Sidelines and Bloodlines: A Father, His Sons, and Our Life in College Football

by Ryan McGee, Jerry E. McGee, Sam McGee, Rece Davis (Foreword by)

Overview

Football is a game of lines – on and off the gridiron. America’s great game brings together individuals of all ages, from all walks of life. And these literal and figurative lines are the connective tissue that weaves the bonds between coaches and players, fans and star players, and fathers and sons. For ESPN’s Ryan McGee, football is a lifelong passion formed from growing up as the son of Dr. Jerry McGee, a man who wore stripes for decades as one of the most highly-decorated officials in college football history. For the McGees – Jerry and sons Ryan and Sam – the lines of the game have provided a lifelong series of adventures, education, and even given them a needed emotional anchor to cope with the loss of their wife and mother, Hannah.

In Sidelines and Bloodlines, Ryan McGee – co-host of the popular Marty & McGee show on ESPN Radio and SEC Network – teams up with his father and brother to share lessons learned between the white lines, featuring a cast of characters that runs from no-name small college athletes and coaches to one-name legends such as Holtz, Paterno, Tebow, and Bo. The McGees provide a rare and often hilarious glimpse inside the lives of college officials, detailing how a love for the game convinces accomplished professionals from all walks of life to voluntarily endure ceaseless insults, public criticism, and the expressed goal of doing one’s job on a very public stage in a way that will hopefully NOT draw any attention to how that job is done.

From hilarious stories of brawling high school referees and making awkward small talk with George Lucas and Darth Vader at the Rose Bowl to the heart-tugging story of young sons in the stands on a Saturday as a stream profanity-laden insults directed at their father drowns out the marching band, Sidelines and Bloodlines delivers laughs, tears, and a deeper understanding of a life in stripes.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629377872
Publisher:	Triumph Books
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	527,771
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ryan McGee is a senior writer for ESPN. Dr. Jerry E. McGee is one of the most highly-decorated officials in college football history. Sam McGee is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Rece Davis is the host of College GameDay, ESPN’s flagship college football program. He also hosts the network’s on-site coverage of the College Football Playoff and has been a regular contributor to SportsCenter and other ESPN shows and platforms since he joined the network in 1995.

Table of Contents

Foreword Rece Davis vii

Prologue xi

1 If You Can Officiate Sigma Nu vs. the Pikas, You Can Work the Rose Bowl 1

2 Big Time, Small Colleges 27

3 Home Games 51

4 Yea, Though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death 69

5 ACC-elerating 91

6 The Wall of Screaming 131

7 Go (Big) East, Young Man 151

8 Love the Good Days, Own the Bad Ones 183

9 Hey Ref! 195

10 Changing of the Guard and of the Game 217

11 The Long Goodbye 233

12 Zebra Emeritus 253

Editorial Reviews

“I came for the hilarious stories about the strange place referees occupy in our sporting world and found myself pulled deep into a tale of family, fathers and sons, and how we never forget the way back home.” —Wright Thompson, ESPN senior writer 


“Able sportswriting that, due to its focus on a little-known aspect of the game, will be illuminating even for die-hard fans.” —Kirkus Reviews 


“It’s uniquely structured with the voices of all three McGees coming through.” —The Daily Independent 


“A story well told as [Ryan McGee] shares the football officiating experiences of his dad and family.” —SEC Commissioner Greg Sankes 


“Ryan McGee is a master storyteller who imbues all his work with wit, warmth, and brains. No one knows college football better than McGee...Sidelines and Bloodlines is a love letter to the game and to the ties that bind fathers and sons.” —Jeremy Schaap, ESPN host, Outside the Lines 


“In my 40-plus years of coaching, I never shared a sideline with a more respected official than Jerry McGee.” —Lou Holtz, Hall of Fame coach

From the Publisher

2020-07-07
ESPN writer McGee enlists his father and brother to describe a side of college football that few spectators consider.

When it’s a family affair, football, writes the author, is “a childhood of Xs and Os, watching fathers spend their summers dissecting game film, knowing that every autumn weekend will never be free for other activities.” Moreover, in his particular family, he and his brother, Sam, learned that there were not two sides in a game but three, the third being the one that “doesn’t arrive in a chartered jet”—namely, the referees and umpires. The author’s father, Jerry, enrolled in East Carolina College (now University) with an eye to becoming a coach, but he was steered into officiating early on, working as a referee until 2009. As the author maps out, there are eight officials in a major college game: the referee, the only one of the officiating staff who wears a white hat and, usually, a microphone to announce a decision to the usually ungrateful crowd, as well as a squad of judges distributed around the field to monitor particular matters. The line judge keeps the game clock, for example, and watches the line of scrimmage, while the back judge also has game-clock responsibilities while keeping an eye out on the deep zone. (Those two judges, McGee adds, are the ones who stand below the goal posts and declare whether a field goal was good or not.) Jerry, his son writes, keeps a few rooms in his home as a personal museum of his time on the field, which added up to more than 400 games in different conferences, one standout exhibit being a photograph depicting a coach screaming at him with the understated caption, “Coach Joe Morrison explains his point of view to a less than interested official.”

Able sportswriting that, due to its focus on a little-known aspect of the game, will be illuminating even for die-hard fans.

Kirkus Reviews