by Ryan McGee
I recounted the story of the hotheaded little boy who blew up the pickup football games on the Carter–Finley Stadium hill—his little boy. The little boy who had become the man who had become the head coach of the Raiders, Tennessee, USC, FAU, and, a couple of years from this moment, Ole Miss. The very stadium tower in which I now talked to Lane Kiffin’s father was decorated with a giant banner of Lane Kiffin’s face, designed to catch the eye of people traveling on the nearby Interstate.
Monte Kiffin did a spit take with his coffee when I recalled how he had stopped practice to tell the kid to chill out. “Hell, he hasn’t changed much, has he?”
A few hours later, the father calls me over to tell the story again, this time to his son. Lane Kiffin, without so much as a hint of a smile, looks me in the eye for the first time since we played those games in that stadium grass while our fathers worked on their games on the playing field below.
“Your dad is a referee. Then you know the truth here. If you guys hadn’t kept committing all those penalties, we could have actually had some fun.”
4. Yea, Though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Dad’s first game in Division I-A—what we now call the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS)—was the Division I-A/FBS equivalent of his first small college game, Emory & Henry at Guilford.
The visiting James Madison Dukes would one day become a I-AA (Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS) powerhouse. But September 18, 1982 was not that day, even with future Washington Redskins hero Gary Clark catching passes. The home team Virginia Cavaliers would one day become a perennial ACC title contender and bowl season regular. But this was also not that day, even with future College Football Hall of Fame coach George Welsh at the helm. It was only Welsh’s second game in Charlottesville, hired from the U.S. Naval Academy to try and awaken the long-dormant UVA program. But he’d already lost in Week 1 to his former employer and on his way to an inaugural campaign that would end with a 2–9 record.
Never one for extended jovial moods, the former Navy quarterback and Joe Paterno apprentice was of particularly bad temperament on this afternoon. His demeanor did not improve as James Madison pushed toward a 21–17 upset win.
Dad
I was a back judge, and again, I was nervous. I wasn’t nervous because of the game or even because Mr. Neve was going to be there to evaluate me in person. I was nervous because I was subbing for my hero, a man named Bob Sandell, who was the model of consistency for downfield officials. He was already a legend and is still my all-time favorite football official. But he was from Charlottesville, so he couldn’t work Virginia games.
I was plugged into a team of real veteran guys. The referee was Bob Cooper, who had a long career as a college football and lacrosse official. The umpire was Bradley Faircloth, who would go on to succeed Mr. Neve as the conference coordinator. Charlie Neely was head linesman; Bill Luper was the field judge. Bo Menton, who was a dentist during the week, was the line judge and, like Sandell, he was already a living legend among college officials. It was a ridiculously great crew and they really worked hard to make sure that I felt comfortable.
But these guys had worked hundreds of ACC games. I had worked zero. So, when George Welsh looked out there, he knew who all of these other guys were, but I know he was wondering, Now, who the hell is this guy?
Dad was working hard to play it cool, but in reality, he was just trying to get comfortable in his own shoes. Like, literally. He’d never been on artificial turf before.
Dad
The first punt of my first ACC game, the punter shanked it out of bounds. What happens on that play is that the referee is with the kicker, so he follows the ball through the air and he lines it up where it goes out of bounds. My job is to raise my hand and run along the sideline where it went out. If it rolls out of bounds, I can see it and I mark it. But in the air, that’s on the referee. So, I run along and when I get the signal from the white hat, I mark where the ball went out of bounds and we set up for the line of scrimmage for the next series.
Now I’m running up the sideline, just textbook. But I look for Cooper and he’s gone. He’s running down the field. He hadn’t thought for one second about me. Totally out of a character for a great official. It happens. As I was looking at him, like, what the hell, man, he realized what he had done. So, as he was running, he kind of gave me a half-assed little point with his hand, like, “Yeah, right there somewhere…” So, all I can do is make my best guess, mark the spot, and signal timeout. George Welsh went crazy. I wasn’t within five yards of the correct spot. But I didn’t know that. I am literally guessing. And now, for the rest of the game, I’m thinking, “Well, the ACC was fun…”
When the game was over, Mr. Neve was going over our evaluation with us in the locker room. He says, “McGee, what happened on that punt?” Well, I’m not going to throw Bob Cooper under the bus. I’m a rookie. I’m going to take one for the team.
“Mr. Neve, I didn’t get a great start on the kick, so running down the field I had to make my best guess on that spot.”
Mr. Neve, who was always a very serious guy, said, “Yeah, I could tell you were guessing.” Well, that felt pretty awful. I hadn’t really messed anything up, but now, officially at least, I had. Or, so I though. Then he turned and looked at Cooper. “Bob, the reason he was f--king guessing is because that was your call!”
Bob looked at me and said, “Yeah, I know…” He wasn’t ever going to let me take the fall, certainly not in my first game. But he appreciated that I was willing to take the fall for him.
That night, Norval Neve gave Dad a piece of advice that he would repeat so many times over the next two seasons and has reverberated in Dad’s mind ever since.
Dad
Mr. Neve said over and over again, “Let your mind digest what your eyes have just seen.”
He warned us to not to call anything too soon. That was just inviting trouble. You see a play and you immediately want to run in and call it. Or something gets sideways, like that kick at Virginia, and you have this need to fix it immediately. But there’s nothing wrong with taking a breath, processing what you’ve seen, and then making the call.
People will yell, “Man, that was a late flag!” or “What took him so long to signal touchdown?” But Mr. Neve would tell us, “There’s no such thing as a late flag. That’s an official taking a breath and making sure of what he is about to do.”
Virginia’s Scott Stadium is a beautiful facility, one of the nation’s most underrated college football stadiums, lined with columns that blend it in with Thomas Jefferson’s practically perfect college campus. And when the team is good—and Dad would go on to work some incredible games there, perhaps the greatest in ACC history—the UVA crowd has always had the ability to be raucous when the moment inspires them to do so.
But it isn’t Death Valley. That was the location of Dad’s second-ever ACC game and his first full-fledged conference game. It was October 16, 1982, and Clemson was hosting Duke. The Tigers were the defending national champions and ranked 20th after a season-opening 13–7 loss to Herschel Walker and Georgia. But now Clemson was rolling, and they were angry. They were on probation for recruiting violations, kept off of television and out any postseason bowl for two years. The weekend before this game, they’d defeated Virginia 48–0. That same day, Dad, still working a full South Atlantic Conference schedule, had officiated a game at Catawba College. There were about 500 people at the game.
For this afternoon contest against the Blue Devils, there were 62,822 Clemson fans in attendance, in a soaring double-decker concrete facility, packed to the sky with orange. At one end of the stadium, just-unveiled lettering read 1989 national champions. At the other end, also known as The Hill, as the Tigers entered the stadium to rush down that hill, they paused to slap their gloved hands against a desert rock mounted atop a podium for good luck. In 1945, after watching his team get bulldozed by Cle
mson 76–0, Presbyterian College Blue Hose head coach Lonnie McMillan compared the misery of the experience to a visit he’d made to Death Valley, California, a decade earlier. In the 1960s, a Clemson alum driving across that same desert picked up a small boulder and delivered it to legendary Clemson head coach Frank Howard. When Howard tried to have it thrown away, a staffer instead had it placed atop an altar that overlooked the new Death Valley.
So, as has happened every autumn Saturday afternoon since, the Tigers stampeded down The Hill, past the concrete slab inscribed “From Death Valley, CA to Death Valley, SC” and onto the playing field below, as the Tiger Band played the Tiger Rag…and hundreds of orange and white balloons were unleashed into the skies of Upstate South Carolina…and gracious sakes alive and glory be, this here, this was a different college football world.
Dad
We drove in, and every road was covered in orange tiger paws. Every one of them. We got to the locker room and it was huge, like a walk-in closet. Our names were engraved on these orange nameplates over our locker. There was a giant fruit basket, a box full of shaving supplies, a huge meal waiting on us. I’ve never seen so much fried chicken. And then the pregame. I had never seen anything like it.
Sam
If I have an earliest memory of Dad working an actual ACC game, it was this one. I don’t think I even really knew who Clemson had played. I just knew that he had been to Clemson for the first time, because when he got home, he talked about the size of it. I remember him telling us about all the orange vehicles. Orange vans and orange Cadillacs with tiger tails hanging out of the trunks. He gave us the stuff they’d given him. He was so excited. What he kept saying was, “Guys, we think we’ve seen big-time college football. But now I’ve really seen it. This is a whole new ballgame.”
Dad
To be clear here, all of that was cool. But as soon as the game started all of that atmosphere and tradition, that was gone from my mind. It was time to go to work. And we had to go to work just about as soon as the game started. Right off the bat we had a really bizarre call on the field. I’m on the sideline right in the front the bench, so as always, I’m the guy who has to explain to the head coach, and the head coach was Danny Ford.
Okay, if you don’t already know about Danny Ford, you really need to, because this is not the last time he will be mentioned in this book. Honestly, we could write an entire compilation of only Danny Ford stories. The reason for that is the man himself. A native of Gadsden, Alabama, Ford played for Bear Bryant at Alabama in the late 1960s and then joined the Crimson Tide staff as an assistant coach. In 1977 he joined the staff at Clemson as offensive line coach under another Bryant disciple, Charley Pell. When Pell left for Florida in ’78, Ford was named head coach. His first game as head coach was the 1978 Gator Bowl. It’s one of the most infamous games in college football history, when enraged Ohio State head coach Woody Hayes suddenly punched a Clemson player on the sideline and was fired the following day. Only three seasons later, the Tigers won their first national championship. So, to be clear to you youngsters out there, Dabo Swinney didn’t turn Clemson into a college football powerhouse. He returned it to the promise it had once shown under Danny Ford.
Ford was the Mr. Gaddy of college football coaches. He was never without a wad of tobacco jammed into his cheeks. He liked to crouch along the sideline and pick blades of grass out of the turf. He wore mesh-back trucker hats and when he wanted people to know that he wasn’t happy, he would poke the bill of that cap with one finger and push it until it was mounted high atop the back half of his head. When Danny Ford talks, it sounds like a tuning fork being played with a chunk of gravel.
Danny Ford was—still is—a folksy quote machine. He once assessed a Clemson player’s performance by saying, “He looks like Tarzan, but plays like Jane.” He once said to a group of reporters, “I don’t know why y’all come to my practices. I don’t come to your office and watch you type.” And when someone tried to overcomplicate a football observation, he replied, “It don’t take a scientific rocket to figure this out.”
Dad
My first ever interaction with Danny was in this Duke game and on a really goofy play. The Duke quarterback ran about 25 yards, and as he was getting hit, he threw the ball to a teammate, and threw it forward. The guy didn’t catch it, it hit the ground, and a Clemson player fell on it. The place went crazy. They thought they’d recovered a fumble.
But because the quarterback was way downfield, what we had was an illegal forward pass—an incomplete illegal forward pass. Clemson’s only option was to take a five-yard penalty.
I’m the sideline guy, so Ford says to me, “I don’t want to take this damn penalty. I want the damn football.” I started trying to explain why he couldn’t do that and exactly what happened, and I was doing a really terrible job of it. Danny started yelling, “That wasn’t no damn forward pass!” The white hat was a veteran guy, Jimmy Knight, and he saw me struggling. He ran over and calmed Danny down and explained it way better than I had. Danny said, “You mean we are going to get the ball.” Jimmy explained, no, Duke was keeping the ball.
We’re done and I was walking back to my position and Danny said to me, “Hey! You ain’t never been down here, have you?” I said, “No sir, I have not.”
Danny Ford said to me, “Well, this ain’t f--king Catawba.”
He was certainly right about that.
Like all things pertaining to Ford, it was also sneaky smart. The coach could have made his point by throwing out the name of any small college anywhere, but he had done his research. He knew that Dad had indeed worked at Catawba the week before, so that was specifically the school that he mentioned.
Danny Ford always did his research. During the eight years Dad and Ford were in the ACC together, Ford always made sure his entire coaching staff attended the conference’s annual offseason officiating clinic. These were the meetings where officials went over rules changes, watched film, and took the written and physical exams that went toward their grades as officials, their ranking among others at their position, and largely determined what their regular season schedule would be a well as their chances of earning a bowl trip at the end of that season.
There were always coaches from various ACC schools at the clinic, but Ford and his group were the only ones guaranteed to show up every single year. In the conference rooms where rules discussions were taking place, a Clemson coach was there to ask questions. In the hallway, at lunch, you name a spot in the meeting space or at the hotel and Ford and his guys were there, asking questions about what they could and couldn’t get away with. And yes, that included the bar.
Dad
One year we had the summer clinic in Charlottesville and the word got out on a particular night that the beer was in my room, where I was staying with my longtime crewmate, Bill Booker.
We also need to take a moment here and introduce you to the great William Booker of Lynchburg, Virginia. First of all, no one calls him William. Second of all, no one calls him Bill, either. He’s just Booker.
Booker is big man with an even bigger laugh, and I’m not sure that anyone loves sports more than he does. A former multi-sport star at Ferrum and Lynchburg Colleges, he was the son of a minor league baseball player who became one himself, an infielder in the Houston Colt .45s organization (now the Astros). Booker then became a legendary Virginia high school coach in baseball, football, and basketball. He also officiated seemingly 365 days a year, from Virginia prep sports to college football and basketball. Like my Dad, Booker loved his father, his coaches, and he took great joy in including his family in his officiating experience, especially his three sons. The McGee and Booker boys got to know each other sitting in the officials’ family ticket rows or in vans being hauled around during bowl game trips.
Booker and McGee, the line judge and the field judge, began sharing the same sideline in 1986 and continued to do so for the next half-decade in t
he ACC, a season in the Big East, and then a second ACC stanza after that. They always roomed together. Everyone knew that no one worked harder than Booker and McGee. But everyone also knew no one had more fun than Booker and McGee.
Dad
Sure enough, everyone at this rules clinic ended up in our hotel room. Danny Ford and his staff were in there, along with a few other coaches and about 10 other ACC officials. Danny started talking about a play from the season before. He didn’t like the penalty that was called on that play.
It was getting late and he had enjoyed some adult beverages. He got real demonstrative as he stood up and was walking through the play. “What you called was this...but what really happened on the play was…” and then he tripped over his own feet and, wham!, crashed right through the little table in the middle of the room. He broke all four legs off it. He hit so hard they shot off in four different directions. Well, he popped right up and we all laughed and decided to call it a night. We had our big rules exam the next morning, and we needed to sleep.
Booker and I got into our beds and in the dark, I said to him, “Damn, man, we’re going to have to pay for that table.” He said he’d talk to the manager and we went on to sleep.
About two or three o’clock in the morning, there was a knock at the door. Woke us both up. We opened the door, expecting that the manager had heard about what happened and we were about to get chewed out. Instead, this really young Clemson assistant coach walks in with another table under his arm. He set it down, picked up the pieces of the old table, said “See you later, boys,” and left.
From sideline chats at scrimmages to chance meetings at airports to, yes, inebriated play demonstrations at rules clinics, the discussion between coaches and officials about what is and isn’t allowed within the rules never ends. It’s only the screaming part on Saturday afternoons that is televised.
