Sidelines and Bloodlines by Ryan McGee

Author:Ryan McGee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2020-07-20T02:01:42+00:00

6. The Wall of Screaming

Vince Dooley wasn’t typically a sideline screamer. The reality is that during Dad’s four decades of sideline experience, very few of the coaches were the kind of guys who spent entire games ranting and hollering about everything that happened.

Dad

It was usually the complete opposite of that, especially when you were working with coaches and staff members you had seen over and over again for years. A lot of times, they would give me a heads-up on what was coming, maybe even just a whisper before a play, “Hey McGee, we are about to throw this pass directly at the spot where you are standing, you might want to take a couple of steps back.”

One day at Georgia Tech, a team that ran the ball on every single play, one of the offensive coaches casually walked over and said, “Be on your horse for the first three plays. We are going to throw the living hell out of it.” They did it, too, like three straight bombs downfield, and I was ready for it. I was in perfect position on every play. In the postgame, the evaluator was Dan Post, a guy I’d officiated with for years. He says, “God almighty, you were on top of all those early pass plays. You beat the receiver downfield on every one of them! Did you know that was coming?”

I said, “I don’t know, man. I guess I’m just that fast.”

But all of that being said. Even the good guys have bad days.

As Dad tells that story, we are in his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. These days he lives only a few miles away from me, and Sam lives at almost the precise halfway point between us. It’s the first time since those days in the 1980s that we have all lived in the same place.

He is talking about interacting with coaches on the sideline and how he always worked hard to adhere to another of Mr. Norval Neve’s oft-repeated commandments of officiating advice.

Dad

He would say, “You will get in more trouble for what you say on the sideline than what you call in the game.”

I would be lying if I said I always stuck to that rule. But I certainly always tried to.

There are two rooms here in Dad’s house that are decorated almost exclusively in sports memorabilia. One is his personal collection of baseball stuff. I call it McCooperstown. The other is the TV room, where he now spends many of his college football Saturdays, watching games between four walls that are covered in mementos from his own days on the field. In the houses of my youth, his walls were covered with the pennants of the nearly 150 different teams he shared the field with. His current collection is more modest, though that’s a relative term.

There are so many commemorative coins, flipped before so many games gone by. There is a stack of program covers from those games. Dad used to have those covers photographed and

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