Sidelines and Bloodlines

by Ryan McGee

  Here’s the roster:

  –Referee: Most people call everyone in a black-and-white striped jersey “ref,” but the reality is that there’s only one referee. This official is known the “white hat” because they’re the only member of the crew wearing one. Positioned in the offensive backfield behind the quarterback, they are looking for illegal blocks, roughing the passer, everything around the quarterback. If you’ve ever known the name of a football official, it’s probably a referee, because they’re the one who wears a microphone and explains to stadium and television audiences what’s going on after any penalty flag or unusual play. They also get to announce “first down!” after a measurement.

  –Umpire: Yes, there are umpires in football. Positioned on the defensive side of the line of scrimmage and focused on interior line play, this is the official who is always in the middle of the chaos, dodging linebackers as they chase running backs and running backs as they try to avoid the would-be tacklers. Tom Laverty, the former college lineman who was run over by Tim Tebow, was an umpire. Most umpires are big dudes like Laverty. Now you know why.

  –Linesman, or Head Linesman: Straddling the line of scrimmage on one sideline, they make sure everyone is where they’re supposed to be in relation to that line, watching for offsides, encroachment, illegal men downfield, illegal shifts, and the like. They also watch the sideline when a play comes their way to determine in- or out-of-bounds rulings and are in constant communication with the chain crew to keep them up-to-date on first downs and marking the line of scrimmage.

  –Line Judge: Straddling the line of scrimmage on the opposite side of the field, their duties are similar to the head linesman, but with the added responsibilities of providing assistance to the umpire on holding calls and the referee on false starts. They’re also the keeper of the game clock (yes, that’s kept officially on the field, to keep the press box clock operator honest) and responsible for ensuring the quarterback doesn’t cross the line of scrimmage before throwing a pass and that the kicking teams don’t do the same before the ball is kicked.

  –Field Judge: They share the same sideline with the line judge, but are positioned further downfield on one side of the defensive backfield, 20 yards or more. They count for 11 defensive players pre-snap and keep the 25-second play clock. This position is best known for handling pass plays or long runs, set up downfield for the express purpose of being in position to handle those plays. Their most common flag is pass interference. This was Dad’s position for most of his big college career.

  –Side Judge: Everything you just read about the field judge applies to this position as well, only the SJ is located on the opposite side of the field, sharing a sideline with the head linesman. Also, all four of these line of scrimmage sentinels also enjoy/endure very direct dealings with the coaches and teams when they want to dispute/discuss the flag just thrown.

  –Back Judge: This is football officiating’s version of a centerfielder, lined up at least 25 yards into the defensive backfield and in the middle of the field. They are responsible for the deep zone and also the game clock. That official you see sprinting alongside a wide receiver who just broke a 40-yard post route and is headed up the middle of the field to the goal line? That’s the back judge. And when a kicker sends a ball through the uprights—or doesn’t—the back judge and the field judge are the two positioned beneath those uprights to signal whether or not the kick was good.

  –Center Judge: This is still a new position in college football, introduced in the mid-2010s. They are positioned in the offensive backfield like the referee, but on the opposite side of the quarterback. The official NCAA guidelines that describe the center judge’s responsibilities use the word “help” a lot, and they should. That’s why the position was created. As the game has increased in speed during this century, that help has been sorely needed, if for no other reason to make sure the ball is spotted correctly and ready to go in the world of no-huddle offenses.

  Additional help has been added over the years in the form of an on-site replay official in the press box, an on-site observer/evaluator, officiating “command centers” where the conference coordinator and his team watch every camera from every game, and a national officiating coordinator who is keeping an eye on everything and everyone we just listed, at the 60-plus games being played nationally every weekend.

  All the above is an admittedly oversimplified explanation of everyone’s duties. But you get the idea. Now imagine subtracting members of that team one at a time and thus taking one, two, three, or even six of each position’s responsibilities and dividing them among a much, much smaller group.

  When Dad finished his college officiating career in 2009, they were using seven-man crews and the command centers were still an experiment. When he started his Division I college career in 1982, those crews had six men. His first small college crews in the 1970s used five officials. In high school football, there were four…and that was only if everyone who was supposed to show up for the game actually did, which wasn’t a given.

  In 1965, Dad got married, graduated college, returned home to Rockingham, and started a job as an industrial engineer with one of the textile mills, all while serving in the Army National Guard. It was an insanely busy time. Amid it all he received a call from a man named Allen Gaddy.

  Dad

  Mr. Gaddy was the godfather of high school officiating in the area. He was also regional distributor of Buttercup Ice Cream. He was a little guy, he had kind of big tummy on him, and he was funny. Everyone liked him. He was a good-natured guy. But he didn’t take any crap from anyone.

  He would officiate high school games on Friday nights and would also do some small college games on Saturdays. When he officiated games, he’d chew tobacco the whole time. He’d be running up and down the field all night with his whistle hanging around his neck and it would bounce up and down on his belly. Then, when the games were done, he’d have brown tobacco juice stains all down the front of his jersey. The first time I saw it, I thought it was blood. I pointed to a big wet

  red stain right on his gut and he said, “Yeah, some guy kicked me right there earlier.” He was lying. It was the tobacco juice coming out of his whistle and splashing all over him when he ran.

  Mr. Gaddy would look like a total mess, but there was no one more respected in North Carolina high school sports officiating.

  The man some called Daddy Gaddy had heard about young McGee’s time on the field at East Carolina and wanted to know if he’d like to drop in on a meeting that he was running with local high school officials. Dad went, and when he walked in the door, he realized that he knew nearly everyone in the room. He’d either played with them or against them as a Rockingham Rocket or, as a kid, had watched them playing for local schools. They were from all the towns in the area, from the northern edge of the South Carolina border up to the southern tip of the fabled golf courses of Southern Pines, North Carolina.

  Dad immediately wanted in. Even after Mr. Gaddy informed him that he would have to buy his own uniform and work his first five games without pay. Anyone who wanted to be an official would have to start out losing money. It was the first of a lifelong, neverending list of reasons to not do it, an obstacle course seemingly designed to weed out those who weren’t worthy, or perhaps even to prove the insanity of those who were.

  It was 1966. Dad worked his first five games and lost his money. Gaddy took young McGee under his wing, as did another veteran Rockingham-based white hat named Jimmy Maske and the regional officiating coordinator, Cecil Longest, who preached advice to Dad that he carried with him until he hung up his last uniform 43 years later: “Stay out the way. Play deep. Only call the obvious stuff. Learn all you can from the guys around you.”

  The following fall, he worked his first full season of North Carolina high school football, sometimes officiating three or more games in three days, from junior high on Wednesday to junior varsity Thursday to varsity
games on Friday nights. The big varsity schools paid $25. The smaller ones paid half that. You could make a little more if you agreed to be the designated driver, though that meant giving up one’s late night backseat beer privileges (reminder: this was the 1960s). The guy who lived the furthest away from the destination school would drive, stopping by the homes of the other three members of the crew and picking them up to travel to such exotic locales as Fairmont, Rowland, and Tabor City, to work games on fields that were more sand than grass, instantly filled with puddles of standing water after even the smallest rain shower.

  They loved it.

  They would sometimes drive hours in both directions to work two-hour games scattered throughout a region of rural North Carolina that covered more than 2,000 square miles, all for the honor of getting dressed in the girls’ basketball locker room or in the parking lot next to the car. If it was a local game, they’d dress at home, which always drew interesting looks from other motorists, being passed by a station wagon driven by a man dressed in thick black and white stripes. Those uniforms were self-purchased from the local sporting goods store or Sears & Roebuck. Dad would buy white dress pants and have his new wife and my future Mom, Hannah, sew up the cuffs into the correct shortened, bloomed-out knickers style that he always loathed. His entire career he lobbied to switch to black, track suit-style pants, to no avail. The NCAA did finally introduce them…the year after Dad retired.

  During the weekdays, Dad worked. During weeknights, he played semi-pro textile league baseball, while also umpiring church and industrial softball at $8 per game. Every dime went toward Mom’s tuition, as she too was now paying her own way through college. On Monday nights, the local Rockingham officials would meet at Mr. Gaddy’s office to have a rules discussion, go over the evaluations turned in by the coaches of their last game, receive their assignments for the upcoming week, and eat free ice cream.

  In 1967, there were 2,600 officials working high school football games in North Carolina. Dad, in his first full season, received the highest coaches’ grade among them. He worked as either a line judge or a head linesman, stationed along the sideline directly in front of the coaches and their teams. But on a four-man high school crew, he was also responsible for however many yards lived between him and the goal line. That’s a lot of real estate.

  Dad

  Working the line of scrimmage in the high school, at the snap you had to know if an offensive lineman moved or if a defensive lineman was offsides. Then you had to watch for holding, which means you couldn’t see the guy with the ball coming at you. But if that guy with the ball, the one you can’t look for yet, breaks a big play, now you have to take off after him and try to beat him to the goal line, and we had a lot of kids in these games who went on to be college football players.

  Man, I was covering 120 freaking yards. It was good to be twenty-something years old.

  That’s where Dad would end up spending nearly his entire officiating career, on the sideline and downfield, though thankfully, as the years went by and headcounts grew, the amount of space one to had cover was never as ridiculous as in those earliest days.

  But what never changed about being in those positions, no matter the level of football, was that the sideline guy is also the guy who delivers the bad news about penalties to the head coach and the guy who has to manage the ire that often comes with that delivery. As a lifelong “people person,” Dad was also very good at handling those interactions. His evaluation grades reflected that. But a nice evaluation score certainly didn’t mean that 100 percent of the people coaching or working those games were happy 100 percent of the time.

  One night at Laurinburg High, the home team scored late and went for the two-point conversion to tie the game. The ball carrier got his foot into the end zone, but the ball never crossed the goal line. Dad signaled no score. Then something whooshed over his head and helicoptered onto the playing field. It was the yard and first down markers, thrown in disgust by the sideline chain crew. They’d decided that they were done for the night. There was still a minute and half left to play.

  Dad couldn’t help but think he was glad the same hadn’t happened during a junior high game in Laurel Hill, North Carolina, a game he’d worked for a friend who was starting a football program where there’d never been one before. When Dad got there, he realized that there were no first down chains at all. No problem, the friend assured him, producing a pair of tree saplings connected with 10 yards of rope. If someone had tried to throw those in protest, it would have been bad. (By the way, there was also a huge oak tree in one end zone, but both coaches agreed it wouldn’t be a problem because they’d never complete a pass. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even score.)

  Dad

  To do this job, you have to learn detachment. Every game you work is the most important game you’ve ever worked, whether it’s Michigan at Notre Dame or Rockingham at Hamlet. When I first started working high school games in Eastern North Carolina, at least a third of the teams I officiated were being coached by guys I had just gone to college with. But holding is still holding, no matter who the people involved are. So I learned very quickly to check that at the door—relationships, teams you might have rooted for as a kid, famous names. You can’t be objective if you don’t.

  In 2002, I worked the Houston Bowl between Southern Miss and Oklahoma State, who had an incredible wide receiver. I loved watching that kid play. Early in the game he had a 60-yard catch, but we called it back because I got him for offensive pass interference. I wasn’t alone. Virgil Valdez, a longtime great official, had it too. Les Miles was Oklahoma State’s coach at the time, and he sent word all the way across the field to me, “Tell the field judge that’s Rashaun Woods and he’s a first team All-American.” And I sent word back to Miles, “You tell Coach that today he’s No. 82.”

  An official has to remove connections, names, even team brand names, anything that might get in the way of how a game needs to be called. They can be in awe of the experience of walking into Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium for the first time, seeing Longhorns mascot Bevo, and hearing the band play “The Eyes of Texas.” They can be intrigued by the prospect of watching a Heisman Trophy favorite in person. They can even be excited to see an old friend on a coaching staff.

  But once the game clock starts, all that fades into the background. It’s two teams led by players and coaches and it’s just the next game on the schedule. It’s a lesson Dad learned at the very beginning of his career, calling those college intramural and high school games.

  Dad

  One night we had a big game in Wadesboro, North Carolina, and their head coach was a legend. Ed Emory was an All-American offensive lineman at East Carolina before I was a student there, and he had a North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame coaching career, at several high schools and also at ECU. I was officiating the game with a dear friend of us both, Jerry Brooks, who was from Rockingham and played with Ed at ECU. Both really good, decent, sweet men.

  Whenever a crew was done working a game at Wadesboro, they had a standing invitation to stop by this local place called Bowman’s Restaurant for a steak and a beer. A table was always waiting in a private room in the back. Ed Emory always made sure of it. This particular night, three of our four guys were East Carolina guys—me, Brooks, and my best friend, Ken Rankin. Ed loved that. “Alright! Three ECU Pirates, this is gonna be good tonight! We’re gonna win tonight!”

  In the fourth quarter, this little scatback for Wadesboro breaks an 80-yard touchdown run that is going to win the game. Ken and I are chasing the kid to the goal line, signaling touchdown, and the crowd is going nuts. Then we look back to other end of the field and Jerry Brooks has a flag on the ground. Holding. Now I have to go tell Ed.

  “F--king Jerry Brooks called that, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, Coach, he did.”

  “He was my damn college teammate. When your college teammate is doing that to you, you d
on’t stand much of a damn chance, do you?”

  Wadesboro loses. We’re in the dressing room getting changed and I said to Jerry, “Well, thanks to you there won’t be any steaks tonight.” But Jerry Brooks insisted we were fine. “I’ve been friends with Ed Emory since we were 18 years old. He’s not that kind of guy. We’re going to Bowman’s.”

  We got there and it was like the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City. We walked in and this old guy was wiping down the bar. He looked up and said, “What the hell are y’all doing here?” The place was full and there had been all of this noise and laughter and people having a good time. But when he said that, it went totally silent.

  Jerry says, “Didn’t Coach Emory call?” The bartender said, “Hell yeah, he called alright. He said if y’all came in here to have your asses arrested.”

  That night I think Jerry Brooks learned about detachment.

  Another lesson learned early on by any and every sports official is that benefit of the doubt will never be on their side. Just as it was in the real Long Branch Saloon, those officials’ black ballcaps might as well be black cowboy hats, because in the eyes of the audience they are always the bad guys, even when they are going out of their way to do the right thing. That leads to another lesson: no one is ever going to truly look out for them but them.

  Dad

  We had a game at Massey Hill High School in Fayetteville on a Saturday and it wasn’t even our game. We had worked a game on Friday night and Saturday morning the phone rang. It was Mr. Gaddy. He said that they’d had a big mess at Massey Hill and he needed our help. The officials who were supposed to have worked their game the night before had gotten the home and visiting teams mixed up and gone to the wrong stadium, so their game had to be postponed. So, here we come, we’re gonna save the day, right?

  We came out of the locker room and were walking onto the field and the PA guy comes over the speakers, real sarcastic: “Well, look who showed up tonight. It’s those damn officials who couldn’t find the stadium last night, but they found it today. Great job, boys. Let’s have a hand for the officials.” That got the crowd all lathered up—cussing and cat calls and everything.