“I had come to Penn State in 1967 and during that time football had been so successful that it became clear it was going to be an integral part of the university and its growth,” Patterson recalled. “And Joe Paterno was a key part of that. We had heard these rumors about the Patriots and we decided that the time had come to get him a contract.”
Paterno, having been at Penn State since 1950, by then had been granted tenure and a full professorship in the College of Liberal Arts. But like many football coaches in that era, he continued to work year to year without a formal contract.
“I’d get paid and in July, if everyone else at the university got raises, I got a raise,” he remembered. “I operated like everybody else. I never had a contract.”
Paterno recalled a 1968 conversation on the subject with Bear Bryant during a ceremony at which the Penn State coach was being honored as Coach of the Year. Paterno mentioned to the legendary Alabama coach that while he had no contract, he did have tenure. Bryant looked at him like he had two heads.
“Your contract should be for five years and you ought to be able to roll it over,” Bryant advised. “You ought to have a car and you ought to have a country club. You ought to have two hundred tickets—season tickets.”
Bryant told the younger coach that Penn State was going to benefit enormously if he built a nationally prominent program. And Paterno’s compensation package ought to reflect that.
After the Royal Sonesta meeting with Sullivan, Paterno was on the verge of accepting the job. The night before the Sugar Bowl, he asked his brother to walk with him in the French Quarter. He told George of the Patriots’ offer and asked him to come along as an assistant.
“It looked as if he was seriously considering the job,” said George Paterno.
Between those considerations and the ongoing discussions with Penn State’s Patterson, Paterno was seriously distracted that week. His team played that way too.
Not much went right for Penn State in the Sugar Bowl. Star running back John Cappelletti came down with a stomach flu that morning and couldn’t play. The Nittany Lions managed just 49 yards and 11 first downs against Chuck Fairbanks’s defense. If they hadn’t recovered five Oklahoma fumbles, the final score would have been a lot worse than 14–0.
The Patriots rumor ripped wide open when Paterno and Sullivan were spotted standing “a few steps apart” at the post–Sugar Bowl party. Bob Ryan’s January 2 Globe story revealed that the two were continuing to negotiate. The holdup appeared to be a disagreement over the size of the coach’s stake in the club.
The delay remained the heart of the story for days. With the NFL draft less than a month away, the pressure on Paterno to decide intensified in Boston. Several sports columnists there speculated about other possible reasons for the holdup. In 1975, after twenty-five years at the university, Paterno would become eligible for a half-salary pension, not an insignificant enticement for a college coach in that era. Others believed Paterno wanted to succeed the retiring Weeb Ewbanks with his hometown Jets. He also had a connection with Ewbanks, who had been a Rip Engle assistant when Paterno played at Brown.
The public was not aware that Paterno also had a half a dozen meetings with Patterson in the interim. Had the coach taken Bryant’s advice to heart? Was he leveraging the NFL team’s interest in his dicussions with Penn State?
“No,” Paterno said, “I didn’t use the Patriots to get more money. Obviously, I was pleased that they wanted to give me a contract, but in the end it was a very, very difficult decision for me.”
It may have been the case, but Bucko Kilroy, the onetime Patriots GM, recalled that a few years later Paterno, through a Philadelphia sportswriter, let it be known that he might again be interested in the New England job. “I went down to a Holiday Inn in New Jersey and met with him,” said Kilroy. “Nothing came of it but he later told me he got a good contract out of it.”
Meanwhile, the reaction to the news about his possible departure had State College frantic.
Residents had come to relish the attention Paterno’s program brought to their town. More than nineteen thousand postcards were sent to the coach, pleading with him to remain at Penn State. That month’s edition of the local magazine Town & Gown had Paterno’s picture on its cover, alongside the words “Joe: Don’t Go Pro!” The news dominated the Centre Daily Times (hardly surprising, since it was competing for space with developments such as was chronicled beneath this spellbinding headline “None Hurt in Sunday Accidents”).
But Paterno knew fans could be fickle. Even in State College, they’d get over his departure as soon as Penn State won its next game. According to his hometown paper, a petition urging the coach to stay circulated among Penn State fans on a bus headed for the Sugar Bowl. Everyone on board signed. On the way back, following the Lions’ shutout loss, a similar petition made the rounds. This time only five passengers put their names on it.
On Friday, January 5, New York sportswriter Dick Young reported that Paterno had accepted Sullivan’s offer. The source, it later turned out, had been Sullivan himself. Paterno had phoned the owner the day before and accepted the job in principle. Sullivan agreed to send his private jet to State College that Friday, and he and Paterno were going to make it official at the Plaza.
But Paterno’s vacillations intensified. One minute he wanted to go and the next he couldn’t imagine leaving Penn State.
Curiously, the trip to New York City wasn’t the only flight he had scheduled for that Friday morning. He had made alternate plans to fly to Pittsburgh with Patterson. They would visit with Chuck Queenan, a lawyer there who had represented Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw. If need be, they’d finalize his first contract with Penn State.
The night before, Thursday, January 4, Sue Paterno called their closest friends, Penn State sports information director Jim Tarman and his wife, Louise, and invited them to their house. Paterno told Tarman that he was probably going to take the NFL job and asked Tarman to come to Boston with him. “Pro ball was a dog-eat-dog business for money and you needed extremely loyal assistants, people who could protect your backside,” said George Paterno.
While the Tarmans pondered the move, the two couples celebrated the Paternos’ apparent good fortune with champagne toasts.
But, more so than her husband, Sue Paterno remained uncomfortable with the thought of relocating. That helped explain Paterno’s continued indecision. What would the move do to his young family? He thought back to his days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, a book that had shaped the attitudes he carried into adulthood. “When you choose wrong, as Aeneas found out,” Paterno said, “life comes down on you with some terrible whacks.”
The Paternos stayed up late talking. At about 3:00 A.M., his doubts seemingly resolved, perhaps by the champagne, he telephoned Patterson and told the Penn State administrator he had decided to accept the Patriots’ offer.
“After I got that call, I got in touch with the pilots who were going to fly the university jet and told them we wouldn’t be going to Pittsburgh the next morning,” said Patterson, retired now and an affiliate professor of transportation at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.
The coach went to bed, joking to his wife in an effort to reassure her. “This will be the first time you’ve ever slept with a millionaire,” he said. She didn’t laugh.
Paterno tossed and turned in bed as he continued his mental grapplings. State College was so comfortable. He loved coaching and molding young kids. They were so hungry to learn about football and life. It wouldn’t be like that in professional football. A bad season or two and he might be wishing he had never left.
“I knew damn well what it was,” Paterno later wrote of the temptations pushing him toward the NFL. “The money. The house on Cape Cod. Hobnobbing with the hottest shots in a big-time town, being their hero, not having to worry, for once, about the example I have to set in a small college town, being watched by my kids. It was the only chance at a million dollars I’d ever have.”
; Early on the morning of January 5, he awakened his wife and told her they weren’t going anywhere. Paterno reached Sullivan before the owner had departed for New York, thanked him, and turned him down. “God bless you, Joe,” the owner responded. Sullivan, ironically, wound up hiring the winning coach in the Sugar Bowl, Oklahoma’s Fairbanks. (Fairbanks would go 37–34 in nearly five seasons in New England. But days after his 11–4 Patriots clinched the franchise’s first division title in 1978, reports surfaced that he had accepted the head-coaching job at the University of Colorado and he was fired.)
After talking with Sullivan, Paterno telephoned Tarman and Patterson.
“I guess it was about seven-thirty when he called and said he’d be staying at Penn State,” recalled Patterson. “Now the flight to Pittsburgh was back on. So I called the pilots and told them to be ready shortly. They said they couldn’t go now because after I had canceled the flight, they went out and got drunk. They said they needed twelve hours before they could fly again. I told them, I didn’t care how they did it but I wanted that goddamned plane ready to leave in an hour.”
They flew to Pittsburgh and met with Queenan.
“They showed me the contract and said, ‘What do you think about this?’ ” Paterno recalled. “I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ They asked me if I didn’t want my own lawyer to look at it. I said, ‘No, I trust Bob Patterson.’ ”
While Paterno’s salary has always been something of a state secret, administrators now hint that the deal he signed that day earned him about $100,000 a year. Whatever the details, and they were never made public, Paterno decided he also needed more life insurance. Patterson contacted a Pittsburgh doctor and set up a quick physical.
“Joe had been up most of the night and I didn’t think it would be the best time for him to be taking a physical examination,” said Patterson. “But he went ahead with it anyway and, fortunately, passed.”
When Tarman learned neither he nor Paterno would be going to Boston, he set up a news conference for 10:00 A.M. Saturday in Rec Hall to deal with all the questions the university had been getting about its football coach, especially in the wake of Young’s story.
Most of the sportswriters who attended were by then aware of that story and assumed the news conference had been convened as a farewell for Paterno. They were genuinely surprised when the coach, wearing a glen-plaid sport coat and seated next to President John Oswald, revealed he was staying. He told reporters that unless there were some “drastic change” at the school, he planned to remain there the rest of his career.
“I thought about the Sugar Bowl game,” he told them, “and I didn’t want to go out a loser.”
That raised an obvious question and someone asked it.
“Joe, does that mean you’d have taken the job if you’d beaten Oklahoma?”
“That,” said Paterno, “is an iffy question.”
As far as anyone knew, no coach had ever been offered a $1 million contract, let alone turned it down. That fact alone made Paterno an instant national celebrity. No matter which side of the era’s political divide you resided on, his decision had an unmistakable appeal.
Those who were dismayed by all the striking societal changes of the 1960s and early 1970s saw it as a reaffirmation of basic values. Here was a man who cared more for educating young people at a small-town college than making a fortune in the big city. On the other side of the political spectrum, Paterno’s action was viewed in an anti-establishment light. He had turned his back on material gain, thumbed his nose at the powerful institution of the NFL.
It also gave Paterno a platform upon which he could expound on the theories he was developing about college sports. He would use it very quickly to criticize recruiting excesses, academic abuses, freshmen eligibility, the overemphasis on football, commercialization, polls, and the lack of a season-ending play-off. Writers began to characterize him as a Don Quixote figure, tilting at the sport’s windmills. George Paterno used that analogy, too, when he wrote of how his older brother’s rejection of the NFL had empowered him. He now possessed a moral authority that most other coaches lacked. In his late brother’s words, the Penn State coach came out of the episode with “heavy artillery and a million Sanchos.”
Most of those Sancho Panzas were sportswriters, who began to lather praise on the coach. In their adoring eyes, his very public display of conviction, in combination with his Grand Experiment and the run of outstanding Penn State teams, made Paterno the ideal of what a college coach should be.
National newspapers and magazines commissioned stories on this coach who had made such a startling commitment. Sports Illustrated’s William Johnson wrote that Paterno “did not believe that money is the root of all the fruits of life. . . . In these days when feet of clay and souls of brass seem to be the identifying marks of so many leaders, the mere fact that Joe Paterno expresses himself with an unforked tongue is apparently enough to warrant standing ovations and hero worship.”
Interest in Penn State football increased in the immediate aftermath, prompting the school to make plans to enlarge Beaver Stadium again. Marketing surveys of the Nittany Lions’ fan base in 2004 revealed that many of those allegiances were formed just after Paterno turned down the Patriots.
The construction of the Paterno legend was moving ahead at full throttle. And like any legend, he was credited with qualities he didn’t possess. Paterno’s harder-edged complexities and shortcomings—his impatience, his biting tongue, his manipulative nature—rarely came through in the aggrandizing portraits. All that most Americans could see was his nobility. He seemed single-handedly to be defending loyalty, simplicity, and virtue against the disturbing forces that were just beginning to shake sports and the wider world.
While he welcomed the attention—and the unmistakable help it gave him in recruiting and fund raising—there was a part of him that was uncomfortable. When Sports Illustrated’s Johnson asked him if he considered himself a “folk hero,” he cringed.
“I get letters from people who seem to think that if only Joe Paterno can spend twenty minutes with a kid, then his troubles will be all over,” he responded. “Nuts. People want to give me too much credit. I’m a football coach who has won a few games—remember?”
Still, grateful Pennsylvanians planned banquets to honor the coach. Requests for speaking engagements and interviews flowed into his office. Penn State even asked him to deliver its commencement address that June. Like Paterno himself, that speech was humorous, philosophical, didactic, and at times eloquent.
“W. H. Auden said it beautifully,” Paterno noted in that June 16, 1973, address, “when he wrote on the death of Sigmund Freud: ‘Every day there dies among us those who were doing us some good and knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living.’ Live your life so that by some little thing you will improve your life just by living. But be realistic enough as you continue your adventure in life to understand that regardless of how strong you are and how smart you are, you will at times become discouraged.”
While Paterno was being anointed a sporting saint, it might have been left to his little hometown paper to remind his worshipful fans that not everyone had the same vision of the man.
“[He] has critics,” noted a January 9, 1973, editorial in the Centre Daily Times that otherwise hailed Paterno’s decision to stay. “Those jealous; those who disagree with his philosophies; those who can’t believe he’s sincere in his outspoken stands; those who can’t tolerate or understand his brutal frankness.”
Paterno never did get that house on Cape Cod, although he did, years later, purchase a summer home along the New Jersey Shore. But the national reverence he came to command helped him overcome some of the bitterness he had felt about Brown. Over the years, as his prominence grew, old college classmates began to contact him or bring their children and grandchildren to visit with him in State College. The coach suddenly became an active and involved alumnus.
In 1997, Brown graduate Roger D. Williams pledged $1 million
to establish a football coaching chair in Paterno’s name. Two years later the coach showed up at an “off-year minireunion” to receive the William Rogers Award, recognizing “an outstanding alumna or alumnus whose service to society in general is representative of the words of the Brown Charter: living a life ‘of usefulness and reputation.’ ”
He was among 297 who attended the Class of 1950’s fiftieth reunion in the summer of 2000. Everyone knew who he was by then. There were cocktails and dinner on Friday.
On Saturday, there was a forum on leadership. Its principle speaker, dressed in a blue blazer instead of a white sweater this time, was Joseph V. Paterno of Brooklyn, still swarthy after all those years.
CHAPTER 7
THROUGH THE WIDE WINDOWS of Suite 1217 in the Sheraton Newton, downtown Boston’s nighttime skyline glistened like a sequined gown. Inside the room that had been set aside for Joe Paterno’s weekly media cocktail reception, several sportswriters were clustered near a wide-screen TV tuned to ESPN’s Friday night college football game, Florida State versus Miami. Bowls filled with salty snacks sat untouched atop tables. Little blue flames lapped at the bottom of silver trays brimming with meatballs and chicken tenders. The small towers of plates and napkins flanking the food had not yet been disturbed.
Away in a far corner, as alone and unnoticed as a wallflower, stood a portable bar. A bored young bartender absentmindedly rolled an empty glass in his hand as Jeff Nelson, Penn State’s sports-information director, approached. Without pausing—apparently without even thinking—Nelson reached out to adjust a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, its black-and-white seal unbroken, its fetching amber contents untouched.
It was 9:30 P.M. on September 10. Penn State’s traveling party had arrived at the hotel, which sat atop a Mass Pike overpass, a half hour earlier. The Nittany Lions would be playing Boston College the next night at eight, in a nationally televised game in nearby Chestnut Hill.
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