The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  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 te
levision 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?”

  His words, of course, were in vain. Texas was No. 1 in the final voting, Penn State No. 2, Southern Cal No. 3, and Ohio State No. 4.

  “Sure we wanted to be number one, but it really wasn’t that big a deal,” says Onkotz, who now works with a financial-investment firm near State College. “The media wasn’t nearly as big back then, so you didn’t hear about it all the time, the way you would now. And, to be honest, we were all so busy. I was a biophysics major, so I had a lot of classes that took a lot of time and work. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about who was number one.”

  Years later, even after Penn State had won two national championships, Nixon’s call still angered the coach. “The bloodcurdling nerve!” he wrote in his 1989 autobiography. “ . . . Nixon favored us with an honor that any idiot consulting a record book could see that we had taken for ourselves, thank you, without his help.”

  He began to promote a postseason play-off system. Like so much of what Joe Paterno has proposed for college football over the years, his suggestion was seen as thoughtful and constructive. And then it was ignored.

  CHAPTER 5

  LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before Penn State’s September 4 season opener, and much to the relief of the sweltering thousands who had assembled in Beaver Stadium for the Friday-night pep rally, the oppressive heat that had shrouded State College finally yielded to more comfortable weather.

  The heat had not wilted these Penn State fanatics, twenty thousand of whom seemed a tiny gathering as they huddled together in a corner near the 107,282-seat stadium’s south end zone. Almost all were wearing some item of apparel bearing the Nittany Lions logo—a chiseled but unthreatening feline whom the school’s sports-information staff jokingly called “the chipmunk.” Like religious pilgrims, they had brought along relics and icons—lucky seat cushions, lucky jerseys and hats, lucky buttons that read PENN STATE PROUD, YOU’RE IN LION COUNTRY OR WE ARE . . . PENN STATE!

  Further evidence of their fidelity was evident in the hundreds of lumbering RVs, plastered with Nittany Lions paw prints and decals, that were parked in the vast lots outside. Though this was merely a rally in advance of the next day’s 3:30 P.M. game against Akron, some fans had conducted tailgate parties nonetheless. At a few of the more extravagant affairs, life-size cutouts of Paterno (“Stand-Up Joes”) were propped up among the living guests, positioned as carefully and lovingly as figurines in a Christmas creche.

  These loyalists, drawn long ago to the program Paterno had pushed to prominence, paid dearly for their devotion. Since 1971, five years after Paterno became head coach, Penn State’s season-ticket holders have had to make sizable annual donations to the Nittany Lion Club for the privilege of purchasing tickets. For a $5,000 contribution, each club member was entitled to as many as fourteen seats (at an additional $46 a game in 2004). To upgrade location, a larger donation was required. In all, eighty percent of Beaver Stadium’s capacity was controlled by club members, their annual seat-rights contributions totaling nearly $10 million to the university.

  Such spend-to-spectate schemes suggested that Penn State, too, had become the kind of money-driven football program Paterno had once sought to tame. Here and virtually everywhere else that battle had been lost. College football was a $5 billion business fed by television, corporate sponsors, and frenzied boosters.

  In the late 1960s, when Paterno first revealed his Grand Experiment—an attempt to produce football success and educated, well-rounded players—Beaver Stadium held 46,284 fans. His initial game as head coach, against Maryland on September 17, 1966, drew only 40,911. But the Nittany Lions’ combined record of 30–2–1 from 1967 through 1969 sent demand spiraling and created three decades of nearly nonstop stadium expansion. Its capacity rose to 57,538 in 1972; 60,203 in 1976; 76,639 in 1978; 83,770 in 1980; and 93,967 in 1991.

  Then came the most recent project, the $94 million expansion that added the Mount Nittany–obscuring, 11,500-seat upper deck, plus sixty luxury suites atop the east grandstands. A ten-year lease on one of those fourteen-foot-by-thirty-foot boxes initially cost between $40,000 and $65,000, not including the price of tickets. Five-year leases were even more expensive per season. (But, thanks to a favorable IRS ruling, without which college football would be hard put to exist in 2004, up to eighty percent of the cost of those suites was tax deductible as a charitable contribution.)

  Paterno’s program generated enough annual revenue to pay for itself and contribute an additional $12–$16 million to support the university’s other twenty-eight sports. In 1999, counting the Nittany Lion Club donations, football had produced close to $35 million in revenue.

  By 2004 the fans’ largesse had become a double-edged sword for Paterno. While their money permitted him a massive recent upgrade in football facilities, it also gave the ticket-holding investors a significant voice. The coach had long been able to reject demands from boosters and alumni. “We are happy to accept their money,” he once said, “but we don’t want their two cents’ worth.”

  That attitude was fine when Penn State was ranked in the top ten every year. But many ticket holders now resented having to pay thousands of dollars a year to watch a sub-.500 team lose at home to Toledo, as the Lions did in the 2000 opener. As the dissatisfaction with Paterno broadened, a tiny minority of boosters threatened to withhold future contributions unless the coach stepped down. University officials acknowledged that athletic giving had leveled off since 2001, just about the time the current slump was getting under way. Nearly $20 million had been donated that year. By 2003, the figure had dipped to $18 million.

  Now, heading into a tough 2004 schedule that, realistically, didn’t promise much relief, they remained concerned. While most of those th
en gathering in State College for the Akron weekend weren’t yet aware of its existence, the athletic department was already one year into a five-year, $100 million fund-raising drive, “Success With Honor: A Campaign for the Penn State Way.” Publicly, it was billed as a way to fund more athletic scholarships, coaches’ endowments, more advising, plus upgrades to its sports-medicine facilities. Privately, some administrators and fans saw the effort, which would be revealed to the public the following month, as insurance against more lost games and more lost donations.

  “They’d better get it while they can,” said a 1970 graduate.

  The pep-rally crowd included alums, parents of football players and band members, as well as those whose only connection to the university was a lifetime’s allegiance to Paterno’s teams. Most had come from the big cities along the eastern seaboard and from the tiny communities surrounding State College. All day, long lines of cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks had moved relentlessly into the tiny college town like armies of ants en route to a picnic spill.

  Each football weekend, visitors spent roughly $4 million in and around State College. Hotel rates more than doubled, with rooms at the university-owned Penn Stater going for well over $200 a night. Then there were the busy bars and restaurants, the crowded souvenir shops, and the long lines at stadium concession stands.

  Some had come to Beaver Stadium on foot: students who resided in nearby dormitories, including the newly arrived freshmen who were getting their first live taste of Penn State football; the returning alums who stayed in downtown apartments and hotels; the big shots in the Nittany Lion Inn, a handsome campus hotel just a short distance down Park Road; and those who had come from a 5:00 P.M. women’s volleyball match in Rec Hall, parading en masse behind the school’s Pep Band as it made its noisy way down Curtin Road.

  In the twilight, Penn State’s campus, described in the football media guide as “picture-postcard perfect,” dripped with nostalgia. Older couples strolled arm in arm along the grassy quad, beneath rows of stately elms and willows. Students and graduates shared cocktails on the patios of elegant Greek Revival fraternity houses. Parents took their blue-and-white-clad youngsters on sentimental journeys through classroom buildings and dormitories.