Sidelines and Bloodlines

by Ryan McGee

  We stopped at the home bench for pregame, but Mr. Gaddy never even slowed down. He went right up through the stands and climbed the ladder into the press box and for at least five minutes he had his finger in that guy’s face. I have no idea what he said to that guy, but when he came back down and we started our pregame, the PA came back over the speakers. This time he was very sincere. “Well, I’d like to apologize to the officials. They worked the game at Lumberton last night and we appreciate them giving us their valuable time tonight. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  There were always a handful of too-passionate fans. That never changed, from Massey Hill to the BCS Championship Game. But even during nights spent working in some of the darkest corners of the North Carolina countryside, there were only a few times it felt unsafe. The occasional group of overzealous rednecks would stalk the refs up and down the sideline, threatening to wait for them in the parking lot at night’s end. No one ever did, but you’d never know that for sure until you walked out of the locker room later.

  One night, Dad went with some friends to watch them officiate a high school basketball game. When they returned to their car to drive home, they found the tires slashed. But that was it. A lot of mean talk, but thankfully none of it was followed up with action. “If I ever thought there was a real chance of trouble, I just stayed as close to Jerry Brooks as I could,” says Dad. We McGees aren’t big guys. Brooks, the former ECU offensive lineman, was.

  Yet another lesson learned in those early years was the importance of timing, in one’s life, one’s love, one’s career, and certainly in one’s experiences on the playing field. Dad has earned every bit of success in his life, and there has been a lot. But he is also smart enough to know that there had to be some breaks along the way, timed just right, whether it was a college intramurals director in need of a student’s help or a high school officiating coordinator with some open roster spots to fill on Friday nights. And yes, the importance of timing also applies to that coordinator’s decision-making during those Friday nights.

  Dad

  We had a first-round state playoff game at a high school where we had just worked a game a couple of weeks before. In that game, Mr. Gaddy had two or three holding calls against that team. Well, as soon as we walked up, the head coach came running at us, just screaming in Mr. Gaddy’s face. “You sonofabitch! How’d you get a playoff game? You screwed us the last time you were here!”

  The game started, and the whole first half he just didn’t stop screaming at Mr. Gaddy, who was in the middle of the field. Well, I’m a linesman. I’m right there on the sideline with this guy and he is just screaming and cussing over my shoulder the whole first half. I kept warning him, but he wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t stopping! I hate that sonaofabitch!”

  At halftime there was no score. But I was begging Mr. Gaddy, “You have to flag that guy!” He just smiled, tobacco juice running out of his mouth and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get him.”

  Midway through the third quarter, one of the home team players broke a big run for a touchdown. A game-changer. I looked back to the middle of the field and there’s Mr. Gaddy standing over his flag. Holding. Home team. The touchdown was coming back.

  Now it’s my job as the official on the sideline to report the foul to the head coach. I walked over and said, “Coach, do you know what that was?”

  He said, “I know exactly what that was. You tell that little sonofabitch I ain’t saying nothing else the rest of the night.”

  That lesson in timing also extended to the larger world outside of football officiating. At the same time Dad was making his way up the North Carolina high school sports ladder, those schools were desegregating. A too-slow process had finally met the requirements of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the 1971–72 school year. That meant a merging of officials as well, with split crews of men of different skin tones who used to work their Friday night games separately. That transition certainly didn’t go smoothly everywhere, but for Dad and his crew black and white went together as naturally as the stripes on their shirts, even as they traveled the backroads of North Carolina. There were certainly some, “Y’all really got those guys with you?” reactions from coaches, fans, and restauranteurs as the integrated crews walked onto their fields and into their burger joints, but they amounted to little more than side-eyed looks and under-the-breath comments.

  The only exception was a roadhouse in Ellerbe, North Carolina, a popular spot for Dad and the other Rockingham-based officials to stop for a beer on the way home. The place had only one long bar, but the patrons’ side of that bar was divided by a wall, marked “Whites Only” on one side and “Coloreds Only” on the other, with the bartender moving back and forth between the two ends. Dad’s new officiating crew, the one that blurred the lines that built that wall, decided to stop and walk into the whites-only side together.

  They were escorted out.

  Unbeknownst to Dad, his future college officiating teammates were enduring similar experiences as they worked their ways up ladders in other southern states. That included men of color, such as Virgil Valdez, the man who’d joined forces with Dad to make that Houston Bowl pass interference call that angered Les Miles. Valdez, who attended segregated schools in Miami, went on to work more than a dozen postseason games, including two Rose Bowls, and the two most legendary “Wide Right” contests between Miami and Florida State.

  Dad

  I thought about that night in Ellerbe at my final college football game. The white hat in that game was Ron Cherry. He was the first black referee to work a national championship game. It should have never taken that long. But I was so very proud to be in that game with him.

  Dad received another glimpse into his future in 1969. A grainy, black-and-white, barely viewable glimpse into his future. It was a game in Whiteville, North Carolina, the last decent-sized town that most people see as they drive across the southeastern corner of the state en route to the beach. WILM-TV in Wilmington had chosen the contest to be its High School Game of the Week. The local station would tape games on Friday night using no more than a couple of clunky video cameras, to be replayed on Saturday morning. The officiating crew was impossibly excited. The crowd was fired up. All hands were in the air as the teams were set for kickoff. Then Dad blew his whistle. The four-man crew met in the middle of the field and Gaddy said, “McGee, what the hell are you doing?”

  Dad whispered into the ear of Joe Gwinn, head linesman and insurance salesman. Gwinn calmly walked over, picked up the football, and moved it five yards. In their excitement, they had marked the ball at the 35-yard line instead of the 40. It was a nice save.

  Early the next morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, Dad and Mom woke up in their newlywed apartment, located behind a countryside mansion that had once belonged to my mother’s family, now owned by a distant cousin. That house had the biggest TV to be found in the rural outskirts of Rockingham and a big enough TV antenna on the roof to snatch up a little bit of signal from Wilmington, 150 miles away. So that’s where Dad was headed.

  The picture was bad at best, but it was there. Amid the snow and the grain, he could see himself, trucking it up and down the football field with the ease of a twentysomething kid.

  It was his first televised game. There would be so many more. But not quite yet.

  Coach’s Timeout with Ed Emory

  “Bowman’s. That place was good. But they didn’t put up with any riffraff.”

  Ed Emory, 75, is laughing about the night he had his officiating friends thrown out of Wadesboro, North Carolina’s finest restaurant. It is a beautiful autumn Saturday at Wingate University during the 2012 college football season and we are chatting in the president’s box at Irwin Belk Stadium. We have both been invited into that box by the president of the university, Dr. Jerry E. McGee, but Dad has headed downstairs for some sort of official halftime presidential duties. During his dual-life
as a college official and college administrator, the only fall weekends he spent off the playing field were homecomings at the schools of his employment. Yes, sometimes the day job won out. With Dad downstairs, Coach Emory is chatting me up.

  In the years following the Bowman’s ejection, Emory constructed an incredible coaching résumé that took him through several ACC schools before he became a head coach at East Carolina. He led his alma mater to one of its most memorable seasons, an 8–3 campaign in 1984 that ended with an AP Top 20 ranking. The Pirates’ only losses that year were to Florida, Florida State, and Miami.

  Emory grew up with a severe speech impediment, but overcame that to become an All-American lineman at ECU and an all-world talker as a coach. In 1966, he made national news when Sports Illustrated reported on Emory taking a stance against the Ku Klux Klan in Wadesboro when his efforts to integrate the high school football team were met with resistance. Among the first African American kids Emory welcomed onto his team and then defended from the bigots was Sylvester Ritter, who went on to become a professional wrestling superstar known as the Junkyard Dog.

  I first got to know Emory through my very first sportswriting gig, covering high school football for the Monroe (North Carolina) Enquirer-Journal. I was in Wadesboro a lot. He wasn’t coaching then, but he was always around. He returned to the sidelines a few years later, leading Richmond County High School, what used to be Dad’s Rockingham High. In six seasons, he went 77–7.

  As we watch Dad hand out plaques to Wingate athletes on the field, Coach Emory is in full talking mode. “All those years your daddy made that drive from Rockingham to Wadesboro to referee my games, and then when I was at Richmond County years later, I was making the same drive in reverse. I lived in Wadesboro and drove over to Rockingham to coach.

  “Yeah, that one time we ran him out of town because our team lost. He’s never let me forget it. But, you know, if I lost a game, they would run me out of town, too. Problem was, I had to come back there to work on Monday, whether they were mad at me or not.”

  I ask Ed Emory if he was ever refused service at any restaurant because the hometown fans were too angry to let him eat there.

  “One time. And you know what? I think it was in Rockingham. I always wondered if maybe your daddy and Jerry Brooks were finally getting their revenge.”

  2. Big Time, Small Colleges

  When Allen Gaddy wasn’t selling ice cream, munching on chaw, officiating high school games, or shouting down public address announcers, he was spending his Saturdays calling small college football games. In the Carolinas, there have always been plenty of those games to work. Seemingly every town of any size also houses a college campus. Daddy Gaddy worked in the Carolinas Conference, a collection of then-NAIA schools located primarily in North Carolina that included Elon College in Burlington, Guilford College in Greensboro, and Catawba College in Salisbury.

  No one from the Carolinas Conference ever officially invited Dad to attend any of their officiating meetings or clinics—certainly not the coordinator, Mr. Joby Hawn, the former ACC coordinator who now oversaw the small schools of the region. But Dad showed up anyway. In 1971, Mr. Gaddy had simply said, “Jerry, I’m going to a college officiating clinic this weekend at Wake Forest, and I want you to go.”

  Officiating clinics are the big offseason meetings held by each conference, weekend-long affairs designed to run officials through a ringer of physical exams, rules tests, film study, and a dreaded timed mile run. Those clinics are also the only time of year when every official from their respective conference is in the same room at the same time, as opposed to being scattered across the college football map every autumn weekend. So while the clinics are always hard work, they are also always a good time, discussions of rules changes and new on-field mechanics punctuated with war stories about crazy calls and crazier coaches.

  Dad sat with Mr. Gaddy at the Carolinas Conference clinic and tied to soak up everything he possibly could. He knew—or at least knew of—a lot of the guys in the room, almost all of them having moved up from the North Carolina high school ranks. The following year, he received an official invitation to attend the clinic. That next fall, he was assigned two college football games as a line judge.

  Just as Mr. Gaddy had hoped, showing up uninvited had paid off for his protégé.

  On September 16, 1972, Jerry McGee stepped onto the field at Guilford College’s Armfield Athletic Center as America’s newest college football official. The home team Quakers were hosting the Emory & Henry Wasps. He was fully focused on the task at hand, but he was also fully aware of what was at stake. Over the years, he had friends from his Rockingham high school crews who’d gotten the call up for a college tryout…and it hadn’t gone well. At all. One pal got so worked up that he called 13 holding penalties. In one game. The other, a big-bodied lineman-turned-umpire/middle-of-the-field official was sent out of his natural position to back judge, way downfield from the line of scrimmage, to enforce a list of rules he’d never had to worry about before. A lifetime of watching for holding and offsides does not translate into properly policing pass interference.

  Their collegiate careers each lasted one game.

  Dad

  I was a nervous wreck. I had worked a huge high school game on Friday night and got home at midnight. I was driving from home to Greensboro at 6:00 am and I bet I didn’t sleep at all. I just didn’t want to mess anything up. Like, I didn’t want to leave something I needed at home, or be late, or make any stupid mistake like that. We had our pregame meeting at a room in the Coliseum Motel. I was so jumpy. Then we went over to the stadium, right around the corner.

  I think there were 300 people in the stadium. Maybe. The night before at my high school game, we’d had 4,000 people.

  Right before the game, I was talking with the back judge and he was a little bitty guy, but everyone knew he was a good downfield official. He could run like a deer. He had these thick glasses and he said to me just before we took the field, “Jerry, you need to ask me anything before I take my glasses off?”

  He had hearing aids and they were built into the frame of these glasses with lenses that looked like the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. So, he pulled them out, took the glasses off, stuck it all into his pocket, and ran off.

  The umpire walked over to me and said, “Well, Jerry, when you dreamed of officiating your first college football game, did you think it would be with a blind, deaf dwarf?”

  I wasn’t so nervous after that.

  Once the game started, it took a few minutes, but when my pregame butterflies were gone, I settled into my routine and it felt like just another game. But as the game went on, I thought about how much easier it was. There was room to work. The field was flat. There was grass—like, really nice grass—and the yard lines were well-marked. The play was so much cleaner. There weren’t a lot of sloppy, dumb, high school mistakes being made. And I could actually see! It was a day game. Every high school game was on Friday night under bad lights.

  It felt special. I really loved it. My check was $40.

  By 1975, Dad had been assigned a 10-game schedule, his first full collegiate season. By then the coordinator was a legendary official, Wilburn Clary. The man they called “W.C.” oversaw the officiating for the small colleges of the Carolinas and was himself still on the field, as he had been since 1939. He worked 375 college games in all, including Peach, Orange, and Sugar Bowls, spending most of his career in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the league of Clemson, Georgia Tech, and the teams of Tobacco Road. In 1989, Clary became only the sixth official to be recognized by the College Football Hall of Fame. He was no-nonsense. He demanded excellence. But he also loved his work.

  Now he was Dad’s newest officiating mentor.

  Dad

  Mr. Clary always said to us before a game, “Anybody in the stands could referee 95 percent of the plays that are going to happen here today. You’re here to officia
te the other five percent. There is going to be a long play, a fumble, someone’s going to kick it out of bounds, something goofy is going to happen in this game. There aren’t many people who are willing to try and handle that. That’s why you are here today.”

  The NAIA, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, was birthed directly from the mind of Dr. James Naismith, inventor of basketball. He sought an organization to handle the governance of his newest brainchild, a national collegiate basketball tournament. Eventually, the NCAA became the governing body of big-time college sports and the NAIA settled into its role as the happy home for America’s small colleges, a proud confederation of mostly church-tied liberal arts schools. At the start of 2020, there were 251 NAIA schools. In 1975, as Dad embarked on his first full season as a college football official, that membership was 56. The Carolinas and their bordering states were packed with NAIA powerhouses, including Elon, Wofford, Presbyterian College, and Carson–Newman.

  There were small college All-Americans all over every field, from Carson–Newman’s Tank Black (before he became a notoriously successfully sports agent-turned-convicted felon) to Elon’s Bobby Hedrick, who led the Fighting Christians to the 1980 national title by way of 5,605 career rushing yards. At the time, it was the second-highest rushing total of any running back on any level of college football, trailing only Heisman Trophy–winner Tony Dorsett.

  From little stadiums tucked into the autumn-painted Blue Ridge Mountains to the pottery kiln–hot playing fields of the Carolina Sandhills and along the Atlantic coast, the football was good. But the characters were better.

  In the final game of one of Dad’s first small college seasons, two bad teams were playing out the string, eager to get disappointing seasons over with. To makes matters worse, it was a cold, drizzly, muddy day. The home team busted off a nice long run, but it was called back. Offensive holding. The next series they completed a 20-yard pass. It also came back; offensive holding again. A few minutes later, another nice play, another penalty. Yes, another offensive holding call.