by Ryan McGee
The benefit of that spending spree was that the officials’ Saturday places of work were being transformed into football palaces. But more money spent on facilities and coaches meant that universities and their alums would demand more wins more quickly in order to justify their generosity. The pressure of expectation started tightening the collars of those coaches’ new designer suits. So they started pushing on the officials more. And the officials started pushing back.
Dad
There were still good guys and bad guys. That never changed. But it certainly started becoming more adversarial.
Sam
I think for Dad, too, there just weren’t as many of the old guard around. They were starting to hang it up. Dad and Booker had also been separated after 10 seasons together. Part of the problem there was missing your best friend, but it was also getting used to someone else on your side of the field. There’s a trust there that has to be built, and it doesn’t happen immediately.
That being said, the veteran guys who were around and on Dad’s crew, they kind of all took on this “we aren’t taking any bull from anyone” attitude. And I mean, they really stopped taking it.
One day at Clemson, Tommy Bowden was really jawing at Dad about something, and Dad looked at him and said, “You know, Tommy, you look cute when you’re mad.” Bowden just stopped and looked at Dad like, What did he just say? So, it worked!
One Saturday afternoon an ACC crew in South Bend, Indiana, for a Navy–Notre Dame contest received a surprise visit from Fighting Irish head coach Bob Davie. The coach, already on the hot seat, walked into the locker room and said, “ACC officials, huh? Well, you better be ready. This is isn’t f--king Duke versus Wake Forest!”
Referee Jim Knight looked up from lacing his shoes and said, “Yeah, well it isn’t Miami–Florida State either, Coach. That’s where we were last week.”
Sam
My favorite Jimmy Knight story was at Navy. There had been some lightning, and when that happens there is a mandatory delay. The officials were in the locker room waiting out the delay when a Naval Academy staffer came in and said “The Commandant says it is time to start the game.” Jimmy smiled and said, “You tell the Commandant that I have a bronze star and a Purple Heart from Vietnam. I’m not getting any medals today.”
A little while later, the kid came back and said, “The Commandant says we will start when you are ready to start.”
The ACC Old Timers crew never lacked for character. Some were already retired by the 2000s, but others were still out there grinding. “Those are the guys I like to see walk out onto the football field for one of my games,” Wake Forest head coach Jim Grobe told me in a 2009 interview for ESPN The Magazine. “I am all about training up young guys, but I feel a lot better when I see guys out there that have grey hair and crow’s feet. I want some experience calling my games.”
Knight, an ACC official since 1974, had frightened the sports world in 1997 after suffering an in-game heart attack at a Virginia–UNC game live on ABC, but came back to work several more years. Clark Gaston, who’d worked with Dad since the 1970s, kept going until 2006, despite knees creakier than a pirate ship run aground. When another Clemson lineman-turned-ACC official, Mark Kane, had suffered a heart attack but came back later in the same season, it was Gaston who greeted him by emptying the giant bag of footballs. You know, in case they needed something to carry Kane home in.
Dad
We had a guy named Bob Cooper, a referee, and he was tough as granite, but I still smile every single time I hear his name. Bob never got stressed out over much. He was almost too loose. He’s the one who left me hanging on that punt spot in my very first ACC game.
One day, there was a marching band sitting right behind the end zone, and they kept playing every time the opposing team tried to call a play. Doing it on purpose to disrupt them. We warned them and the public address guy even told them to stop. They didn’t stop. So, Bob ran all the way down the middle of the field, 60 or 70 yards, to that end zone. He went into a pose and started conducting the band, flailing his arms. Then he jerked them apart, boom, like an orchestra conductor would at the end of a big number.
They stopped and the band members roared in laughter. He ran back up the field and they never played again when they weren’t supposed to. He never said a word.
All you need to know about Bob Cooper is that during the very brief phase of ACC officials wearing shorts, he lobbied, albeit unsuccessfully, to have his crew wear their short pants for a chilly midseason game at Army, for no reason other than he wanted to see how the uniform-obsessed West Point crowd would react.
During a televised North Carolina–Wake Forest game, Cooper turned on his microphone, faced the cameras, and announced, “We have a false start on the offense…” and pointed the wrong way, toward the defense. Dad shouted, “Bob! Other way! Other way!” So, Cooper took his hand, wiped the air in circles as if the world was his school room chalkboard, erasing what he’d just said and done, and started his announcement over.
Sam
I was with Dad and Booker at Clemson. Cooper had been assigned to the game, but he’d never booked a motel room. So, he just shows up and says, “I’m going to say with you guys.” There was no room, but we got a rollaway bed and stuck it in the corner. Later that night we were all ready for bed and we couldn’t find Cooper. He was still in the hotel bar.
Booker says, ‘Y’all help me get this bed out of here…” and we proceeded to roll it outside on the sidewalk, right outside our door. We put his bags on it and everything.
We waited for him to see it and bang on the door all mad, but it never happened. So, we went to sleep. The next morning, we looked outside, and there was Cooper, in the bed, asleep, on the sidewalk.
With the old guard on the way out, Dad started wondering if perhaps he should start thinking about following them. Now he had grandbabies. In November 2004, Erica and I had our daughter, Tara, two days after Dad had worked Virginia at Georgia Tech. Sam and Marci had their first, Hannah Cole, less than two months later, with little brother, Brooks, soon to follow.
Dad was also about to meet the woman who would become our stepmother, Marcella McInnis, who came from a long line of UNC Tar Heels, but thankfully held no grudges about the onside kick in the ’83 Maryland game. After a decade as president at Wingate University, he had everything in overdrive. The school had grown from 1,000 students to 3,200, and there were construction cranes all over campus, building 37 new buildings. He’d added a dozen graduate programs. The school had become one of the national leaders in producing Academic All-Americans. He had 540 employees and a $100 million annual budget.
In other words, there were a lot of reasons to hang up his striped jersey.
Dad
Once the three Big East schools moved to the ACC and the conference went to 12 members, we all knew that the inaugural ACC Championship Game was coming in 2005. I told the boys that if I got that game, that would be it.
Sam
It felt like it was the perfect plan. I couldn’t think of a better way to go out. He had always joked that if he got the Rose Bowl again, maybe he would break on a ball, pick it off, run it back for a touchdown, and take off up the tunnel, never to be seen again. We would joke about what he would say when David Letterman had him on his show the next night.
But he had already done the Rose Bowl and so many huge games. This game was going to be brand-new. No one had done this one, and only one group would ever be the guys who did the first one.
He did get it. The 22nd-ranked Florida State Seminoles versus No. 5 Virginia Tech. A rematch of the classic 2000 national title game that was won by FSU but made Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick a college football legend. A win for the Hokies, led by Vick’s little brother, Marcus, would send them to the BCS National Championship Game.
It was indeed the perfect plan. So, Sam and I booked our travel for Ja
cksonville, cashing in vacation days and leaving our wives at home alone with two little babies. But we weren’t missing this. The atmosphere was every bit as electric as the big bowl games we had attended together in our younger days.
Sam
Ryan and I were both so busy and both had little girls at home, and I don’t think I realized how long it had been since we’d been together like that for one of Dad’s games. I think we both had been at games separately, but not together. The seats were great. We laughed a lot. It was a lot of fun. And it ended up being a good football game.
That part was a surprise. Virginia Tech, favored by two touchdowns, was nervous and sloppy, and FSU jumped out to a big lead. But then Vick led the Hokies back to within five points and his team had the ball in the closing minutes.
You’ve read plenty about the perks of being in an official’s family, but now you will learn about perhaps the biggest problem. If you arrived to the game with the officials, then you also have to be ready to leave the game with the officials. If they have chosen to get dressed at the hotel instead of the stadium at a big postseason game, then that also means they will be sprinting off the field and into a waiting van to be whisked away via police escort and taken back to the hotel in a matter of minutes.
That’s all fine and good if the game is a blowout or, as is the case for many family members, you don’t care about the game at all. But, as you have also read plenty about by now, not caring about the game was never the case for Ryan and Sam McGee.
Sam
At that 1990 Orange Bowl, Notre Dame is driving to put away the game and determine the national championship, and some guy walks up and says, “Sorry, time to go!” Ryan and I were so mad. We made the guy take us the long way around to the exit, still in the stadium, so we could keep watching the last big drive. Then we stood in the tunnel until the last possible second to see Notre Dame score, and then we ran to the van.
Mom finally said, “Boys, I know this a big deal. But it is not a big enough deal for us to have to walk back to the hotel.”
Sam
Now, 15 years later, we were doing the exact same thing. We made the guy in charge of watching the families so mad. Virginia Tech scored and were down five with a little less than two minutes remaining. They were going to attempt an onside kick and Ryan and I were trying to watch from the tunnel and the old guy is yelling, “You have to get into the van!”
We didn’t care. It’s Dad’s last game. What do we have to lose, right? So, we yell back, “No!”
The onside kick failed. Tech recovered, but it hadn’t traveled quite 10 yards. What a ridiculously apropos symmetrical end to Dad’s career, going back to his first huge call, the onside kick at Maryland that also determined an ACC championship.
Sam and I ran to the van, much to our handlers’ relief. We listened to Florida State run out the clock on the van radio while the crowd that we could no longer see cheered all around us. Seconds after the game clock hit all zeroes, Dad came running off the field and jumped into the back seat of the van beside us. The police lights started flashing. The vans carrying the officials and their families peeled out of the Gator Bowl, snaked through the crowd that was now pouring out of the stadium gates, and we hammered down I-95 toward our hotel.
Sam and I leaned over, reached out to shake Dad’s hand, and said, “Congratulations on an amazing career.”
Dad’s eyes stayed pointed straight ahead.
“I think I’ll do one more year.”
Coach’s Timeout with Bobby Bowden
“Your daddy worked so many of our dadgum games back then. But if I’m being totally honest with you, the first time I saw him I had him as the wrong Jerry McGee.”
It is on or near National Signing Day in Tallahassee, Florida. I am in Tallahassee to cover the harvesting of another crazy-talented FSU recruiting class. Bobby Bowden is still being referred to as “the recently retired Florida State head coach,” and I have stopped by an off-campus function where Seminoles fans have been promised face time with some Florida State football legends.
Bowden, winner of 377 games (389 if you still count those vacated by the NCAA), two national championships, a dozen ACC titles, and the father of fellow head coaches Tommy and Terry, is shaking hands and signing autographs. At his side is Mickey Andrews, his defensive coordinator of 24 years. They both retired from football in 2009, one year after Dad.
Dad officiated more than a dozen FSU games coached by Bowden and Andrews, including rivalry matchups at Florida and Miami, the so-called Bowden Bowl between Bobby Bowden’s Seminoles and Tommy Bowden’s Clemson Tigers, and an oppressively hot Labor Day weekend Kickoff Classic at the New Jersey Meadowlands against the Kansas Jayhawks.
Andrews was always one of Dad’s sideline favorites. I find out on this night that the feeling is mutual.
“What I wanted to see was a lot of gray hair on my referees,” Andrews explains. “If they didn’t have any, I thought it was my job to give them some.”
This had long been verified to me by Dad, who has always told the story of Andrews riding a young rookie ACC official during an early season FSU cupcake game. During a timeout, Andrews approached the official with a very detailed rules question. When the youngster tripped over his explanation, Andrews cut him off. “Why did I even bother asking you? If you were worth a s--t and actually knew the rules you’d be working a real game today instead of this bulls--t.”
“Yeah,” Andrews says when I tell him that story, laughing. “That was a good one. I did that a few times.”
But now we both turn to Coach Bowden to finish his story. The wrong Jerry McGee?
“Yeah, so we get the names of the officials working our game and I see ‘Jerry McGee from the ACC.’ I think, okay, I know who he is! But I really didn’t.”
Wait. I know where this is going. There is indeed another Jerry McGee. He and his twin brother, Mike, played football at Duke and both went on to great coaching and sport administration careers. Mike, who served as athletic director at both USCs—Southern California and South Carolina—was also head football coach at Duke, with Jerry as his defensive coordinator. The duo also did a stint at Dad’s alma mater, East Carolina. Jerry went on to have a decorated career as a North Carolina high school sports administrator. This was all taking place during the 1970s and ’80s, when my Jerry McGee was moving up the officiating and college administration ladders, and also in North Carolina.
Confused? Yeah, well, join the club. Remember Ed Emory, the high school coach who had Dad and his crew thrown out of a Wadesboro, North Carolina, steakhouse? He also went on to be head coach at East Carolina, and one day gave a tour of the football offices to our entire family, during which he introduced my father to everyone as Mike McGee. He did it so many times that even now, years later, I still call Dad “Mike.” Adding to the confusion, in 2012 and 2015 the two Jerry McGees were inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, my father first and the other Jerry McGee three years later. Mike McGee—the actual Mike McGee, not the Jerry McGee that Ed Emory thought was Mike McGee—had already entered that same Hall of Fame years earlier.
But it turns out the president of the Jerry McGee Confusion Club might very well have been Bobby Bowden.
“The referees come out there before the game and I am walking over to say hello and I said to the person I was with, ‘Wait, which one of these guys is Jerry McGee?’ And he points to the field judge and says, ‘There he is, Coach.’ Now, Ryan, your daddy isn’t a big guy, is he?”
No, Coach, he’s not.
“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, poor Jerry McGee! That guy was a two-way lineman at Duke! His twin brother won the Outland Trophy, for heaven sakes! This was a big man. He has shrunk! He’s wasted down to nothing!’ Finally, somebody said, ‘Coach, the Jerry McGee you’re talking about, I think he’s coaching high school ball. This guy isn’t that guy.’ I felt like such a dummy.”
I tell Bobby Bowden not to feel too bad about it. I tell him it happens all the time and I even tell him the Ed Emory “Meet Mike McGee” story.
“Oh, I don’t feel bad about it. Neither should your dad. Heck, I had dinner with my sons last week and I spent the whole night calling Terry, Tommy and calling Tommy, Terry. I’m just glad I didn’t call up that other Jerry McGee to bless him out about a flag that your daddy threw on us.”
11. The Long Goodbye
Considering that we started this book with Dad’s final game and that game was played on January 8, 2009, then you’ve likely figured out that not only was the 2005 ACC Championship not the end of his officiating career, but neither was the 2007 Rose Bowl between USC and Michigan…or the 2008 Cotton Bowl between Missouri and Arkansas.
What we’re saying is that “I think I’ll do one more year” became “I’m actually going to do three more years.”
A big reason for that was Dad had a new sideline partner named Rick Page. Page’s presence had reestablished that crucial sixth sense–like trust that Dad had felt in the Booker and McGee days. Page was funny, he loved the game, and his mechanics were impeccable. So, the fun was back, though it was admittedly a different kind of fun now.
The domino effect of money increasing stakes increasing scrutiny increasing pressure was becoming overwhelming for many coaches, and that scrutiny was spilling over into officiating as well. In fact, that ’05 ACC Championship had resulted in a meeting at the conference offices between the crew who had worked the game and the Virginia Tech coaches. Frank Beamer and the Hokies coaching staff had always been a cool-headed bunch, but they were convinced that they had lost a huge game in which they had been heavily favored because of the 17 penalty flags that had been thrown their way (Florida State was penalized a dozen times).
Dad
They had two huge turnovers in that game. They had two instances of 12 men on the field on punts, which gave the ball back to Florida State. They really struggled converting on third down (9 of 20). I think we found two plays we might have called differently.
