Paterno (14 page)

But there are more than forty years of stories and testimonials that show Paterno lived what he believed. The interview files for this book are bursting with player quotes like this, from the 1986 team captain Bob White: “You understood that if you didn’t go to class, you didn’t play. That wasn’t a punishment. In Joe’s mind, it was all the same thing.” Or this from tight end Mickey Shuler, who told Paterno he was hoping to play in the NFL: “He looked at me kind of surprised . . . then he shocked me by saying he didn’t know I wanted to play professional football. He thought I wanted to be a teacher and coach like my dad . . . . It wasn’t until later in life that I realized Joe didn’t just see me as a football player, but as someone with potential to be whatever I wanted to be.”

And so on. There are so many quotes like these from former players that after a while they lose their power; they sound alike and induce involuntary eye rolls. Paterno impressed upon so many of his players, through so many years, exactly the same thing:
Go to class. Be on time. Don’t make excuses. Get up after you fall. Play to win.
A
sportswriter named Charles Culpepper hit on something when challenged about Paterno’s friend and rival Bobby Bowden, Florida State’s football coach. Bowden coached college football for fifty years, and he was an impossibly charming and jovial man with a wonderful sense of humor, both about himself and the world. “The guy’s a phony,” a Florida State hater said to Culpepper.

“Yeah?” Culpepper replied. “Well, to do it that long, it’s one hell of an act.”

PATERNO CALLED HIS ATTEMPT TO
marry football, academics, and life lessons “a grand experiment.” In short order, those three words would become capitalized, and “a” would be replaced by “The.” These simple changes reshape the meaning, no? “The Grand Experiment” sounds so much more certain and cocksure and presumptuous. There’s a reason for this. Paterno first talked about his bold ideas with a Philadelphia sportswriter named Bill Conlin, who was, well, certain and cocksure and presumptuous. Paterno may have referred to it as “a grand experiment,” but Conlin pierced through the timidity and called it “The Grand Experiment.” Conlin had grown up in Brooklyn, had seen Paterno play football in high school, had gone to Brooklyn Prep, and so even though the men were very different, they understood each other. Conlin’s life as a sportswriter was big and bold, full of arrogance and brilliance. His career would end right around the time Paterno’s coaching career ended, with a long story in a Philadelphia newspaper reporting accusations that he had molested children many years earlier. Conlin denied the charges and, shortly afterward, suffered a nervous breakdown. Even after that, though, in an email exchange with me, he wanted it remembered that he had coined “The Grand Experiment.”

The Grand Experiment was built on Paterno’s beliefs about education and fair play, of course, but there was also a powerful third reason, perhaps the most powerful one of all: The Grand Experiment worked. Paterno understood that he did not have the charisma of Bear
Bryant or the molten fury of Ohio State’s Woody Hayes or the studious calm of UCLA’s basketball coach John Wooden. What Paterno had was confidence and a clear vision. He was honest. He used that honesty, cultivated it. Other coaches recruited the players; Paterno recruited the parents. Other coaches made promises; Paterno made demands. Other coaches made their recruiting trips fun and exhilarating; player after player after player said that their Penn State recruiting visits were boring beyond exaggeration.

Paterno’s honesty came from a real place, of course: from the Brooklyn streets, from his insistent mother, from what his brother called his “pathological need to do the right thing.” But he was shrewd enough to see how well it worked for him. The players who were drawn to his frank observations were exactly the sort of players he wanted in the first place. For instance, Lydell Mitchell was a star high school running back from New Jersey. Paterno happened to have a surplus of star running backs already. The great running back Charlie Pittman was already on his team; another gifted high school star from New Jersey, Franco Harris, seemed intent on committing to Penn State. But Paterno still wanted Mitchell, not only because of his speed and talent but also because “he was such a great person.”

Mitchell, though, had decided to go to Ohio State. Or, anyway, that’s what he thought he had decided. One day after he had made his decision, Mitchell heard his name over the high school intercom and was told to report to the office. When he got there, he saw Joe Paterno waiting. He braced himself for an uncomfortable conversation.

“Um, Coach, thanks for coming,” Mitchell said. “But I’m not interested in going to Penn State. I’m going to Ohio State.”

“I know,” Paterno said. “You’re afraid to come to Penn State because Charlie Pittman is there and you can’t compete with him.”

Whatever Mitchell might have been expecting Paterno to say, that wasn’t it. He was furious. “Yeah?” he said. “I’ll come up there and break every Penn State record there is.”

That’s just what Lydell Mitchell did.

Honesty worked with the kind of players Paterno wanted to coach.
He did not promise players they would start. He told them plainly that they had to go to class or they wouldn’t play. He would often say, “We would like to have you come to Penn State. But we don’t
need
you.” He challenged them to reach for something bigger within themselves. Every time he gathered together a bunch of recruits, he would give the same speech: “Not all of you are cut out for Penn State. Here, we go to class. Here we wear ties when we travel. Here we wear plain uniforms, and we don’t showboat, and we follow rules. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I understand, and I suggest you go somewhere else.” That kind of recruiting pitch may not sound all that appealing, but it had three powerful pulls.

One: It appealed to parents.

Two: It appealed to the kind of players Paterno wanted at Penn State and eliminated many he did not. Any player who recoiled from his challenges was a player Paterno did not want anyway.

Three: Perhaps most significantly, Paterno’s directness had a muscular salesmanship of its own. “Young men crave discipline,” he said many, many times.

“Joe Paterno didn’t lie to me,” Steve Smear said, and dozens of others said the same thing. It turned out that many players did not want to be told how great they were. It turned out many wanted to go to college and be challenged mentally as well as physically. Many found themselves drawn to Paterno’s ideal of “being part of something bigger than yourself.” When Joe Paterno recruited you, player after player said, it felt like Penn State was offering something just a little bit more honorable than what the other schools were selling.

PATERNO PROSELYTIZED PENN STATE FOOTBALL
. In those days, the power of college football was concentrated in the South, the Midwest, a bit out West, more or less everywhere but in the Northeast. The stars of coaching were Bear Bryant at Alabama, Woody Hayes at Ohio State, Darrell Royal at Texas, John McKay at Southern California, and Ara Parseghian at Notre Dame in Indiana. To people around
America, eastern football sparked images of undersized Ivy League kids bashing into each other between classes on Chaucer. When Paterno became head coach at Penn State, there were 46,000 seats at Beaver Stadium, and many of those were empty on game day.

So Paterno preached. He and Penn State’s sports information director, Jim Tarman, traveled to Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Cleveland, and New York—and also to smaller places like Altoona and Scranton and Hazleton—and they gave speeches, told jokes, shook hands, and, most of all, wooed reporters. They carried heavy suitcases filled with bottles of whiskey, just enough to loosen the conversation, and they traveled to every Optimists Club and Rotary Club and Alumni Club they could find. The reporters inevitably showed up at the hotel, where Paterno turned on his Brooklyn charm. The reporters enjoyed the liquor but also found a football coach unlike any they had ever encountered. He talked with them about Greek mythology and the writing style of Fitzgerald and the politics of Nixon. He did not hide his disdain for corruption in college sports (a favorite topic for newspaper reporters), and he refused to speak in clichés (a favorite trait of newspaper reporters). Paterno loved to argue, and he found that newspaper reporters and columnists generally enjoyed doing so as well. “Joe turns it on,” the longtime Philadelphia sports columnist Bill Lyon warned, “and you’re dead.”

Later, especially in the last fifteen years of his life, Paterno would wage a cold war with the media. He would become secretive, dismissive, and cranky. In response, many of the reporters became distrusting and snarky. It’s hard to tell who turned first or hardest, and in the end it did not matter. College football had changed. The media had changed. The world had changed. And, though it sounds simplistic, perhaps Paterno did not want to change. “We used to be a lot closer,” he would say, not without regret in his voice.

It’s true: in those early years, reporters loved Joe Paterno, and he loved them, and together they built up the aura and importance and wonder of Penn State football. “You do a little research,” the longtime Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez said, “and you see
what Knute Rockne did for Notre Dame. He took that little school and he crisscrossed the country on a train before we had media like we have today. So the big newspapers are writing about this midwest Catholic school Notre Dame like it was some bastion of learning and a huge university . . . . Joe did the same thing at Penn State. To put it on the map, to get people around the country to know who Penn State is, and to have him stamp that school as one of the best football schools—I think he did the same thing Rockne did.”

In November 1968, toward the end of Paterno’s first undefeated season, Dan Jenkins wrote a story for
Sports Illustrated
whose soaring opening paragraph created the template for the Joe Paterno stories that would follow for three decades:

A Beethoven symphony swirls through the mind of a defensive tackle. A linebacker earnestly dashes to physics class on the morning of a game. Test tubes intrigue a cornerback; math fascinates a center; engineering problems make a safety swoon. And while the youthful keeper of these characters, 41-year-old Penn State coach Joe Paterno, should be fretting about his team’s possible climb toward No. 1 or an Orange Bowl bid, he stares at the boutique-colored leaves of the pastoral Alleghenies, thinks about Romantic poets and longs to drive his kids over to Waddle or Martha Furnace or Tusseyville so they can sit down and talk to a cow.

Jenkins was a famously sardonic writer—he was the author of the raunchy and hilarious football novels
Semi-Tough
and
Life Its Ownself
—and yet even he could not help but fall for what seemed sweet and old-fashioned and enlightened about Joe Paterno and the program he was building. Paterno never did drive his kids to Waddle to talk to cows, nor did he spend much time staring at leaves, but after Jenkins, writer after writer celebrated his ambitions.

Mike Reid was that defensive tackle who heard Beethoven playing in his mind. Reid had grown up in Altoona, about forty miles from
State College, and he was a terrifying and marvelous football player. “Mike Reid was the only guy I really—I don’t say I feared him, but I stayed away,” his teammate Don Abbey said. But Reid was not typical. He never wanted football to take up too much of his life. He never believed the coach’s stuff about football defining character.

Reid loved music. He would often joke that for him football was the sissy game, and music was the manly endeavor. When he was twelve, he bought an organ for $1,500, saving pennies from his paper route for two years to pay for it, and he spent every free minute playing, tinkering, listening to the sounds. He was a star football player and an eastern collegiate heavyweight wrestling champion, so people found it hard to understand how much music moved him.

But it did. Abbey remembered the time he and Reid went to see
2001: A Space Odyssey.
When the music began for the famous space ballet involving docking stations, Reid said admiringly, “Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube.’ ” In front of them a couple of kids snickered loudly. When the movie ended and the two kids started to leave, Reid stood up, pushed them back in their seats, and made them understand that they had just been listening to beautiful music.

Paterno was the ideal coach for Reid. He encouraged Reid to follow his musical dreams even if it meant missing practice, as it often did. Paterno made it clear that he expected Reid to think beyond football, to chase hard after his muse and what mattered to him most. After graduation, Reid became a pro football star in Cincinnati, but at twenty-seven, he quit football to concentrate on his music. In time he became a renowned songwriter and an admired composer. Though he would lose touch with Paterno and Penn State football as both of them became more celebrated, he always believed that Paterno had helped him become a man. “I had a fear of Joe,” Reid told reporter Bob Hertzel of the
Times West Virginian
. “And it certainly wasn’t physical because any one of us could have grabbed his scrawny little neck and wrung it . . . . I lived in fear of disappointing him, the same way I did with my Mom and Dad.”

Dennis Onkotz was the linebacker who insisted on taking a physics
exam on the day of a game. “I won’t sleep anyway,” he had told Paterno. In many ways he and Reid defined The Grand Experiment as much as Paterno did. Onkotz was both an All-American and an Academic All-American. He led the team in tackles and posted a 3.5 grade point average. Paterno had this utopian ideal of what college football could be, but Reid and Onkotz and others were living it. They were showing him possibilities beyond his own aspirations.

“Everything is changing,” he told Dan Jenkins. “And the kids want to change the world.”

W
hen the 1968 football season ended, Paterno was offered what he called a staggering amount of money to become the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was a tempting offer for many reasons, money being only one of them. Sue had grown up in Latrobe, about forty miles from Pittsburgh. Art Rooney, who owned the Steelers, was a tough former boxer whom Paterno admired deeply. The chance to coach the greatest players tempted the strategic side of him. But he turned it down. “I think coaching should be fun, and I’m not sure I could get that out of pro football,” he told reporters. It wasn’t a particularly big story in 1968. The Steelers hired a relatively obscure Baltimore Colts assistant named Chuck Noll, who would lead them to four Super Bowl victories. The next big offer for Paterno would stun America.