by Ryan McGee
Those first years in the Big East, it seemed like every weekend felt like that first trip to Clemson. Everything was new and everything felt special. That’s what I was hoping for when I made that really difficult decision to leave the ACC.
The 1991 season was also the year that we McGees devised a new way of consuming college football as a now-scattered family. We did it over the telephone. I was chasing the Tennessee Volunteers, Sam was chasing the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, and Mom was chasing Dad through the stadiums of the northeastern corridor. That led to a never-ending series of pre–cell phone era Saturday night and Sunday evening reports on the three games we’d all attended over the weekend, or breathless voice machine messages recorded as soon as we returned home from those games.
That very year had started with perhaps the most memorable of those calls. I was at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, a Tennessee student watching my team struggle with Virginia, a team Dad had seen in person five times that season. Sam had been with him for a couple of those games. On the Superdome jumbotron, they had just shown a highlight from the Orange Bowl, a Notre Dame–Colorado rematch, again with a potential national championship on the line. The crowd at my game had been stunned into booing when we were told that the thrilling 90-yard, final-minute, game-winning punt return touchdown by Rocket Ismail had been called back for a block in back. My college roommates immediately looked at me and said, “Would Dr. McGee have called that?”
At the next timeout I rushed to a bank of payphones and called home. With the cheering Sugar Bowl crowd booming through the concrete concourse it was basically impossible to hear anything on the other end. But once I could finally make out Dad’s voice yelling “NOPE!” I hung up and ran back to my seat.
I spent every autumn weekend following the Johnny Majors–led Volunteers around the SEC, the final couple of seasons as part of the team’s film crew. In ’91 alone I traveled to Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky; Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama; the Swamp in Gainesville, Florida; Commonwealth Stadium in Lexington, Kentucky; and also made my first trip to Notre Dame. I worked most of those games on the film crew, though several I attended by loading up my Pontiac Grand Am with roommates and buying a ticket off the street once we got there. Meanwhile, I spent every weekday afternoon at the practice field, so luckily assigned to be on the tower with Coach Majors, shooting videotape of practice while the legendary player and coach chatted me up about my schoolwork, told tales of his days as a near–Heisman Trophy winner, and opened every Monday practice by asking, “Where was your father officiating last weekend?”
At Wake Forest, Sam experienced one of the most magical seasons in the history of Demon Deacon football, coached by Bill Dooley, he of the “Jerry McGee cannot take constructive criticism” evaluation. The Deacs won eight games and the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl over Oregon. On Halloween, Wake beat Clemson for the first time in 16 years. So, naturally, Sam and his friends tore down the goal posts.
Sam
We ripped off an upright and drove out of the parking with it sticking out the window of a Datsun. I bought a hacksaw and we set up shop in the middle of campus, sawing off pieces and selling them to classmates as they rolled the quad with toilet paper. Of course, as the proprietor of this enterprise, I saved the cap of the upright for myself. It’s in my office.
The official start of college football season became the moment when Sam and I received the annual letter in our dorm room mailboxes containing the carefully handwritten composite “McGee Football Schedule” listing Tennessee; Wake Forest; Furman, Dad’s new employer; NCAA Division II Wingate University; and, of course, “The Grey Ghost” himself. That jet-black head of hair from Dad’s youth had long since given way to a head of silver that became his trademark.
Whenever we could figure out a way to be at the same game at the same time, we did, even if that meant doing a tiny bit of bending of the rules. When Dad got his ’92 Big East schedule, it included Army at Wake Forest. Per the rules, Dad wasn’t supposed to work a game of a school being attended by one of his children. But no one seemed to notice, so none of us pointed it out. It was an open date for Tennessee. So, there we were, me, Mom, and Sam, sitting in the stands and watching Dad together for the first time in in nearly two years.
Sam
Yeah, we kept that to ourselves. Other than bowl games, it was probably the only time we were able to watch a game together, three of us, like we had so many times before that. I think maybe I was worried that perhaps that chapter was over, that Ryan and I might move away after college, and who knew how often we’d be able to watch Dad’s games together after that?
In the meantime, I used to love it when Dad couldn’t work Wake Forest games, because I had a joke I would always pull. I would see who was working the game, and I always knew at least one or two guys on pretty much every crew. At least a couple of times it was Booker. So, I would leave my friends in the student section and go down the first row and call out to one of the officials during pregame. They would come over to the wall and we’d talk. Sometimes a couple of other guys on the crew would see us and they’d come over, too. Just catching up, small talk.
Well, my buddies in the student section, they would see this whole thing, me down there having a long talk with the officials. When I got back to the seats, I would say, real serious, “I talked to the refs. We’re all set.” If there was an early penalty against the other team, my friends would all look over at me and I’d just give them the thumbs up, like, “There you go. Our plan is coming together.” Then I would give them the shush sign with my finger, like, “Y’all better not tell anyone what’s happening here.”
There was always concern in the backs of our minds that perhaps Sam was right. After school, once we’d both entered the real working world, would we also be finished birddogging Dad?
But we were all back together again sooner and much more often than we could have expected, though it didn’t last long. Shortly after I graduated from Tennessee, I started at ESPN and moved to Bristol, Connecticut. One year later, Sam was admitted to Yale Law and moved down the road from me in New Haven. Both moves had impacts on our lives that we continue to benefit from to this day. But in the moment, all I could think was, We’re going to be able to go to some of Dad’s games together!
Sam
From our apartments in Connecticut, getting to Army or Boston College wasn’t hard. Even if Dad wasn’t working games there, we would have him ask the crew that was there to leave us tickets. Going to West Point in the middle of October, there’s no place prettier than that. Or Boston College, for that matter. It was familiar, being there watching Dad, but the crowds were way different.
Ryan and I went to a West Virginia–Boston College game, and I don’t think we considered ourselves to be naïve when it came to gambling, but that day we learned that we were. BC had trailed big the whole game. Toward the end they sent out the kicker, in, like, the last minute, and he kicked a meaningless field goal. Well, the crowd just went kind of crazy, booing and everything. We were like, “What the heck is going on with these people? So, you lost by 13 instead of 16, who cares?”
Then someone sitting by us explained that BC had just covered the spread. That wasn’t something that would have gotten that kind of reaction at Georgia Tech–Duke.
What a time it was to be attending, let alone officiating, Big East football games. Curtis Martin was running the ball at Pittsburgh. Donovan McNabb was throwing it deep to Marvin Harrison at Syracuse. Jim Druckenmiller and Antonio Freeman were setting records at Virginia Tech. The coaches in the conference were West Virginia’s Don Nehlen, Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer, Holtz at Notre Dame, and my coach, Johnny Majors, was back at Pitt after having been fired from Tennessee.
Then there was Miami. The 1991 national champs and ’94 runners-up, coached by Dennis Erickson and then Butch Davis, anchored by the likes of Heisman Trophy–winner Gino Torretta on offense,
while Warren Sapp and then Ray Lewis powered the defense.
Dad
During all my years on the field, Ray Lewis was one of the players I interacted with most. Late in his final year at Miami, we had them up at Boston College. Ray didn’t play much in that game. He was injured, and I think maybe he didn’t play at all in the first three quarters. They were up by three and BC was driving late, trying to get into position to tie it up or maybe even win it. I look over my shoulder, and there’s Ray, up off the bench and standing right behind me, watching the game.
I looked at him and said, “You gonna play?” He smiled back at me and said, “When it matters, I’ll be out there.” BC drove way down there and, sure enough, Ray ran past me with his helmet on. I think he made four straight tackles. Game over. See you later, boys, we’re headed back to Miami.
There were absolutely those guys who, while the game was going on they were just a number on a jersey like everyone else, but when the game was over and you had a chance to sit down and really think about what you had just seen, and the players you had just watched, you knew who the special talents were. You looked at a guy like Ray Lewis and thought, he’s not the biggest, strongest, or fastest guy out there, but he’s clearly the best football player on the field. I’m not really an NFL guy. But there were absolutely guys who I watched as a fan after they went on to the NFL because of my experience with them in college. Ray Lewis was definitely one of those guys.
However, the most vicious hit that Dad saw in the Big East did not come from Ray Lewis. Actually, he didn’t see it all. He felt it. The rest of us saw it. It was Pitt at Louisville, October 1, 1994.
These days, if you watch a University of Louisville game, you see a sparkling multimillion-dollar facility funded by Fortune 500 boosters and specifically built for big-time college football. In ’94, the Cardinals were still trying to make it to that level, so they were still playing their games in a minor-league baseball stadium, with the rectangular football field crammed inside of the misshapen baseball diamond. The turf was terrible and the sideline was always very crowded, jammed with everyone from actual football personnel to photographers, university staff, and general hangers-on.
Dad
Billy West, the Pitt running back, had a huge season that year. Rushed for 1,300 yards. That day he broke a long run down the sideline, and I had it played perfectly. I was running backward, but I was in front of him, knowing he was going to go out of bounds at some point and I was going to have the spot marked as soon as that happened. That’s always a tough place to be. You have to watch the players themselves, but you also have to be ready to spot where they go out of bounds, and when they are coming right at your feet like that, it happens all at once.
I think back on my career, almost all on the sideline, and how I wasn’t hit all of the time is amazing. You develop a kind of automatic radar for trouble. I would go back and watch games on tape and there would be at least a couple of instances where I had danced around out of trouble, and I wouldn’t even remember having done it.
But this time around, that’s not what happened. The good news is that I got the call right. I got the play right. I got the spot right. Everything was right. The bad news is that with my eyes down, I never saw what was coming.
What was coming was West, a finely tuned teenage college athlete, weighing 205 pounds and covered in shoulder pads and a helmet, traveling at high speed. Sure enough, he had stepped on the line. Dad had his arms above his head giving a timeout signal while running in to make the spot. But a defender gave West a last-second shove while he was still on the move. The fifty-something university president, draped in nothing more than a polyester jersey, knickers, and a flimsy black ballcap, never stood a chance. Dad was hit so hard by West that his feet left the ground and he sailed several yards backward before landing on his right side and slamming down onto that over-worn artificial grass. This was old-school Astroturf, maybe half an inch thick, tops, with a sheet of good old concrete beneath it. His unprotected shoulders hit first and then his head followed, snapping back and popping the back of his skull against that slab. Within a split second, he was surrounded by all of those people who had been crowding that sideline.
Dad
I’m pretty sure that more than a few of them thought I might be dead.
Jeff Triplette, the game’s white hat who was about to leave college football for two decades as an NFL official, has since told me that he, too, believed that Dad would be leaving in an ambulance at best. The television audience certainly thought that. At the very least, they assumed that his back had been broken.
That audience included me and my brother.
Sam
I was in my senior year at Wake in my apartment with my roommates and we were doing what we did every Saturday. We were watching football, and specifically we were watching Dad’s game. When that happened, my friends, who were not a quiet bunch, fell completely silent. It looked really bad.
I did not see the hit, but I did hear the reaction to it. I was barely two months into my first job at ESPN, production assistant, and my primary job those days was to watch games, log them, and then write and produce the highlights of those games for SportsCenter. You did that job in a room we called Screening, essentially an underground bunker. On a college football Saturday, it was an amazing room of noise and energy and excitement. There were literally dozens of games on TVs throughout this room with six just-out-of-college kids chattering and shouting and reacting to what was happening in those games.
My gig on this Saturday morning was not the Louisville game. I had been assigned another contest, sitting at a different screening station. When the hit happened, a huge groan went out from the corner of the room where Dad’s game was being watched. Whatever, that happened all the time. But then the room fell silent. That never happened. Then someone from that corner said, very meekly, “Hey, McGee, you need to come over here. I think your dad just got his damn head knocked off.”
Dad
Once the initial shock of the hit wore off, I was still laying there, kind of doing a checklist of my body. Nothing felt broken, but you can see on television that I immediately reached up and put my hands in my mouth.
When I saw that, on TV screen 900 miles away, I had the same thought as one of my coworkers, who said to me, “Oh damn, I don’t think your dad knows where he is right now.” But Dad still remembers all of it. He says he was fully aware of his surroundings, but when his head snapped back, his jaw had snapped shut with such force that he was convinced he had knocked out at least a few of his teeth. That’s why he reached into his mouth.
Dad
Here’s the most amazing part of the story. The first person to get down on the ground to see if I was okay was dressed in Louisville gear, and I assumed he was a team doctor or a member of the Cardinals athletic training staff. Turned out that he was a dentist. He just happened to be among that crowd on the sideline. Can you believe that? The one guy who could answer the one question that I had. Were my teeth still there, and if they were, were they about to fall out? He did a quick check, assured me that I was okay, and helped me to my feet.
Sam
He sat up and on TV you could clearly read his lips. He said, “Where’s my hat?”
When he stood up and walked back onto the field, all my friends started cheering.
That’s also what happened in Bristol, Connecticut. The most ironclad rule of being a member of the sports media has always been and will forever be that there is no cheering in the press box. But that day in ESPN screening, they were cheering Dr. Jerry McGee as he checked back into the game. One always-dramatic coworker compared it to Willis Reed, who returned to the court in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals despite a torn thigh muscle to inspire the New York Knicks to victory over the Wilt Chamberlain and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Okay, it wasn’t that. But it was still pretty badass.
I’ve
been telling this story for 25 years to my friends and during speaking engagements. So, I’ve always believed that I knew the whole tale. But now, Dad has informed me that perhaps he wasn’t as bulletproof as we’d always believed.
Dad
That night, instead of going to dinner with the crew, I decided to stay in my hotel room and order a pizza. I even talked the delivery guy into stopping somewhere on the way and buying some beer. This was several hours after the game. When the delivery guy arrived and I answered the door, he took one look at me and said, “Damn, man, are you the ref who got hit so hard in the game today?”
I told him, yeah, that was me, but I also asked him, how did he recognize me? No one ever recognized the officials out of uniform. He said, “But you’re still in your uniform.”
That’s how out of it I was. I’d never changed. I had been sitting there all night on my hotel bed in my stripes and my knickers.
A couple of weeks later, Dad worked a game at Pitt, and as soon as he hit the field for pregame warmups Billy West threw his arms around the ref and apologized for almost committing an accidental murder. Pitt head coach Johnny Majors hugged Dad, too, and confessed that he had really been worried about him. Dad said thanks, but wondered why Majors’ level of concern seemed so intense. Then the coach told Dad that throughout the remainder of the Louisville game, whenever they talked, Dad’s answers never matched the questions Majors had asked him.
“Jerry, which of my players did you guys just call that holding penalty on?”
