The Detroit News’s Mark Falkner penned a lengthy profile of NHL referee Wes McCauley, and his article’s a “good read”:
Wes McCauley’s rise to the top of the National Hockey League officiating ranks began to take shape as a freshman on the campus of Michigan State in 1989.
He just didn’t realize it at the time.
Now the NHL’s most animated official whose dramatic pauses and amusing calls after disputed goals and penalties have gone viral on YouTube and shared on social media by hockey fans and whose popularity among players was underscored in an NHLPA poll when he was voted the No. 1 referee in 2018, McCauley back then was about to follow his father’s advice and attend Michigan State, which had an enrollment (40,000) about the same size of his hometown in Georgetown, Ontario, just outside of Toronto.
In 1985, his dad John McCauley, an NHL referee for 15 years and the league’s director of officiating at the time, was in East Lansing for a series of exhibition games between the Canadian Olympic team and the Spartans at Munn Arena.
“Dad came home and said, ‘You’re going to Michigan State,'” McCauley said. “He was good friends with league commissioner Bill Beagan and as the boss, he (McCauley) would watch the young officials in the CCHA (Central Collegiate Hockey Association) and meet the coaches there. He always wanted me to go to Michigan State.”
