clock, the Florida Gators rushed the field to celebrate their national title. The Oklahoma Sooners stood frozen on their sideline, staring at that scoreboard in disbelief. My media colleagues stepped over that sideline onto the field and took off running to the right, headed to the middle of the field to document the championship moment.
Dad ran in the opposite direction, to the left, through the end zone, beneath the goal post, and into the narrow tunnel that led to the officials’ locker room. He had always taken great pride in being the first official to get to that locker room postgame, and this time was no different. I had taken off after him and tried to put my arm around him as he left the field, but he was moving so fast that I had to settle for a sprint alongside. He paused briefly, looking up to the left and toward Sam in the stands. Then his cleats left the turf and clacked their way up the concrete tunnel.
As his crewmates arrived, an impromptu receiving line formed, hugs and congratulations, followed by a little business. Dad’s final official act in uniform was to read aloud from his penalty card, going through the game’s 11 penalties so that the group could check their cards for accuracy before he turned in the official penalty report for review.
When he was finished, the others in the room started the process of showering and packing their ACC travel bags. Laverty pulled off his uniform to show off his Tebow cleat-carved battle scars. Meanwhile, on the tiny TV affixed to the wall of the locker room, Tebow was addressing the media and was asked about the collision. “I felt bad. I had to help him put his shoe back on and everything.” The press room erupted in laughter. Laughing at the refs. What else was new? Those being laughed at never heard it. They were too busy packing up.
But Dr. Jerry E. McGee, the man who’d spent his entire adult life sharing football fields with the likes of Donovan McNabb, Ray Lewis, Joe Paterno, Lou Holtz, not to mention Ryan and Sam McGee, went against his instincts and took a seat on a locker room bench. He watched his colleagues as they scurried around preparing for departure. He swigged some Gatorade. He smiled. Everyone else had changed, but Dad was still in his uniform.
“I think I’m just going to wear this home.”
TV Timeout with Tim Tebow
“I ran over a ref in that game?”
It is sometime during fall 2019, outside a football stadium somewhere in the Southeastern Conference. I am talking with Tim Tebow on the bus that serves as the production office of SEC Nation, the flagship college football show of ESPN’s SEC Network. It has been nearly 11 years since the Gators won the 2009 BCS title and Tebow was named offensive MVP of the game. He is now a TV analyst for the network, and we are coworkers. Until right now, he didn’t realize that Dad was one of the officials in his final college game—so until right now, he certainly didn’t know that his last college game was also my father’s final game.
Like all great athletes, Tebow has an abnormally acute sense of recall. He can tell you in great detail about plays run in certain quarters on certain downs against certain teams from years ago, just as he can recount nearly every pitch he saw while spending his recent summers playing baseball in the New York Mets organization.
But for the life of him, he can’t remember running over Tom Laverty in South Florida, the last real play of his legendary college career.
“Was he okay?”
Yes, he was.
“Wait…that wasn’t your dad, was it?!”
No, it wasn’t.
“Okay, good! Hey, speaking of the refs, do you know what I do remember most about that game? It feels like it’s what most people remember about that game other than us winning it, because I still hear about it all the time, even now. I got flagged in that game. It was on that same drive you’re talking about, the last one. I had a good run and we got the first down, but I thought that a guy took an extra shot at me in the pile after I was tackled. I was pretty fired up. So, I jumped up and gave the guy the Gator Chomp.”
It was Oklahoma’s Nick Harris. He didn’t really take an extra shot after the play, but he definitely had some something extra to say to Tebow after the first down that essentially clinched the win for the Gators. As Tebow was headed back to his sideline, he reacted by giving Harris a sarcastic “okay, nice tackle” hand gesture…which was indeed followed by quick three-clap version of Florida’s signature chomp…which was followed by a yellow flag toss directly at No. 15 and a 15-yard taunting penalty.
“That was not my finest moment,” the player with the famously sparkling reputation recalls. “It was the only unsportsmanlike of my career. Like, ever. Youth football, high school, NFL, anywhere.”
Tebow pauses, and then repeats himself.
“Wait…that wasn’t your dad, was it?!”
No, it wasn’t.
“Okay, good!” He repeats, then adds: “Whoever it was, let them know they definitely got that call right.”
1. If You Can Officiate Sigma Nu vs. the Pikas, You Can Work the Rose Bowl
When discussing his football officiating career, one of the most common questions my father receives is the one that goes back to very beginning: How and why in the world does one get started in a line of work that, if all goes as well as it possibly can, one will end up screamed at, scrutinized, and despised by thousands of people on at least a dozen different days each and every autumn?
This was a question that I investigated in depth for an article on ESPN.com in January 2019. An NFL officiating crew failed to flag what looked to be a blatantly obvious and critically important pass interference in the NFC Championship Game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints. The no-call ended up leading to death threats, caused the crew to move from one hotel to another for the sake of their safety, and ignited a national outrage that extended from the NFL Commissioner’s pre–Super Bowl “State of the Sport” address to the floor of the U.S. Capitol Building, where a Louisiana lawmaker made his case to have the game replayed. I spent days talking to football officials, college and NFL, active and retired, with one question in hand: Why in the world would anyone want to be a football official?!
To a man, and woman, their response was always the same.
Wait, why am I explaining this? Let’s let Dad do it, shall we?
Dr. Jerry E. McGee, a.k.a. Dad
They do
it because they love it.
I’ve learned two things about officials over the years. The first is that they are all human beings. They make mistakes, just like a player turns the ball over or a coach calls the wrong play at the wrong time.
The second is that they truly officiate for the love of the game. They have to, especially now. Youth and high school officials have to deal with crazy parents, and they are making no money. Most college officials aren’t making much money either; they all have full-time jobs, and these days their names are out there on social media.
Never once have I had an official say they are doing it for the fame or the money. There’s not much money and the best you can do is infamy. They do it because they love it. And someone else who loved it first introduced them to it.
So, how did my father get started on the four-plus decade path that ended on the field in South Florida? The answer to that question has its roots in the very theme of this book. It was about fathers and sons. Or, in this case, father figures and sons.
Jerry McGee grew up in the post–World War II Baby Boomer Era in the poor-but-proud textile mill villages that surrounded Rockingham, North Carolina, a town of only a few thousand people at the edge of where Eastern North Carolina starts its transition from the lush green rolling hills of the Piedmont region to the flat, sandy, pine tree-lined Coastal Plain. In those days, every corner of Rockingham was bracketed with massive brick textile mills, the constant clickety-clack from row after row of looms reverberating through the lint-filled air. To most Rockingham kids, the idea of attending college was like scaling Everest or strolling on the moon. But the parental figures of Dad’s childhood, blood or otherwise, never once allowed him to believe that a dream and a fantasy are the same thing.
Dad lost his father, Sam McGee, when he was only three months old, taken at the age of 33 by Bright’s Disease, a kidney disorder that is treatable now, but not in the 1940s. A few years later, he got a new father when his mother, Mary MacKinnon, met Robert Marshall Caddell. He was fresh home from his service in World War II, Purple Heart in hand after being blown into the Pacific when a Kamikaze plane struck his ship, the USS Daly. Caddell—or as Sam and I would one day christen him, “Pa-Pa”—was a good man and great father. He called little Jerry “Son” and my future father called him “Daddy.”
When Dad was 13, Pa-Pa took him up to Durham, North Carolina, to see Duke host Georgia Tech. It was Jerry McGee’s first college football game. Pa-Pa always loved the Blue Devils, and the two sat there in the cheap seats at Wallace Wade Stadium, then still Duke Stadium and less than 30 years old, a classic bowl designed to look and feel like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It had in fact hosted the Rose Bowl Game when Dad was an infant and Marshall Caddell was preparing to steam across the Pacific; the game moved to Durham for fear of a Japanese attack on Southern California.
Dad attended Rockingham High School and played on every sports team that school had to offer, but he excelled at baseball. The Rockets played in a classic small-town bandbox wooden ballpark, metal cleats clicking through the cement dugouts while John Phillip Sousa marches played over the loudspeaker during pregame warmups. Young Jerry was skinny but strong, not quite six feet tall with jet black hair and eyes that were always bright despite his Irish squint.
At Rockingham High, Dad met his third father figure, a perpetually smiling coach named Bill Eutsler, who had played at Duke Stadium twice against Wallace Wade’s Blue Devils as a Wake Forest Demon Deacon. In Rockingham, like so many blue-collar factory towns across the United States, sports served as both the ultimate escape and also the tool kids used to learn the benefits of hard work and focus. For Dad, the man who guided him through those sports and then throughout most of his adult life was Eutsler, the man he forever called “Coach.”
Over the span of 31 years, Coach Eutsler would build Rockingham High School into a classic Southern Friday Night Lights powerhouse, winning 226 games, 13 conference titles, and four state championships. When my father got on Eutsler’s radar, the coach was searching for new ways to ensure long-term football success. A big part of that plan was educating the football-playing kids at the junior high schools that fed into Rockingham High on the Bill Eutsler offensive and defensive philosophies. So, he went to those schools, helped them organize football teams, and created his own little Rockingham Rockets football farm system. Every week, playing fields throughout the Sandhills of Richmond County, North Carolina, came to life with the sounds of youngsters running Eutsler’s plays in youth football games.
Those games needed referees. So Coach Eutsler recruited some of his most trusted Rocket athletes to grab whistles and do the deed. That included Dad, a former football center and now senior baseball star, known by one and all in Rockingham as “Smoky” McGee. If you visit Rockingham today and mention Dr. Jerry McGee, some folks will know who that is and some won’t. But if you drop the name Smoky McGee, the recognition throughout the room is instant.
One day the coach threw Smoky an armload of striped shirts and said, “McGee, you’re in charge of the junior high officials.” Dad recruited his buddies, two per crew, and sent them off to places that were little more than country crossroads, anywhere in the area with a junior high school that existed in the high school’s gravitational pull. They would find an open field, mark off a 120-yard rectangle with a bag of white lime powder, officiate the “game,” and receive a couple bucks for their efforts.
After high school, Dad attended college at East Carolina. There was never a discussion of whether he was going to college, only where he would attend. These days the school is East Carolina University, or ECU, with nearly 30,000 students from around the world. Back then, it was East Carolina College, with about 4,000 students, nearly all from the immediate region. Dad, the first member of his family to attend college, was there to learn how to become a physical education teacher and a coach. He was also there to play baseball, making the Pirates roster as a relief pitcher on a team that made it to the 1963 NAIA College World Series. But he was also paying his own way through school, spending much of his time during each academic quarter trying to figure out how he was going to foot the bill for the next one, $275 at a time.
Dad
At East Carolina I was playing intramural football, and it was so boring. Two-hand touch or flag football. One night during a game I started talking to one of the student officials and I told him I’d worked some games during high school. He said, “Why don’t you officiate games with us?” At first, I was like, I don’t know, man, I have a lot going on. But he told me they’d pay me two bucks a game and I could work three games a night, so six bucks a night and $24 per week. He said, “Beer money.” So I did it, and I was pretty good at it.
Coach Jack Boone, the retired ECU football coach who was running the intramural program, soon asked me to help him oversee officiating. I would recruit students to be officials and train them to work football, softball, and basketball games. I did the scheduling and I made sure the facilities were ready to go. I would observe them and do evaluations, and if there was any controversy during a game, I would deal with that, too. I ran it out of my dorm room.
One day during my junior year he asked me to be the student director of intramurals. I told him I couldn’t. I had schoolwork, baseball, and was trying to have a social life. Then he told me it included a half-scholarship, $180 a quarter. That sounds like nothing now. But that $180 per quarter changed my life. And I got that through officiating.
While intramural officiating was paying for school, it was also already beginning to school Dad when it came to the backbone principals of officiating games on any level. As he likes to say, “If you can officiate Sigma Nu versus the Pikas, you can work the Rose Bowl.”
Think about it. You’ve got guys out there who are way too emotionally invested in these games. They are trying to impress their girlfriends. They are trying to prove to everyone that they were the best athletes from their high school ba
ck home, which included some of the roughest redneck towns in North Carolina. They are playing on a “field” that is essentially a dirt track. They are the same guys with whom, as a student official, you are eating with in the cafeteria and sitting with in class and drinking with on the weekends, so they think as a friend you should always cut them slack during games.
And, oh yeah, some of them are playing half-drunk. Even on their worst nights, the guys on the field in the Fiesta Bowl weren’t inebriated. (As far as we know.) Even if they were and someone decided to come after one of the officials during a game, in the Fiesta Bowl, someone else was there to have your back—at least a half-dozen someones. On the intramural field, there was one other official. Maybe.
Speaking of, this feels like as good a time as any for a primer on the makeup of officiating crews. As a kid growing up in an officiating home, knowing the who/what/how of the positions on the field was something I took for granted. But as the years have ticked away, I’ve been shocked at how many people don’t know the roster of every game’s third on-field team, and that includes some of my most decorated and respected press box colleagues, men and women who have covered the sport for years. So, here we go…
These days, if you watch a big-time college football game you will see eight officials. Each is assigned to specific positions to watch a specific zone of the playing field, and within those varied zones they usually handle a very different group of players and penalties.
