Sidelines and Bloodlines

by Ryan McGee

  A few minutes before the game, the home coach comes to me again. Another problem: the visitors had forgotten to bring their headsets for the sideline coaches to communicate with the coaches in the press box. The rules state that if one team doesn’t have them, no one gets to have them. So, Lenoir–Rhyne agreed to share some of theirs with the visiting team. Problem solved, again. Let’s play ball.

  The whole game, the visiting coach was just screaming at us. “I can’t wait to report on you guys! We haven’t gotten a close call yet!” Just nonstop.

  With about 20 seconds left in the game, Lenoir–Rhyne is up by three and they have to punt it away. Now the visitors have the ball with eight seconds to play, a chance to win the game. But they ran the ball off tackle, the clock runs out, and the game ends. We start running off the field and here comes the coach, just losing his mind. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Coach, we’re going home.”

  “But you can’t go home! That was just the end of the third quarter!”

  The next week he was fired for coaching while inebriated. Small college football, man.

  The occasional drunk notwithstanding, Dad’s experience with the coaches of small college football was a great one, especially when he reached out for feedback on how to do his job better. At this same time, he had started working on a small college campus himself, as a fledgling administrator at Gardner–­Webb College, located in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, squarely in the middle of the South Atlantic Conference. The Running Bulldogs were also a member of that conference. That meant that Dad couldn’t work Gardner–Webb games, his first foray into officiating’s conflict of interest rules which state an official can’t be assigned to games involving their alma mater, their children’s alma maters, a school located in their city of residence or, as in this case, a school where they are employed.

  There was, however, a big advantage to working at a school whose team played the teams he officiated on Saturdays. It was Dad’s introduction to film study. In the late 1970s, only a tiny number of college football games were televised—and certainly not any small college contests. But teams, even small college teams, were regularly shooting film of their games and exchanging that film with their opponents. It wasn’t great. In the words of Dad, most of the Super 8mm footage was so fuzzy it was hard to tell a football from a pair of cleats or a pair of cleats from a helmet. But it was still a way to watch himself and other officials to take note of positioning, mechanics, and, clarity willing, whether a foul called had been worthy of the flag thrown.

  He went to the Gardner–Webb coaching staff with a request. It was a group of real pros, led by head coaches Oval Jaynes, who would go on to be a high-powered administrator at Auburn, Colorado State, and Pittsburgh, and Tom Moore, who came to GWC to replace the departed Jaynes after a decade on the staff at Clemson. Dad gave them his schedule and asked them to let him know if the film of any of his games made it into their office. They did. And that led to many nights of Dad sitting alone in the empty football coach’s office, watching himself on a little pull-down movie screen, fine-tuning his on-field mechanics.

  Dad

  What a huge advantage that was, to have that perspective of the importance of positioning, being in the right place at the right time to make the right call. And it wasn’t just about watching me, it was about watching everyone on the field. It was about how we all worked together and if one guy wasn’t doing what he was supposed to, how much that hurt the rest of us.

  Before that, I would watch any football I could, just to see how games were officiated. But back then, in the ’70s, there was only one college game on TV per weekend, two at most, and I was usually working a game myself and couldn’t watch it. There were no VCRs back then. I would try to get back home and watch big college games on Saturday nights and NFL games on Sunday and Monday night to see how they did it, and even though there were a lot of differences in how the NFL and college handled mechanics, what struck you was how precise they were. Those guys were never caught out of position. In the NFL they always operated from a place of calmness. In college there was a lot of nervous energy on the field and guys were running all over the place. The NFL guys were never rattled, never got excited, always treated every game and play the same. I loved watching Gerry Austin, who was in the ACC and then went on to the NFL and worked several Super Bowls.

  I would also have talks with the coaches at Gardner–Webb, like Oval and Tom, about how they liked to interact with officials, and how much different it was at the next level of the college game. They also talked to me about coaching tendencies, why they did certain things at certain times. Coaches scout teams for tendencies and strengths and weaknesses, how their opponent will react in certain situations or how a coach will act in certain situations, and I learned how to do that, too. Every good official needs to know those things about the teams they are going to be on the field with before they get there. That’s a big part of being prepared.

  Most of time at the small college or high school level, that’s all eyeballing on the field or asking other guys for information. Being able to see it on film and have a discussion about it with smart coaches, what an advantage that was as I was still learning about the job. I felt like I was improving pretty quickly.

  Still, the timeline for any official, no matter what advantages they might find to accelerate their development, is an exercise in forced patience. By the end of the 1980 season, Dad had worked 80 small college games over eight seasons, the last six full-time. But at the end of that season, a letter had arrived at the house. It was from Greensboro, North Carolina, and the envelope was embossed with the logo of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

  Some big decisions were about to made. And Jerry McGee wasn’t going to make them alone.

  Coach’s Timeout with Oval Jaynes

  “Everybody thinks that the coaches and referees are supposed to hate each other all the time, but in reality, most of us are pretty good friends.”

  It is Thanksgiving week 2018 and I have Oval Jaynes on the phone. He is somewhere in the North Carolina mountains and I am somewhere in the middle of Texas and we are trying to shout our way through spotty cell service. I have known Coach Jaynes since I was in elementary school, when he was head coach at Gardner–Webb and was letting Dad set up in the offices of the Running Bulldogs to watch game film.

  He left Gardner–Webb in 1978 to be an assistant coach at Wyoming. Then he was associate athletic director at Auburn in the early 1980s, also known as the Bo Jackson Era, and went on to serve as AD at Colorado State, Pittsburgh, Idaho, Chattanooga, and Jacksonville State. I have called him for a story I am writing for ESPN.com on Jackson, specifically the play that won Jackson the ’85 Heisman Trophy, when he sailed over the goal line to defeat Alabama in the Iron Bowl, also known as “Bo Over the Top.”

  But Jaynes has done what so many in college football do whenever I call them for quotes. He has steered the conversation away from my intended topic with one question: “How’s your Dad doing?”

  Jaynes is a North Carolina native and only a few years older than Dad, so their connection runs much deeper even than Gardner–Webb. They don’t share a handful of friends. All their friends are mutual friends. He retells the story of Dad watching film in his office at Gardner–Webb. “If my players had been as serious as your daddy was about watching game film, I would have won more games.”

  But then he recounts a story I had heard from Dad, but always thought might’ve been a little too good to be true.

  “I was in my final football season as athletic director at Pittsburgh and Johnny Majors was in his last year as our head football coach. That would have been 1995.” Jaynes had hired Majors three years earlier after the coach had been ousted from his alma mater, Tennessee. It was an ugly affair. I know because I was a member of the student film crew at Tennessee and had grown close to Majors, spending nearly every fall football practice for three se
asons on his tower as he watched over his offense and shouted “CHECK! CHECK! CHECK!” through a bullhorn directly over my shoulder. Prior to his stint at Tennessee, Majors won a national championship at Pitt in 1976, powered by Heisman Trophy–winning running back Tony Dorsett. Jaynes brought Majors back to Pittsburgh in ’92, and he’d connected with Dad in small part because of his relationship with me.

  Jaynes continued. “We had Miami in town for a late season game. You know they were really good. They always were. They had just lost in the national championship the year before and had Ray Lewis and those guys, and we were having a really tough season.”

  It had been a tough season for Dad, too. A few weeks earlier he was in Austin for a game between Pitt and Texas, but received a call in the middle of the night that his mother, Mary Caddell, had passed away. So, when Dad arrived at Pitt, Coach Majors came straight to him to express his condolences. Jaynes was also eager to visit with his old friend, but he joined the conversation carrying a surprise. He had a new grandchild and the baby was at the stadium, so the athletic director got the child, brought it out onto the field, and handed the infant to Dad. The three men and a baby were talking, laughing, and catching up.

  “All of the sudden,” Jaynes recalls, “We hear someone yell, ‘Well, what the hell is this?!’”

  It was Butch Davis, head coach of the Miami Hurricanes, who had walked out of the locker room for a road game against the Pittsburgh Panthers and the first thing he’d seen was a referee, in uniform, holding the grandbaby of the smiling Pitt athletic director, and with the arm of the Pitt head coach draped over his black and white striped shoulders. Dad handed the baby back as quickly as he could, Jaynes and Majors laughing.

  “Butch wasn’t actually worried about it. At the end of the day, coaches and officials are all in it together on Saturdays. There aren’t a whole lot of people who really understand what that’s really like. So, the ones that do, especially the ones who have been around for a long time, they can’t help but end up becoming friends. And the good ones all understand that just because you might be friends, that doesn’t mean you’re getting favors once the game starts.”

  Oval Jaynes laughs.

  “Okay, not all of them are friends. But we always have been.”

  3. Home Games

  My first real memory of Dad as a college ­football official isn’t from a stadium or a practice field. It’s from a PTA meeting at my elementary school in Shelby, North Carolina. I was in the third grade. Dad was the PTA president (because, you know, he didn’t already have enough to do), and I distinctly remember watching him crossing the gymnasium stage to take his place behind the podium and address whatever it is that PTA presidents must address. That journey to that podium was perilous, not because of any overly angry ­parents or teachers, but because he was on crutches. I remember being very nervous about that. I wasn’t alone.

  Sam McGee

  My first memory is pretty much the same, but it wasn’t at school. I remember Dad in our basement den, with his right foot stuck in a bucket of ice. I remember him explaining to me what had happened and why he was having to sit there and basically torture himself.

  I was, what, six years old? I didn’t like that at all.

  It dawns on me that this is the first time you are really meeting my brother, Sam. Today, he is a hugely successful attorney, representing good, hardworking people when they find themselves thrust into extraordinarily awful situations, hard times often unleashed upon them by cold, uncaring corporations. Sam has dedicated his life to forcing those who don’t care to care.

  No one will make you laugh harder than Sam McGee, but no one will ever work harder than Sam McGee. His intensity is matched only by his heart. That’s what makes him a good lawyer, father, and man. If you’d met him when he was six, none of what he’s done or what you will read from him in this book would surprise you. The same skills of observation and research that he used to graduate from Yale Law and now uses to prepare for court are how he has always attacked every aspect of his life. That certainly includes how he studied every bit of Dad’s officiating career, from the execution of rule enforcement and mechanics on Saturday afternoons to, unfortunately, the injuries that sometimes got in the way of completing those tasks.

  It was one of those injuries here in 1979 that had Dad’s right foot swollen like a water balloon, stuffed in that ice bucket at home and into a walking cast at my school’s PTA meeting. The Saturday before he’d been officiating a Week 2 game between Carson–Newman and Wofford. He was a line judge and had been given a heads up that someone from the ACC would be watching the game, scouting him as a potential NCAA Division I official.

  Dad

  I wasn’t nervous about that, because I was happy where I was. If they called, great. If they didn’t, okay. But I absolutely wanted to make sure that I showed them my best effort, no matter what might happen.

  During one of the game’s very first plays, he ran in from the sideline to spot the ball. Bodies were still rolling and crashing at the end of the play when he arrived and a giant Carson–­Newman lineman jumped into the air to keep from tripping over all those bodies on the ground. He landed right on top of Dad, dragging his cleat down Dad’s right shin, into the top of his right foot, trapping his ankle and twisting it badly. Dad toughed it out until halftime, when he went in to see the Wofford trainer, who started unlacing the right shoe and then suddenly stopped. He told Dad that if he kept going and pulled that shoe off, they’d never get it back on because his ankle was already so swollen. Instead, the trainer wrapped the entire shoe in athletic tape and sent Dad back out to work the second half. When the game was over and Dad finally pulled off his cleats and socks, his shin was crusted with blood and his ankle was twice its normal size.

  The next morning, when Mom pulled back the sheets on the bed, Dad’s ankle was so swollen that she gasped.

  Dad

  If I hadn’t had toenails you wouldn’t have even known it was a foot.

  That Tuesday we got my evaluation from the ACC observer who’d come to see the game. He provided all of this detailed criticism of the other officials he’d been there to see. Next to my name he wrote one sentence.

  “Ran like he was hurt.”

  Over the long haul, that right ankle became an unforeseen blessing. Dad never again worked a game when he didn’t have that ankle taped by the athletic training staff of the home team. He would knock on the door a couple of hours before kickoff, and they would always oblige. He was usually not alone, as other officials were also nursing injuries, from bum hamstrings to bone spurs. The unexpected benefit of those times spent on the trainers’ tables was the chance to visit with the players who were there to have an injury prepped and the coaches who were stopping by to check on those players.

  Dad

  It always caught people off guard the first time they saw it, a grey-headed guy in his black and white uniform getting taped up. But I made real friendships in those rooms. Some of those legendary trainers taped my right ankle for 30 years. Coaches would stop by to chat. The legendary former players you always see in the stadium on game days, they would talk your ears off. We even met Lee Greenwood in the trainer’s room.

  Joe Paterno thought it was hilarious. The first time I went to Penn State, he came in there and saw me and couldn’t stop talking about it. “Look at this! This guy is so serious about this, he’s getting taped up! You got any eligibility left? A man your age that is this intense, I could use some of that!”

  Paterno joked, but he was also a regular on the training table, thanks to a series of injuries in the 2000s, everything from a broken leg suffered in a sideline collision versus Wisconsin to a self-inflicted hip injury while demonstrating an onside kick. A painful reminder that only the players are wearing pads and helmets.

  But before all of that came this PTA meeting at my elementary school. I’ve never forgotten it because I’ve also never fo
rgotten my mother’s assessment of the situation, which is was almost as short and every bit as memorable as that ACC officiating evaluator. She had driven us to the meeting, helped Dad out of the car, handed him his crutches, and run interference for him when too many people came running up with a sympathetic but nosey, “Oh, Jerry! What happened?!”

  Now, as he hobbled up to the podium with his presidential notes, Mom leaned over to me and whispered, only half-joking. “Let’s say a little prayer that Dad doesn’t fall off the stage right now.”

  Dad

  People will ask me, ‘Well, how did Hannah feel about you officiating?” or “How did Hannah balance everything at home with two boys and her work and all of that when you were gone every weekend doing games?”

  The answer is that she did it so well it was never an issue. At least, it never felt like an issue. She knew that I loved it. It gave us opportunities that we wouldn’t have had without it. And honestly, it was just always there. I started working high school games almost as soon as we were married and I worked college games for the rest of her life.

  Hannah Covington of Rockingham, North Carolina, was never one to be described as a big-time sports fan, but that certainly didn’t mean she wasn’t around games her entire life. From the time she cheered on the sidelines of the Rockingham High Rockets all the way to watching from the stands of America’s most hallowed football grounds, featuring field judge Dr. Jerry McGee, she was never far from a football playing field.

  Mom grew up in the Cartledge Creek community well beyond the outskirts of Rockingham, a country crossroads that made Dad’s textile mill neighborhoods look like Manhattan. My parents met in the hallways of school, the three-sport athlete and cheerleader who was two years his junior. They dated on and off, all the while somehow knowing in the backs of their minds that were destined to be together, even as young Jerry left for college and shortly thereafter young Hannah went west to California to be with her older sister and also start college.