by Ryan McGee
An incredulous member of the penalized team approached the officials. “Goddammit! Who keeps holding?!” They told him it was No. 75. He turned to his team, hands on his hips. “Goddammit, 75, quit holding! Where is 75? Who be 75?!”
“Hey, man,” one of his teammates replied, pointing at his jersey, “You be 75.”
“Damn. I do be 75.”
Dad
I’d had the same team three times in one season. That never happened in small college ball, but it did this year. A big part of my job my entire career was to get the captains from the locker room for the pregame coin toss.
So I go to get the captains from this team I’d seen three times in the same fall, and this one guy, he’s just huge. He looks at me, looks over at his teammates, and then back at me. Finally, he walks over to me and he says, “Hey man, every time I see you, there you are.”
I knew what he meant. We’d seen each other three times in, like, two months. The back judge, a guy I’d never worked with before, heard what the kid said and he replied, “Yeah, and of all the people he knows, you’re one of them.”
Jokes aside, Dad knew a lot of people. Still does and always has. He’s always had the gift of making people he’s just met feel like they are old friends and making all his old friends feel like they are his best friend. Much as it had been on the high school sidelines, he found that the small college coaching staffs were full of former East Carolina classmates and coaches.
That made for an exciting but awkward exchange back at Guilford College in ’73. The Quakers had lost 33 games in a row. But with a two-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter over Randolph–Macon, that streak would finally end. The Guilford coach was Dr. Henry VanSant, a former East Carolina football player, assistant coach, and close personal friend of line judge Jerry McGee. A little too close.
Dad
There was still a good bit of time left in the game, and all of a sudden someone started hugging me, right there on the sideline. It was Henry. “Jerry! We’re going to win the game! We’re going to win the game!”
I said, “Dammit, Henry, the game is still going on! People can’t be seeing you hugging on me!” and I pushed him away.
The game ended and Guilford won for the first time in, like, four years. Everyone on the team ran out on the field and they were hugging each other. But Henry came running back to me and started hugging me again. “We won, Jerry! We won!” He begged me to stay and have dinner with him to celebrate. I told him I had to get on home, but he kept insisting. His wife was out of town, and he didn’t want to eat alone. That was the only game he won that year. They went 1–9. It was the only year he coached the team at Guilford. He said to me, “Oh, hell, stay around. I have to celebrate with someone, and you might be my only friend on campus today.”
So, I stayed, and he took me to dinner at the on-campus cafeteria. There’s the football coach and me, eating together in the cafeteria after the big win.
But here, at the next level of officiating, Dad wasn’t only reconnecting with old friends. He was also making a lot of new ones, some of whom he would share locker rooms and playing fields with for the next several decades. Many of the officials he worked with in the Carolinas Conference and its successor, the South Atlantic Conference, were the same teammates he would go on to be crewed with at places like Notre Dame and the Rose Bowl.
As great as the funny stories are, they were merely punctuation to the real story of working small college games, the round-the-clock and round-the-calendar hard work that went into improving one’s craft. When Dad and his weekend coworkers were together, they had constant conversations about mechanics, how to best position themselves to keep watch over their designated zones of the field but also to provide backup for their crewmates.
Dad
My philosophy was always, okay, my judgment is pretty good; what I need to work on is positioning. Where I struggled making calls was whenever I was out of position. If I could make sure that I was in the right position, then I could get the call right.
I have told young officials all the time, “We are all human beings and we are all making judgment calls.” Sometimes we’re going to be wrong. But you can always be 100 percent right mechanically. You can 100 percent be in the right place. You can’t control what’s happening with the football or in a game. But you can control mechanics.
An official’s playbook is no different than it is for a player. If you are in the right place at the right time, you have a chance to get it right. If you aren’t, you don’t. And that extends to the other officials on your crew, too. If you know that guy is going to be where he is supposed to be, then you don’t worry about him. Just like Joe Burrow, the former LSU quarterback, knew he didn’t have to worry about those wide receivers being where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. If they run the playbook the way it is drawn up, then he can worry about making the throw, not about whether his guy is going to be there. If I am a field judge and I know the back judge is good on his mechanics, then I can worry about my zone and my guys right in front of me, and not worry about what’s going to happen if they get past me and some guy is back there in the wrong place and in position to screw up.
Those early days, with no film and no games on TV, that meant a lot of talking about mechanics. That’s all we had.
The responsibilities of an official aren’t limited to only those times when the game clock is running. There are also pregame duties. As he’s already explained, Dad was always responsible for retrieving the captains from the locker room for the pregame coin toss. And when the game started, the seconds leading into every play meant counting the number of players on the field on defense and the seconds after every play meant changing out footballs with the sideline ball boys and delivering the new ball to the line of scrimmage. And between all of that, oh yeah, was watching the play, following the positioning and mechanics determined by the conference coordinator as the best manner to watch that play. If there was a flag on the play, no matter whether Dad threw it or not, as one of the officials who spent his entire day on the sideline, he was also the messenger whom the coaches often wanted to shoot.
The officials who took all those responsibilities seriously would no doubt get a look from the next level, offered a chance to work games at places like Clemson’s Death Valley or perhaps even a postseason bowl game in Atlanta, Memphis, or Miami, legendary stadiums where the footballs were new, the showers worked, and someone would actually pay to have you stay in a hotel room.
But for now, their Saturday routines weren’t much different than they had been while working high school games. The pay certainly wasn’t much better, starting out at $40 per game versus $25. But the football was. Dad realized quickly that he was having to adjust his reaction time—not to mention the head start he gave himself when covering deep pass plays—to the speed of small college players versus those from the public high schools, even with the increase from four- to five-man crews. The playbooks being utilized were a little more complicated, though only a little. But many of the locker rooms were still so small that only two guys could get dressed at once—if there was a locker room at all. Some schools would book a room at a local motel so that the crew could meet, change, and drive over in uniform.
Dad
At Carson–Newman they would always have a room for us at this little motel, doors that opened to the parking lot, like you saw a lot back then. I had driven all the way up from North Carolina into Tennessee with an official named Bill Wampler, a guy I ended up working games with for a couple of decades. We got there and the clerk tried to act like he didn’t know we were supposed to have a room. Obviously, he’d sold it. So, he called the manager and that guy let him have it. He hung up and grabbed his keys and said to follow him.
We walked all the way to end of the building and he unlocked all of these locks on the door and said, “Y’all can change in here.” When he opened the
door, feathers flew out all over the place. They were using this old hotel room as a storage room, and I guess it had been full of old mattresses and pillows. Damn feathers were everywhere. And we’re trying to change into our uniforms. We were covered in feathers.
Some of the other guys got there later and when they walked in Wampler said, “We’ve got some eggs over there in the corner and we’re going to need you guys to take turns sitting on those for a while.”
Twelve years later, Bill Wampler and I were officiating together in the Orange Bowl. The accommodations were a little nicer.
Like that day in Jefferson City, Tennessee, there were plenty of times when everyone opted out of the postgame shower. If not for feathers, then because the bathroom tiles were covered in a half-inch of mildew. That made for some rank-smelling car rides. And now those car rides, to faraway colleges instead of regional high schools, were much longer than they used to be. On occasion, they were much longer than originally planned.
Chowan College, now Chowan University, is located in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, a town tucked into the northeast corner of a state that is notoriously wide. Chowan is almost in Virginia and almost in the Outer Banks, but not really close to anywhere. In the 1970s, the Chowan Braves were a junior college, coached by small college legend Jim Garrison, winner of 182 games and inducted into so many sports halls of fame that Chowan named its own hall of fame after him.
Dad’s first interaction with Garrison was during a pregame walk of the field at what is now known as Garrison Stadium. It is customary for officials to take a stroll around the field long before kickoff to ensure there are no unforeseen safety issues. At the highest levels, that meant checking to see that the Astroturf at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia wasn’t bunched up in the middle of the field (which it had a tendency to do). At the small college level, that might mean telling the grounds crew guy that he can’t leave his lawnmower parked at the 25-yard line.
This particular day, Dad noticed that an oak tree outside the stadium had grown to the point that it was hanging over the back of the end zone. He pointed it out to Garrison, who assured the officials that he’d been at Chowan 30 years and no one had ever hit that tree. Dad informed him that the ground rules would be as follows: if a Chowan player threw a pass that hit the tree, it would be ruled incomplete. But if a visiting player hit the tree it would be ruled a touchdown. The next time the crew returned to Chowan, the tree was gone.
Garrison was known for winning, but was also renowned for his keen eye when it came to evaluating young officiating talent. Every official at every level of every sport is under constant surveillance and scrutiny, and those evaluations are ultimately the determining factor in where that official is allowed to work and where he or she will never be allowed to work, be it leagues, levels of leagues, or the postseason games that come with them. And no, this is isn’t about the opinions of fans or TV analysts. It’s about postgame job evaluations filled out by conference supervisors, conference at-game observers, fellow members of each crew, and, yes, the head coaches of each team in each game. And while most coaches don’t have time to fill out the paperwork that comes with Heisman ballots, All-Conference selections or even the Top 25 Coaches Poll, they never skimp on their duties when it comes to sending their opinions on an officials’ performance to the conference office on Sunday mornings.
Dad
Yeah, some of the guys took that job a little too seriously. At the small college level, you would actually hand the coach your evaluation card prior to the game. We had a guy at Catawba College who got all worked up during a game and started running up and down the sideline, holding that evaluation card in his hand, pointing it at us and screaming. “You just wait until I turn this in, you S.O.B.! You’re going back to high school!”
At Chowan, Garrison always provided unemotional, smart, detailed feedback on every official he saw in action. He was in constant communication with W.C. Clary and their mutual friend, Norval Neve (pronounced “Nave”), the officiating coordinator for the ACC. Neve was cut from the same old-school granite as Clary, but employed a drill sergeant–like approach to the job that sometimes managed to even make Mr. Clary look slack.
Together, Clary and Neve (Dad called them Mr. Clary and Mr. Neve, just as he had done with Mr. Gaddy) had a pretty nice little farm system of their own working, earmarking good young talent for potential promotions into the collegiate big leagues and Garrison’s evaluations were a key component of their process. So, to get their guys in front of Garrison’s eyes, they made sure that all of their officials made at least a trip or two each season to Chowan, no matter how long that trip took.
Dad
We all knew that if Coach Garrison gave a good review to Mr. Neve, then that probably meant that you were going to get a real look from the ACC and you might be on your way to bigger games. So, you never complained about going to Chowan, but man, it was hard to get to.
There was a group of really good officials based out of Greenville, South Carolina. Clark Gaston, who had played offensive line at Clemson under Frank Howard, and Joe Long, Rod Dailey, Gil Rushton—these are all guys I went on to work with in the ACC for years. They had to make the drive from Greenville to Chowan. That takes seven or eight hours. It’s a night game, so they leave out at dawn and head east.
They’re riding along, all in one car, and start scrolling through the AM radio to try and find some games to listen to. As they go along, different games are tuning in and out. Finally, somewhere around Raleigh, five hours from home but still two hours from Chowan, they get a good signal and they hear the play-by-play guy:
“Now it’s third-and-six for the Braves…the Braves get a great stop on that play…the Braves have it deep in their own territory…”
Well, these guys in the car, they’ve been driving through North Carolina listening to the Demon Deacons and the Tar Heels and the Wolfpack and now they’re asking, “Who the hell are the Braves?” Then the play-by-play guy is taking it to a commercial break and he says, “At the end the third quarter, Chowan leads 21–7…”
For some reason, the game had been moved from night to day, and without cell phones or the internet, these guys never got word. So, they stopped in Raleigh, got something to eat, and headed back home. I’m sure they were also wondering who the hell had shown up to work their game.
Rod Dailey said, “Well, I really enjoyed spending the day with my friends, but 10 hours was a little too far to drive for a bad barbecue sandwich.”
With all those officials from everywhere on the map driving across all over to get to wherever, having all five members of a crew get where they were supposed to be and when could be a bit of a challenge, especially when those officials were still trying to double-dip with Friday night high school games and Saturday small college contests.
For a contest between Samford and Guilford, there would be a split crew, meaning that some members of the five-man officiating team would be from one conference and others from another. That used to be standard operating procedure for cross-conference games and remained so all the way through the 1980s. Dad and two colleagues from the Carolinas Conference would be joined by a pair of officials from Alabama, home state of the Samford Bulldogs.
At 10:00 am, three hours before the 1:00 pm kickoff, it was time for the officials’ pregame meeting. The guys from Alabama weren’t there. At 11:30, still no sign. The white hat looked at his two crewmates and said, “These sumbitches aren’t coming!” They decided to go back to their JV high school mechanics. The referee would work the middle of the field; Dad, as line judge, would work the line of scrimmage; and the third guy, the back judge, would cover the entire defensive side of the field.
Fifteen minutes before kickoff, Dad heard someone screaming “Hey, ref! HEY, REF!” but ignored it like he always did. Finally, with kickoff looming, he turned around and looked. There were two guys in black and white stripes standing outside the gate. It was
the Alabama boys. They’d worked a high school game in their home state the night before and were running late, way late, and they’d tried to talk their way into the stadium by explaining to the security guard, “We’re the damn referees!” The office at the gate replied, “Looks to me like the damn referees are already on the field.”
They ran in, with minutes to spare, and received their assignments from the white hat, umpire, and back judge. They didn’t like them. “But I’m a referee and he’s a head linesman!” the late arrivals informed their new teammates.
“No, we already had our meeting, and you weren’t there,” the incensed white hat replied. “You mother----ers are what I say you are.”
The game went fine and the Alabama boys left for home, making a 1,000-mile round trip to spend no more than perhaps four hours at Guilford College. But, hey, they made $60 apiece.
Dad
We had a game at Lenoir–Rhyne one afternoon, and the referee and the umpire went to meet with the head coaches prior to the game, which is their standard operating procedure. But they came back way too soon and said that the head coach needed to see me. It was my friend, Dr. Henry VanSant, the one I’d had to fight off the hugs from at Guilford. He was now the head coach at Lenoir–Rhyne, and he had a problem.
I go down there and he says to me, “Jerry, the visiting team has shown up with their home uniforms, their dark uniforms. The rules say that visitors are supposed to wear white.” We went down to see the visiting coach, and he said, “We’re going to wear these uniforms, this is what we’re wearing.” When Lenoir–Rhyne offered up their white practice jerseys, the other coach said, “We came to play, not to practice.” Eventually, we convinced him to do it. It was either they did it, or they had to go back home and get their white jerseys, or we don’t play the game.
