Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  This passion was in place from the start. Here’s part of a letter a young Joe Paterno wrote in 1952 to a recruit named Earl Shumaker:

  Dear Earl,

  As I told you last December we definitely feel that you are the type of boy we want at Penn State—a good student as well as a good football player. All the people I have talk[ed] to about you have told me the same thing—you are interested in going to college to get an education first and to play football second. That’s the way it should be and we are only interested in boys who feel this way. Always remember you can only play football a few years, and if all you get out of college is four years of football you are getting cheated. No matter where you decide to go to school make sure that you will get an education that will enable you to have a happy and well-rounded life.

  Sincerely

  Joe Paterno

  As an assistant coach, Paterno developed a reputation as a molder of quarterbacks. Football was a different game in the 1950s and 1960s; quarterbacks did not throw nearly as often as they would forty and fifty years later, and they called their own plays, a responsibility that coaches later took for themselves. It was important, then, to teach quarterbacks how to think, how to feel the game, how to anticipate what the defense might try. Paterno loved coaching like this; he did not want players to be like robots. He wanted them to develop their own rhythms and styles, to learn from their own mistakes.

  He also believed in simplicity. If a play worked, he wanted his quarterbacks to try it again. If the play worked again, he wanted his quarterbacks to try it yet again. He was not opposed to an occasional trick play; he developed the belief that a surprising gadget play such as a reverse or a halfback pass could turn the tide of close games. But like his Brooklyn counterpart Lombardi, Paterno believed that you did not win games by tricking teams; you won with precise execution of plays and by making fewer mistakes than your opponent.

  His first great quarterback success was Milt Plum, whom he personally recruited. Plum was such a versatile athlete that he played quarterback, running back, defensive back, punter, and kicker. But he was a disappointment during his sophomore and much of his junior seasons. Paterno wrote about Plum in his autobiography, expressing his feelings about the mysteries of football and his own passion for teaching in a single paragraph:

  In our first six games that season [1955] we broke even, confirming the mediocrity of both our team and our quarterback. If the electricity a quarterback transmits (or doesn’t) to a team defies analysis, another imponderable is what happens when that current suddenly transforms. In our seventh game of 1955, all the teaching, drilling, and praying I had pumped into Plum miraculously fused with his natural talent. He took charge. His passes clicked. His confidence lit the field and charged through the team. We surprised the experts in the press box by slipping past Syracuse 21–20, when we were scheduled to be crushed by them. On that day, Milt Plum became a star quarterback—and my first visible success.

  Plum was brilliant in 1956. He threw the ball only seventy-five times the whole season, fewer than nine times a game. Forty years later, there would be quarterbacks who would throw that often in a single game. But Plum ran well, tackled hard on defense, intercepted seven passes, and one of his punts against Ohio State went 73 yards and stopped at the 3-yard line, perhaps the decisive play in Penn State’s shocking 7–6 upset victory, one many Penn State historians believe started the modern success of the school’s football program. Plum would go on to a long and successful career as a pro quarterback.

  Paterno’s next quarterback project would prove even more successful. Richie Lucas grew up in Glassport, just outside of Pittsburgh. Paterno believed that he saw Lucas’s great talent before anyone else did, before he even became a quarterback. Paterno was watching films of a more highly touted quarterback, Jerry Eisman of nearby Bethel, when he noticed Lucas, a player on the opposing team. Other schools soon noticed him too, and there was a recruiting battle to get him. Paterno won the battle, as he would hundreds of times through the years, by captivating Lucas’s parents, in particular his mother.

  Riverboat Richie Lucas, as he came to be called, became a Penn State legend. He fit Paterno’s ideal of a quarterback perfectly: he was fast and tough, had a good arm, and could make good decisions quickly. But there was something else: as his nickname suggested, he also had a bit of the gambler in him. He liked to take chances, throw the ball downfield, go against conventional thinking. The conservative Paterno was quietly thrilled at this. He did not want quarterbacks who always did the “right” thing; sometimes, as he would tell players, you need to forget what you were taught and just make a play. Lucas instinctively understood that. In 1959 Lucas led Penn State to nine victories in eleven games and finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting behind Louisiana State’s Billy Cannon. He would eventually be inducted into College Football’s Hall of Fame.

  Lucas’s senior year was the year Paterno had his first conversation with Sue Pohland. It was also the year other coaches around the country began to notice him. Weeb Ewbank, who coached Paterno at Brown, wanted him to become an assistant coach for the Baltimore Colts. Nick Skorich asked Paterno to be an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Eagles. Boston College invited him to interview for the head coaching job. And there were other offers. The only job that appealed to him was when the Yale head coaching job opened up in 1962. Paterno was thirty-five, about to be married, and he saw the potential to fulfill his destiny there. Yale had a rich football history; it had fielded one of the first college football teams and was the nation’s most dominant football program before World War I. The program’s success had been sporadic after World War II, but Paterno thought he could rebuild some of the magic. “I wanted that job pretty badly,” he remembered. “The idea of being Yale’s coach for fifteen or twenty years was very appealing to me. I thought we could win some games, we could do it the right way, we could have an impact on some of the bright young men who would help form the future. If they had offered me that job then, I think I might have taken it.”

  Yale did not offer the job in 1962. Two years later, however, the job opened up again, and this time they offered it to Paterno first. Many things had changed in two years, though. Joe and Sue were married, they had a baby daughter, and Paterno’s axis had shifted. He now saw his future more clearly. He wanted to be head coach at Penn State. Rip Engle told Paterno he was going to retire soon. Engle named him associate head coach, making him the clear succession candidate, and Athletic Director Ernie McCoy told Paterno that he was next in line. They all went to see the school’s president, Eric Walker, to get final assurances. “I want to know what my chances are to get the job,” Paterno remembered telling Walker.

  “If you’re good enough, you’ll get the job,” Walker replied.

  And Paterno, certain he was good enough, stayed at Penn State. “I’d just as soon stay here the rest of my life,” he told a reporter at the Penn State newspaper, the Daily Collegian.

  There was one other job offer whose story is worth telling. During this time, a fellow Brooklyn native named Al Davis asked Paterno to be an assistant coach for the Oakland Raiders. Davis, however, never just asked for something he wanted; he went on the attack. But that story needs to wait because it’s more about Sue Paterno than about Joe.

  SUE AND JOE SAW EACH other around campus, and they talked every now and again about their mutual love of literature. Neither could remember exactly when their casual friendship became attraction or when attraction became love. They remembered seeing each other at a lecture on campus by the controversial literary critic Leslie Fiedler. They talked for a long time after that.

  Joe said he fell first. After Sue’s sophomore year, in the summer of 1960, she worked as a waitress at the American Hotel on the Jersey Shore, in a five-block square with the magical name Avon-by-the-Sea. One day, at the house where she was staying with “sixteen girls, five bunk beds, one phone,” Joe called to say that he was in the area (“I don’t even remember what excuse he u
sed,” Sue said) and wanted to meet her for pizza. She already had a date, and she thought so little of Joe’s call that she invited her date to come along. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Sue said. “He’s just a friend. You’ll see. He’s an old man.”

  Joe was almost thirty-four. Sue was twenty. They saw each other around campus the next year, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1961 that their relationship shifted. Sue went back to work on the shore, Paterno rented a house a couple of towns away, and they would spend their free time together on the beach, reading books, discussing them, arguing, laughing. It’s easy to see what Joe saw in Sue: she was pretty and smart, energetic and forceful. What Sue saw in Joe is a bit more complicated. She could have seen a middle-aged assistant coach who still lived in the basement of another family’s home. (Jim O’Hora had had his “It’s time to leave, Joe” chat in June of that year.) Instead she saw a brilliant, kind man with honest intentions and ambitions to do something great. She was pinned to someone else, but that summer she fell in love with Joe Paterno.

  “I figured,” Sue explained, “you know, ‘Dick’s really good-looking and really a good dancer but why spend the rest of your life with a petroleum and natural gas engineer?’ ” In other words, she was not attracted to stability and the expected; she craved an unpredictable life. Joe Paterno offered that. At summer’s end, he asked Sue to marry him, and she accepted. They intended to get married three weeks later, before Sue graduated from Penn State.

  First, though, they would have to tell Sue’s parents, Alma and August Pohland, and that turned out to be an adventure. The Pohlands had gone to New York to see one of Sue’s sisters and to catch a show, and so Sue and Joe went there to tell them the good news. They all met at the Hotel Astor in Times Square. Alma Pohland was a sensible woman; she hardly ever drank, and she was a devout Catholic. They had dinner and planned to see the show Irma La Douce at the Plymouth Theater. The conversation they had in the restaurant of the Hotel Astor wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Broadway.

  Joe: Would you like to have a drink?

  Alma: No thank you.

  Joe: We would like to get married in three weeks.

  Alma: I’ll have a whiskey sour.

  Sue: Well, we . . .

  Alma (grabbing Sue): We’re going to the ladies’ room.

  Sue’s parents convinced her to graduate before she and Joe got married. Then, because Penn State qualified for a bowl game, the wedding was pushed back to May 1962. One of Paterno’s favorite and most polished bits when speaking to alumni groups and after-dinner functions was about their honeymoon. “We planned to go to Europe for two months. But we couldn’t afford it. So we decided on a few weeks in Bermuda. But there were a couple of things that came up with the football team, so that shrunk to two weeks in Bermuda, which became ten days in Florida, and then we settled on a week in Sea Isle, Georgia. The bottom line was that we spent five wonderful days in Virginia Beach—well, four days, because we had to detour to Somerset to see a recruit. Sue waited in the car. We lost him to Miami.”

  “That’s true,” Sue said in her own retelling. “I think his name was Jack White or something. I don’t remember. I read a book in the car. Whatever.”

  That was the word Sue would use many times through the years: whatever. She was not a particularly devoted football fan before meeting Joe, and she had no idea what life as a coach’s wife would be. But that was part of the attraction. “After about two years of marriage, I thought, I wasn’t courted, I was recruited. In those days, you used to be able to take out the recruits’ families for dinner, get the mother flowers, whatever. So that’s what Joe did for me, and I thought, I wasn’t courted, I was recruited. Only it wasn’t for four years.”

  PENN STATE NAMED JOE PATERNO head coach in 1966, a few months before his fortieth birthday. But before then, Al Davis made his push to hire Paterno and make him a coaching star. There were, as mentioned, many offers in the early 1960s, but this one was different because of Al Davis. Even in 1963—long before Davis had become the owner of the Oakland Raiders, the purveyor of a philosophy he called “Commitment to Excellence,” a pro football legend and villain in equal parts—he was a whirlwind.

  Like Paterno, he had grown up on the streets of Flatbush, playing stickball and dreaming big dreams. He became an assistant football coach at a small military college in South Carolina called The Citadel, and there he reinvented the way colleges recruit high school players. He was, as best anyone can tell, the first college coach to send cards to high school coaches asking for information not only about the coach’s own players but about the players his teams had faced. He knew more about players than anyone else. And he recruited ferociously; Paterno first became aware of Davis the year they competed for an Italian American tight end from New Jersey. Davis won the recruiting battle. That’s the kind of salesman he was even then: he coaxed an Italian American football player from New Jersey to come south to play at a military school rather than play for Joe Paterno.

  Paterno had dreamed of going west to coach at Southern California in 1957, but it was actually Davis who got the job. By 1963, Davis had become head coach of the Oakland Raiders, and he decided that Paterno had to be his offensive coordinator. He offered to triple Paterno’s salary, from roughly six thousand to eighteen thousand dollars, to get him a new car, and to put him on track to be the next Vince Lombardi in professional football.

  Paterno said no. He remembered telling Davis, “ ‘Al, you know what? You and I would have a tough time getting along.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m smarter than you, and you would never admit it.’ ” But this was more of Paterno’s vaudeville patter; the real reason was Sue. And Al Davis knew it. Sue had a vision about their life together, a blurry vision to be sure, but one that involved family and college and being at the heart of a community. She had fallen in love with State College the first day she arrived on campus as a student, and though Joe did not know it yet, the rest of his life would be guided by her vision. Joe was cocky, ambitious, principled, smart, consumed by football, and determined to win; those qualities and others would make him a great football coach. But he would become a legend by seeing the world through Sue’s eyes.

  “Sue,” Davis said, because of course he called her after Joe turned him down, “I have to tell you this, and I want you to think about it. You are holding your husband back.”

  He could not have been more wrong.

  ACT II: EXCELLENCE

  I don’t belong anywhere where celebrity equals merit or money means talent or wealth proves achievement.

  —IRISH ACTOR DONAL McCANN

  Paterno addresses Penn State’s graduating seniors at the 1973 commencement ceremonies (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  { Aria }

  Joe Paterno

  commencement address to Penn State’s graduating seniors June 16, 1973

  I chuckle at people who blame the “system” for our problems, just as I laugh at those who claim that we should have blind faith in our government and institutions. What is this notorious “system”?

  In my game, people talk about offensive formations as the cure-all. After we lost to Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, many people asked: “Are you going to switch to the wishbone formation?” Believe me: It isn’t the plays of the offensive system which get the job done. It is the quality of the players which makes the formation effective.

  And it is you who will make the organization work for you and you who will become victims of this system, if you fail to execute your responsibility to yourself and your fellow human beings. You have a part to play and if you loaf or quit, don’t sit back and complain that our method is no good.

  The system, the organization, the method, the government IS you.

  If each of us is easily seduced by expediency, by selfishness, by ambition regardless of cost to our principles, then the spectacle of Watergate will surely mark the end of this grand
experiment in Democracy. One of the tragedies of Watergate is to see so many bright young men, barely over thirty, who have so quickly prostituted their honor and decency in order to get ahead. To be admired. To stay on the “team.” These same young men, within the short period of the last ten years, sat in on convocations such as this. They were ready to change the world. They didn’t trust the over-thirty generation.

  I warn you: Don’t underestimate the world. It can corrupt quickly and completely.

  And heed Walter Lippmann, who wrote several years ago: “It is a mistake to suppose that there is satisfaction and the joy of life in a self-indulgent generation, in one interested primarily in the pursuit of private wealth and private pleasure and private success. We are very rich but we are not having a good time—for our life, though it is full of things, is empty of the kind of purpose and effort that gives to life its flavor and meaning.”

  What Lippmann wants us to realize is that money alone will not make you happy. Success without honor is an unseasoned dish. It will satisfy your hunger. But it won’t taste good.

  Paterno screamed “Go to the ball!” Here, eight Penn State defenders, including Dennis Onkotz (35), George Landis (31), Jack Ham (33), Gary Hull (80), and John Ebersole (89), swarm a Colorado player during the 1969 season (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  The Other Thing

  Paterno sat in the upstairs office of his small house in State College and felt something like desperation. Scraps of graph paper blanketed the thirteen-dollar desk Sue had found at an auction, and on each scrap were pencil scribblings in feverish cursive. Paterno had been head football coach of Penn State University for one year. One disappointing year. He picked up one scrap of paper, read it, then another, a third, pulled out a notepad, scrawled something, threw it down, picked up another piece of paper, read it, crumpled it. He stared out the window for long stretches of time.