The Lion in Autumn (9 page)

The linebackers, Sandusky said, “had to be outstanding athletes in the defensive scheme we played.”

But football judgment was equally as important. Penn State wanted those who played the position to process instantly what they saw developing in front of them. Opposing coaches liked to say that while any good linebacker would read a play,
then
react, Penn State's would read
and
react instantaneously.

“Coach Radakovich [Dan Radakovich, who was in charge of the linebackers until departing after the 1969 season] and the other coaches had a saying back then,” said Onkotz. “They said, ‘If you're
going to make a mistake, make it at full speed.' Basically, in the four-four we played, it was the job of the defensive linemen to keep people off us. We had people like Reid and Smear who did that very well, so we just had to run around and hit people.”

Uncovering outstanding linebackers was, as Sandusky noted, merely a matter of identifying strong, quick, and mentally agile players. And neither he nor Paterno hesitated in moving gifted players to the position. Former quarterbacks, in particular, made good linebackers. Both Onkotz and O'Neil played the position in high school. (Both also would return punts at Penn State.) Arrington had been a high school running back, Buttle a tight end. And Charlie Zapiec was a star offensive lineman for the Nittany Lions before Paterno switched him to linebacker, where he became an all-American.

Paterno would achieve a measure of historical infamy, though, while recruiting Jim Kelly, the future NFL Hall of Fame QB, by suggesting the western-Pennsylvania schoolboy should be a linebacker. Kelly, headstrong even then, decided to go to Miami instead.

“I'd probably be a bartender in East Brady, Pennsylvania,” Kelly said while recalling the incident before his Hall induction in 2002. “I would have been a good linebacker, but not a Hall of Fame candidate. I wasn't fast enough.”

Paterno would explain that the criticism he's taken ever since for making that suggestion might be unfair. It came, he said, during a year when Penn State also was recruiting Dan Marino, Todd Blackledge, and Jeff Hostetler, all of whom, along with Kelly, would be part of the greatest quarterback draft in NFL history in 1984.

“I had an assistant named J. T. White who was recruiting Kelly,” Paterno recalled. “He knew we were close with Blackledge and Hostetler and he asked me what he ought to tell Kelly if we signed both those other quarterbacks. I said to tell him if he came here and couldn't beat out those guys, he could play linebacker.”

Penn State's arrival as a national power occurred midway through the 1968 season when it avenged the previous year's loss to UCLA with a 21–6 victory. Like so many other games that season, this one turned
on the play of the linebackers. Ham blocked a punt and Kates returned it 36 yards for the game's first touchdown.

That nationally televised win ignited something in Penn State and its fans. Students back in State College poured into the streets that night in a spontaneous celebration. And the next two weeks, for victories over Boston College and Army, near-record crowds packed every corner of Beaver Stadium.

Paterno's Nittany Lions, who had a pair of freshman running backs named Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris waiting in the wings, concluded the 1968 regular season by rolling over Miami (22–7), Maryland (57–13), Pitt (65–9), and Syracuse (30–12). They earned a No. 3 national ranking and a spot opposite sixth-ranked Kansas in what would be a memorable Orange Bowl.

During that Orange Bowl week in Miami, Paterno enjoyed his first serious exposure in the national spotlight. He and Kansas coach Pepper Rodgers bantered constantly with each other and with the assembled sportswriters at news conferences. For the first time, fans all across the country were introduced to the concept of the Penn State coach's Grand Experiment.

In an era when the best-known college coaches were the gruff Woody Hayes and the taciturn Bear Bryant, Paterno was a refreshing change. Far from being a burly, cliché-spouting jock, he appeared instead to combine the brains of a professor, the principles of a priest, and the personality of an entertainer. And, in what was a confirmation of his comments following the 1967 Gator Bowl, he also won points for daring when the game was on the line.

Kansas, with left-handed quarterback Bobby Douglass, fullback John Riggins, and halfback Donnie Shanklin, had built a 14–7 lead in the fourth quarter. The Jayhawks had an opportunity to run out the clock but Reid twice sacked Douglass to force a punt with 1:16 remaining in the game. When Smith tipped the kick, Penn State took over at midfield.

Paterno was ready with a decoy play he had been thinking about all week. He told Campbell to run a deep post pattern. He wanted Burkhart to overthrow him. That likely would lure Kansas into
thinking the Lions were impatient. Then, on the next play, the quarterback could dump off a little screen to Kwalick underneath the coverage.

But Campbell broke free of safety Tommy Anderson on the play and Burkhart heaved it.

“I knew I had thrown a good pass because you can always feel that,” Burkhart said later. “But on the other hand, they've got a prevent defense working on Bobby, who doesn't exactly run a 4.4 40.”

Just as the public-address announcer was revealing that Shanklin had been named the game's MVP, Campbell caught the ball. The 47-yard connection gave Penn State a first down on the Kansas 3 with under a minute to go. The Jayhawks sent in an extra linebacker, Rick Abernethy, for their goal-line defense. While no one noticed until four plays later, no Kansas defensive back ever left the field.

Two off-tackle runs by fullback Tom Cherry produced nothing, perhaps because it was 11 on 12. On third down, Paterno called the “scissors” play. Burkhart was to fake a handoff to Pittman, then give the ball to Campbell on a reverse. But Kansas, with the extra defender, had managed to penetrate so deeply on the play that the quarterback didn't want to risk a handoff. Instead, he kept the ball and skirted around the left side of the Jayhawks line for a touchdown that moved the Lions within a point, 14–13.

Recalling how dissatisfied he had been after the Gator Bowl tie with Florida State a year ago, Paterno immediately signaled that, on what would be the game's final play, Penn State would go for two points.

On the sideline, Reid bent his head in prayer. Other players held hands or looked skyward. When Burkhart's pass for Kwalick was knocked down, Kansas supporters swarmed onto the field to celebrate what they thought to be a notable bowl victory. They failed to notice that in the middle of the chaotic scene in their end zone an official was waving a white flag above his head. On the conversion try, umpire Foster Grose finally had noticed the twelfth Kansas defender. The illegal-procedure penalty gave Penn State a reprieve.

“I don't think there was a doubt in anyone's mind that we would score,” said Burkhart.

This time, running right at Kansas all-American left end John Zook behind Zapiec, Campbell carried it into the end zone and the Nittany Lions had a 15–14 triumph.

Now it was Penn State's turn to celebrate and they did. Players were still sky high when the team bus returned them to the Ivanhoe Hotel. There, many retreated to their rooms to watch the game, which had been blacked out in Miami and was being televised on a delayed basis by a local station.

When Lou Prato, then a Pittsburgh telecaster and now the director of the Penn State All-Sports Museum, and his wife got back to the hotel, they noticed that, unlike the previous nights, there was live music in the lobby. It was Reid, a concert pianist and future Grammy winner.

“Mike was a unique guy,” said Onkotz. “He was such a great football player but his first love was music. That was clear even back then. Guys relaxed in different ways, but for Mike it was always the piano. I can remember him sitting and playing at some of the oddest places and times.”

As impressive as Penn State's 11–0 season had been, in the end it was good enough only for a No. 2 ranking in the final national polls. Big Ten champ Ohio State, 10–0 after defeating USC in the Rose Bowl, was declared the national champion.

In Paterno's mind, the national perception that Eastern football was inferior had hurt his team. Privately, he was disappointed.

“The sportswriters and sportscasters heaped all kinds of praise on us,” he said, “but couldn't quite bring themselves to credit us—or any college in the East—with having a great football team.”

After the 1969 season, Paterno's disappointment would turn to anger.

The team that Paterno gathered around him moments before the opener of the 1969 season—ironically, another game at Navy—was almost certainly the best he would ever coach. The prospect of guiding all that talent helped explain, in part, why he had turned down a serious off-season offer to coach the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ten starters returned on defense. Three of them, Reid, Onkotz,
and Smith, would earn all-American honors that season. Reid, in fact, would win the Outland Trophy as the nation's top interior lineman. Ham would be an all-American in 1970. The unit would hold opponents to single digits in scoring seven times in 1969, allowing 90 points in eleven games, a meager 18 in the last four.

On offense, Pittman returned and became an all-American, even though he shared time with sophomore Mitchell. Harris backed up Don Abbey at fullback. Kwalick was gone but sophomore Dave Joyner, a future all-American himself, anchored a strong offensive line. Burkhart provided senior experience at quarterback.

Their only close calls that season came in two road victories—17–14 at Kansas State on October 4, and 15–14 at Syracuse two weeks later. Penn State ended its regular season November 29 with a 33–8 victory at North Carolina State. The Nittany Lions were 10–0 and ranked third at the time.

Two weeks earlier, Paterno's team had voted to accept an Orange Bowl bid. It wasn't a casual decision. Though he hadn't done so the year before, the coach this time asked his half-dozen or so black players for their preference among the southern cities that hosted New Year's bowls. Mitchell, Harris, Pittman, and the others had reservations about Dallas, in part because of President Kennedy's assassination there a little more than five years earlier. They preferred Miami.

Paterno informed his team of their preference and also let them know that he believed Ohio State, then No. 1 and the defending champion, would be their chief competition for a national title. Since the Rose Bowl's contract with the Big Ten and Pac-Ten meant the Lions couldn't possibly face the Buckeyes, his players passed up a possible Cotton Bowl date with either Texas or Arkansas and opted again for Miami's Orange Bowl.

“We all had had a good time there the year before,” said Onkotz. “There was no way we could have known it then, of course, but it turned out to be a big mistake. That was the last time Joe let his players decide which bowl they were going to.”

The decision backfired when Michigan upset Ohio State on November 22. Texas then assumed the polls' top spot, unbeaten Arkansas became No. 2, and Penn State No. 3.

Those rankings set up a dream matchup—for everyone but Paterno and Penn State, that is. Texas and Arkansas were set to play each other in their regular-season finale, December 6 in Fayetteville. ABC television commentators, like former Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson, either unconcerned or unimpressed that Penn State also was undefeated, ballyhooed the Southwest Conference matchup as “the Big Shootout” for the national championship.

The game generated so much national hype that President Nixon, a huge football fan who had been a backup lineman at Whittier College decades earlier, helicoptered into Arkansas to watch it in person. Texas won, 15–14. Afterward Nixon went down to the Longhorns' locker room and handed coach Darrell Royal a plaque declaring the Longhorns national champions.

Nixon's premature action might merely have been a shrewd political move designed to bolster his new Southern strategy. If so, it had the opposite impact in Pennsylvania, where Paterno and Penn State supporters were furious. The politically astute Nixon had taken that into account. After honoring Texas, he quickly announced that he would present a plaque to Penn State in honor of its unbeaten streak, which by then stood at twenty-nine.

Privately, Paterno suggested a place where the president could store the plaque. Publicly, he released a statement that said his team “would be disappointed at this time . . . to receive anything other than a plaque for the number-one team.” Four years later, while delivering a commencement address at Penn State, Paterno revealed how much Nixon's snub had upset him. “How could the president know so little about Watergate in 1973,” he said, “and so much about college football in 1969?”

But Ohio State's loss and Nixon's public pronouncement had put Penn State in a powerless position. All the Nittany Lions realistically could hope for was that Texas would lose to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl while they defeated Missouri in the Orange Bowl.

Unfortunately, before they stifled Missouri, 10–3, in Miami, intercepting seven Terry McMillan passes in the process, Texas beat the Irish, 21–17. There was virtually no chance that those voting in the poll were going to reverse the Nos. 1 and 2 teams after those results, but Paterno lobbied anyway.

“I don't like to keep pushing this thing,” Paterno said after the Orange Bowl, “but I still think we have as much right to number one as Texas or anybody else. Why should I sit back and let the president of the United States say that so-and-so is number one when I've got fifty kids who've worked their tails off for me for three years?”