Sue had never seen him like this. She had known him to be driven, of course, but this was something different, and a bit frightening. He woke up at 5:30 every morning, went into the room he used as an office, closed the door, and stayed in there all day. This was the spring and summer of 1967. The Paternos had three small children: Diana, the oldest, was four; Mary Kay was two; David was not even a year old. Joe did not seem to know them. He stayed in that makeshift office, often through lunch, often all afternoon, and when he emerged for dinner he had a dazed look, like a child coming out of a dark movie theater. He would look at Sue and the kids with an expression that seemed to say “Hey, what are you all doing here?” More often than not, he would take his dinner back to the office.
He called the project The Other Thing. Well, he did not actually have a name for it, but he would often tell Sue, “I gotta go work on the other thing” or “I have a meeting, and then I need to get on the other thing.” Sue worried about The Other Thing. She worried about him. She worried about herself. It was a summer of worrying. She took the children to Welch Pool for four and five hours at a time, just to get them out of the house, just to get them away from the tension and strain that seemed to rise off their father like steam. Joe did not seem aware of when they were home or when they were gone. He lost weight. He walked around oblivious. He was unresponsive, even to his young children.
“We could have moved out,” Sue said, “and he wouldn’t have noticed. He might have noticed when he came out and there was no dinner there for him. But he might not even have noticed that. He was in his own world.”
“I always tell our players that you can’t be scared to lose,” Joe said. “That summer, if I’m being honest with myself, I was scared to death.”
HIS FIRST GAME AS HEAD coach ended without a handshake. Nobody had been surprised when Penn State hired Paterno in February 1966; that had been an inevitability ever since he turned down the Yale job. But it’s also true that nobody knew him as anything other than the quirky assistant coach who yelled a lot and told funny stories and obsessed over the game.
“He wanted to be like Lombardi,” said Don Abbey, one of Paterno’s first recruits. “At that time he was all scream-y, swear-y. Later I would hear players say that Joe Paterno never swore. Well, I can tell you he grew into that. At first, he was vicious on the field. Vicious. He would get in players’ faces and yell, ‘You’re a fucking coward’ and that sort of thing. Nothing like the ‘real Joe.’ Nothing like Joe became.”
Ambition consumed him. At the end of his life, he would appreciate that there were complicated and conflicting things clashing around inside him when he was named Penn State’s head coach. He was thirty-nine; many of his friends had long before achieved their professional success. He had never come to grips with the wishes, or the death, of his father. And he was not even sure that he could be successful. He was a head football coach at a school in a remote Pennsylvania town with a football team that, though a consistent winner, had made little impact on the national college football scene. Even the hiring process felt small and insignificant. “We would like you to be Penn State’s football coach,” Athletic Director Ernie McCoy had said.
“I’d like that,” Paterno said. “I think it’s the best job in the country.”
“Good,” McCoy said. “We’ll pay you twenty thousand a year.”
They shook hands and that was it. No contract. No haggling. No promises. Four or five years later, Alabama’s legendary coach Bear Bryant, peerless among football coaches in his ability to consolidate power, was mortified to learn that Paterno still did not have a contract. “You get yourself a contract,” he ordered. “And you be sure that you get them to include two hundred tickets in there.”
“Two hundred tickets?” Paterno asked. “Why?”
Bryant smiled. Paterno would remember that smile the rest of his life. His fascination and curiosity about the great coach never faded. Bryant, the old southern politician, said plainly, “Two hundred tickets will get you a lot of favors.”
That was all much later. In that first year Paterno felt inadequate. He did not trust his future to any other coach, so he called all the plays, offensive and defensive. He did not trust his players to play their best, so he worked them harder than he ever would again. When I asked him at the end if he felt such a desperate need to achieve because his father had died young, or because of the driving personality of his mother, or because achievement had been the overpowering theme of his life, Paterno shrugged. He did not like to be analyzed. He simply said, “Yeah, sure, all of that.”
All of that. The players in that first year had conflicting memories of Paterno. The consensus sided with Abbey: that Paterno mimicked Lombardi, played the role of a tyrant who worked them beyond the point of exhaustion and demanded of them something just beyond perfection. Dave Rowe, a marvelous defensive guard who played with such joy that his teammates called him “Hap,” was thrown off the team briefly for breaking curfew. This might not be worth noting—football players get thrown off teams all the time for breaking curfew—but in Rowe’s case he was out late on the night after a game. Coaches rarely even have curfews the night after a game. And Rowe was spending that time with his new wife.
“Interestingly, I carried being thrown off the team through my thirteen years in the NFL,” Rowe said. “In the pros, I never broke a rule. I know that sounds unbelievable, but I remember how devastated I was when I was thrown off and realized how much football meant to me.”
Then again, not everyone remembered Paterno as a tyrant in that first year. Mike Irwin, who was co-captain of that team and later coached under Paterno, remembered that Paterno had actually gotten too loose and mellow and had lost the fire that made him such a force as an assistant coach.
Either way, the larger point remains: Paterno was not himself that first year. His style was unformed. The assistant coach who always believed he was right turned spectacularly indecisive as a head coach. He changed the offense from Rip Engle’s Wing-T—the offense Paterno had led at Brown, the offense that had brought him to State College in the first place—to the more modern I formation, where two running backs line up behind the quarterback as if waiting in a line for coffee. He then changed back. He switched quarterbacks. One minute he seemed eager to prove that he was not at all like Engle, and when that felt wrong he tried to be more understanding and calm, and when that felt wrong he switched again.
Penn State did win Paterno’s first game against Maryland, but it was such a miserable performance by both teams that the Maryland coach, a character named Lou Saban, did not even show up for the traditional postgame handshake. Saban called two days later to semi-apologize. “Ah, I shoulda shook your hand,” Paterno would remember him saying, “but you guys stunk so bad, we stunk worse, it just didn’t seem right to shake hands about it.”
Paterno didn’t disagree. The next week, his team was destroyed 42–8 by the top-ranked team in the country, Michigan State. That told Paterno how far away his team was from greatness. The week after that, Penn State lost to Army 11–0. That told Penn State fans how far his team was from even being good.
“After that Army game, you wouldn’t believe some of the letters I got,” Paterno said. “In all the years I was at Penn State, I would say some of the most vicious letters I got were in that first year after we got shut out against Army.” His first thought was that he could somehow joke people out of their rage—that was how arguments were handled on the streets of Brooklyn. But this was a different level of anger than he had ever endured. People called Paterno’s home (his number was listed, and would remain listed throughout his life) and screamed at Sue. A doctor in East Stroudsburg sent letters filled with such contempt that Paterno would remember them for the rest of his life. “Oh, I knew enough even then not to worry about what people said. But I wouldn’t be entirely truthful if I didn’t add that it was a bit eye-opening. Here it was, I had only coached three games, and people had decided I had no idea what I was doing. Maybe
they were right, but it wasn’t like we had been a great team the year or two before.”
Two weeks after the Army debacle, Paterno decided to entirely change his team’s defense in an effort to stop a talented UCLA offense featuring a future Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Gary Beban. This move foreshadowed what would be a Paterno trademark: his willingness to start over and do whatever was necessary strategically to win. But it would also demonstrate just how raw he was as a coach, that he didn’t yet understand his own limitations. The staff was still trying to teach the players the new defense on Friday, the day before the game, which, as Paterno would say, “is way too late. If you’re still teaching on Friday, you’re dead before you get started.” He learned that lesson. In later years, he would be at his most relaxed on Fridays, because by then, in one of his favorite Latin phrases, Alea iacta est. The die is cast.
But he did not know that yet, and his defensive players were utterly confused. The Bruins destroyed Penn State 49–11, and to make things more agonizing, UCLA’s coach, Tommy Prothro, ordered a late onside kick, a play that is used almost exclusively when a team is trailing and in a desperate situation. Paterno believed Prothro was trying to embarrass him and his team, and it made him seethe.
Little went right. The week of the Syracuse game, Sue Paterno came up with a plan to liven things up. On Thursday night, she, Sandra Welsh (wife of assistant coach George Welsh), and Nancy Radakovich (wife of assistant coach Dan Radakovich) sneaked over to the Nittany Lion statue at the heart of campus and splattered a little washable orange paint on it, Syracuse’s color, and strung up a few orange streamers. Their idea was to get the Penn State students riled up and ready for Syracuse. “It was way too quiet,” Sue explained. “Nobody was showing any spirit at all.” The wives were so nervous they didn’t realize that most of the paint had ended up on their own coats.
The next morning, the radio news announced that the Nittany Lion statue had been painted orange and the police knew the identity of the criminals; jail time was being considered. Joe flipped. He had so many other problems, and now his wife might go to jail for painting the most beloved statue on campus orange. It was more than he could handle. He called home to tell Sue that she was going to be arrested.
“Joe was mad,” Sue recalled. “I mean he was really mad. I had thought it was just some good clean fun, but Joe was never like that. He has always had the strongest sense of right and wrong—the strongest sense of anyone I have ever known. He was outraged. If they had sent me to jail, I don’t even think Joe would have fought it. He even told me, ‘If you go to jail, I’ll have to find someone to take care of the kids.’ ”
As it turned out, the wives had splashed only a little bit of paint on the statue, probably even less than they remembered, considering how nervous they were. But then, perhaps inspired by the idea, some Syracuse students had come along and painted the Nittany Lion orange from mane to tail, and they had done the job in oil paint. In the end, three Syracuse fans did a little jail time, Sue’s prank would be retold every year, gaining new and more exciting details all the time, and every homecoming week Penn State students would make a show of protecting the Nittany Lion from fans of the opposing team.
Even with all of that, Syracuse beat Penn State 12–10.
Penn State came together well enough to beat the University of Pittsburgh in the last game of the season to salvage a 5-5 record; this mattered because the school had not had a losing season since 1938. But Paterno took no comfort from this. Years before, he had followed his fatum, his inner voice, and it had taken him away from law school, away from New York, away from the life of accomplishment his parents had planned for him. The voice had taken him to State College to be an assistant coach for sixteen years. Why? He had to believe it was for something great. Then, in his first year as head coach, the team had lost as many games as it won, and many people thought he was overmatched as a head coach. He had to admit to himself that he was not even a good football coach, much less a great one.
“I’ll tell you what I think happened that first year,” Paterno would say in a rousing soliloquy. “I was pointed in the wrong direction. I wanted to be successful. That was my mistake. I wanted to be one of the great ones. I wanted to be as big as Lombardi, as big as Bear, as big as Woody Hayes or Bobby Dodd. I had forgotten Rip’s lesson: ‘It’s not our team. It’s their team.’
“And so, that first year I was acting like a coach. I had watched the great coaches closely, and I was doing things the way I thought they did them. I wasn’t a dumb kid, you know? I was almost forty years old, and I knew a lot about football. I knew how to win. But I didn’t know how to infuse that into the players. I had a lot of doubt, my coaches had a lot of doubt, it all trickled down.
“A good coach, a good manager, a good leader of any kind shows no doubt. And they can make players understand that the greatest thing in the world is to lose yourself to something bigger. How could I ask my players to do that when I wasn’t willing to do it? I kept thinking of it as my team. But it wasn’t my team. That’s not a bad title for your book: ‘It Was Never My Team.’ ”
THE OTHER THING WAS PATERNO’S strategic plan to prove that he was a great coach. To everyone. To himself. It was nothing less than his attempt to reinvent the game of football.
Though Paterno had achieved much of his playing success as a quarterback and his greatest coaching success as a molder of quarterbacks, he had come to believe that the best way to win football games was with a great defense. This was something many football coaches believed, but for Paterno it would become a guiding philosophy. Years later, he would scribble a fascinating little note to himself, sort of a miniature Socratic discussion about how to win:
There are two ways to build a football team.
1. Solid kicking.
Dominant defense.
Limited offense that doesn’t take chances because it doesn’t have to.
OR
2. Solid kicking.
An offense that is all over the place—big plays—deep passes—take chances because they can, but have to take chances because the defense is going to give up points.
You won’t win all of your games playing that second way. You have a bad game throwing it. You fall behind and never catch up. You have to go the length of the field.
It is rare to go to a Rose Bowl and win a national championship without a great defense. The only way to control a game is with a great defense.
After the 1966 season, Paterno felt certain the way to make Penn State a great football program was to build that great defense. He shut himself into that upstairs office, shut the door, sat at that thirteen-dollar desk, and worked on designing a defense that had never been seen before. That was The Other Thing, a new kind of defense, and to build it Paterno would have to go deeper inside himself than he ever had in his life.
THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY WITH COACHING defense is this: You don’t know what the offense will try to do. That may sound obvious and simple, but this is the challenge that has baffled and inspired defensive football coaches since the game was invented.
The offensive team calls a play, and all eleven players know the play. They know what they want to do. They know where they are supposed to go. They act.
Defensive players must react. “On offense, you only think about one play, the play you’re running,” Paterno explained. “On defense, you have to think about a lot of plays. You have to be ready for anything.”
The struggles of the 1966 season convinced Paterno of two things. First, he wanted his best athletes playing defense. This would become a Paterno staple; for the rest of his career he would take great offensive players from high school and put them on defense. There is example after example; he even put one of his greatest offensive players, Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti, on defense for a while. Perhaps the most extreme example happened when Paterno tried to recruit a brilliant high school quarterback named Jim Kelly. Paterno wanted him to play linebacker. Kelly wanted to stay at quart
erback. He became a star at the University of Miami, led the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As a quarterback.
When a friend kidded Paterno about being the coach who wanted to shift Kelly to linebacker, he remained defiant: “You don’t know. He might have been an even better linebacker.”
But improving the defensive talent was only the first step. The second: Paterno wanted to conjure up a defense that would baffle and frustrate coaches for years. People will argue whether he invented something new at that desk in his home over that Summer of Love, or if he simply cobbled together some of the better ideas already in circulation. Either way, he called his new defense the 4-4-3. And for the next few years, the Penn State defense would terminate every offensive plan thrown its way.
Here was Paterno’s thinking: For many years, teams lined up seven defensive players close to the line of scrimmage. The combination of players changed—it might be three defensive linemen and four linebackers, or four defensive linemen and three linebackers, or some other blend—but the core number stayed the same: seven. This was important because it left four players downfield to protect against deeper passes and to act as a last line of defense should an offensive player break through the front lines. Defensive coaches tinkered with the alignment, but in general this was the accepted philosophy: seven in front, four in what was called the secondary.
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