Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  His way guided Penn State through the 1968 season undefeated. The final victory, a dramatic 15–14 triumph over Kansas in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, was typical. Penn State did not play well; the Nittany Lions committed four turnovers, a stunning breakdown for a Paterno team. Because of these mistakes Kansas led 14–7 with one minute, thirty seconds left in the game.

  Then the Penn State players put together a series of winning plays. Neal Smith blocked a punt. Quarterback Chuck Burkhart, who was not flashy and would take much abuse throughout his college career because of it, threw a long pass to Bob Campbell to move the ball to the Kansas 3-yard line. After a couple of failed attempts to get the ball into the end zone—and with less than twenty seconds left—Burkhart changed the play just before the snap, kept the ball, and powered into the end zone. Burkhart was supposed to hand the ball off to Penn State’s star running back, Charlie Pittman, but he was sure he saw a small opening, and he ran through it. It was risky; Burkhart was such a limited runner that he had not scored a single touchdown all season. But Paterno said that what Burkhart lacked in pure talent he more than made up for with his nearly flawless instincts. He scored the first touchdown of his career.

  “This will sound like a contradiction because I believe you win with teamwork,” Paterno said. “But football is a contradiction. Life is a contradiction. Sometimes you have to ignore what the coaches tell you, what the players tell you, what anybody tells you, and you have to go out and make the winning play. People thought Chuck wasn’t much of a quarterback because he didn’t throw the ball that well and he didn’t run it that well either. But Chuck understood what it took to win games as well as anybody I ever coached.”

  Paterno had his team go for the 2-point play and the victory. He never considered settling for a tie; that would have gone against everything he believed about being unafraid to lose. The 2-point attempt failed; Burkhart’s pass fell incomplete. The game was lost. And then it wasn’t. Kansas had twelve men on the field. A review of film would show that Kansas actually had twelve men on the field for the two previous plays as well, but the referees had not realized it. This time they noticed. The penalty gave Penn State another chance. This time, running back Bob Campbell took a handoff and scored the 2 points that won the game.

  “The penalty was the big play,” Kansas coach Pepper Rodgers grumbled about his own team’s blunder. He would not be the last coach to mutter those words after facing Joe Paterno.

  HERE IS A STORY ABOUT luck. In the spring of 1967, Joe Paterno called a sophomore football player named Steve Smear to his office. Smear had played offense in high school, but Paterno switched him to the defensive line, one of the many times he shifted a talented player to defense and made him into a star. Smear would become captain of the undefeated 1968 and 1969 teams, a second-team All-American, and one of the legends of Penn State football.

  “I remember that first he told me not to get discouraged by my new position,” Smear said. But this was not the point of the conversation. Paterno told Smear that a Penn State recruit had decided at the last minute to go to another school, and this had opened up a football scholarship. Paterno wanted to know a little bit more about a high school teammate of Smear’s. He asked Smear two questions.

  “Is he a hard worker?”

  “Yes, coach, absolutely,” Smear said.

  “Is he a good guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Paterno said. “Thanks, Steve. See you at practice.”

  That was it. End of discussion. Paterno did not ask any questions about the young man’s talent as a football player. After the conversation, he made Smear’s old friend a last-minute scholarship offer. One of Paterno’s great strengths—and perhaps one of his great flaws—was his fierce loyalty and absolute trust in the people closest to him. Though he had coached Smear for only a year, he had unqualified faith in his judgment. “I knew Steve was a good guy. I knew he would tell me the truth.”

  “It’s not always easy to get his trust,” said Tom Bradley, who played and coached for Paterno for thirty-five years. “But once you have it, you have it all.”

  Smear’s former teammate and friend happily accepted the scholarship—he did not have many other offers—and when he got to campus Paterno moved him from the offensive line to linebacker. (Yes, another player shifted to defense; the story repeats again and again for the next forty years.) Paterno watched the player in spring practice for only a few minutes and then called in his graduate assistant coach, a young man named Jerry Sandusky, and said, “Here’s how I want you to coach him. Don’t coach him! Leave him alone! Don’t change a single thing!”

  The new kid was Jack Ham, who would play with wild abandon for Penn State and the Pittsburgh Steelers and, in time, be inducted into both the College Football of Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Some football experts still call him the best linebacker in the history of football.

  Jack Ham might be the best player Paterno ever found, but he did not spend any time recruiting Ham—he ended up with Ham after the recruiting period ended. It seems impossible to call this anything other than luck, but if something happens again and again, can you still call it luck? Paterno had a startling series of recruiting success stories in the mid- to late 1960s. Other schools certainly offered money under the table, freedom from academic pressures, and guarantees of future stardom, while Paterno offered only a scholarship and the promise of a good education. Is it luck? How often must good fortune happen before it becomes something larger than luck?

  The college football recruiting scene was raw in the late 1960s. There were far fewer regulations and penalties than there are now. “It was the Wild Wild West” is how Paterno put it. Cheating was rampant and only cosmetically camouflaged. Top football recruits drove expensive new cars around campuses across the country and worked at well-paying and largely fictitious jobs such as making sure the sprinklers worked. A representative case might be Joe Namath, a western Pennsylvania high school legend whom Paterno ignored because “he wasn’t much of a student.” Other coaches were not so picky. “It was strange,” Namath famously told Playboy magazine, “coming out of high school and having colleges offer me as much as my father made in a year.”

  Academic standards were preposterously low when it came to football stars. The National Collegiate Athletic Association had set the grade standard for scholarship athletes at 1.6 out of a possible 4.0—barely passing. Even with a bar that low, schools were famous for putting their football players in trumped-up classes that newspaper columnists invariably called “Basket Weaving 101” and “Elements of Bottle Washing.” All of these forms of cheating and others would remain a part of college football throughout Paterno’s life, but the cheating was never quite so brazen and unabashed as in the late 1960s.

  Paterno hated the cheating. The most conspicuous reason for this was his undisguised impulse to value right over wrong. There’s a story Paterno would tell sometimes: When he was in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Brown, there was a secret and contentious vote over a pledge named Steve Fenn, who was Jewish. There had never been a Jewish member of a Brown fraternity. The way Paterno remembered it, two frat brothers secretly blackballed Fenn. Paterno and his friends learned who one of the blackballers was and convinced him to rescind his objection, but they could not discover the identity of the other. This told Paterno that the man was both a bigot and a coward, two qualities he abhorred. When the secret voting started again, Paterno stepped forward and announced, “I’m embarrassed to say this, but I voted the blackball. I would like to withdraw it now.”

  In many ways, that story describes not only Paterno’s sense of fairness but also his strategic sensibilities. He liked to challenge people. Everyone in the fraternity had to know Paterno did not vote the blackball. The ruse was transparent; Paterno had been one of Fenn’s most vocal supporters. But this did not reduce the power of the strategy; the only way the blackballer could call out Paterno as a liar was to reveal himself as a bigo
t. As Paterno told his quarterbacks through the years, “It doesn’t matter if they know a play is coming if they can’t stop it.” He expected that the anti-Semitic frat brother would stay shamefully silent, and he did. Fenn was admitted into the fraternity.

  From more or less his first day as a head coach, Paterno called out those coaches at other schools who cheated and committed academic fraud. He railed against paying players large sums of money, not only because it was against the rules but because he thought it was no way to teach young men about the realities of life. Every one of his five children got jobs in college, even long after he had made his first million. He believed giving too much to an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old—whether in the form of fame, expectations, or riches—could leave permanent scars.

  For Paterno, college football was supposed to be about teaching young men how to live. He would say all the time, “I know this sounds corny” or “People may not believe me,” but this idea was his North Star. Teaching young men how to live. He insisted that schools should—must—challenge football players academically. He believed deeply in education. He may have carried some grudges from his years at Brown, but he also saw his time there as the most intellectually stimulating of his life. “When else in your life do you wake up every morning and the main goal is to learn?” He believed college football players should be challenged and taxed and inspired. He wanted them to be bone-tired at the end of practice. He also wanted them stretching their mental limits trying to decipher Virgil or to consider Napoleon’s motivations or to wrestle with physics formulas long after dark.

  College football worked, he believed, only if the trade was even. At Penn State, a player would give his heart and body to the team, and along the way help make millions of dollars for the school and spark joy and passion in hundreds of thousands of Penn State fans. Paterno understood that was a large sacrifice for a player. In return, the player deserved a matching reward, the biggest any school could offer: his players would leave Penn State prepared to live a full life. What could mean more? That was the only way the trade was fair. Yes, he expected players to get their degrees—between 80 and 90 percent of Penn State football players graduated over the years—but that was only part of the deal. More, much more, he wanted players to be prepared for all that followed, to learn how to be successful, to be good husbands, good fathers, to know how to fight through the hard times and overcome mistakes and achieve more than they thought possible. This was Paterno’s deal, and if colleges failed those students, the deal was broken. Paterno looked at those schools who gave players money and grades and easy ways out, and it disgusted him.

  “You will hear people talk about paying the players,” he explained. “And I think football players should get a little stipend, some spending money so they can go to the movies and go out with their friends without feeling embarrassed. But you can’t turn college football into professional football. The formula doesn’t work. If you pay a big star $100,000 to play college football, and you don’t discipline him and make him a better person, you are getting him on the cheap. You are using him. You are failing him.”

  Paterno’s sense of fair play would strike people differently through the years. Some thought him holier-than-thou. His own brother, George, complained about what he considered Joe’s sanctimony. Others thought he was simply lying about his commitment to education or Penn State’s vigilance about not paying college players or his utopian dreams for college football. Every misstep he made, especially those at the end of his life, would confirm the hypocrisy charges to the critics and the cynics and the people who found themselves unmoved and unconvinced by his stand on ethics and academics.

  But there are more than forty years of stories and testimonials that show Paterno lived what he believed. The interview files for this book are bursting with player quotes like this, from the 1986 team captain Bob White: “You understood that if you didn’t go to class, you didn’t play. That wasn’t a punishment. In Joe’s mind, it was all the same thing.” Or this from tight end Mickey Shuler, who told Paterno he was hoping to play in the NFL: “He looked at me kind of surprised . . . then he shocked me by saying he didn’t know I wanted to play professional football. He thought I wanted to be a teacher and coach like my dad . . . . It wasn’t until later in life that I realized Joe didn’t just see me as a football player, but as someone with potential to be whatever I wanted to be.”

  And so on. There are so many quotes like these from former players that after a while they lose their power; they sound alike and induce involuntary eye rolls. Paterno impressed upon so many of his players, through so many years, exactly the same thing: Go to class. Be on time. Don’t make excuses. Get up after you fall. Play to win. A sportswriter named Charles Culpepper hit on something when challenged about Paterno’s friend and rival Bobby Bowden, Florida State’s football coach. Bowden coached college football for fifty years, and he was an impossibly charming and jovial man with a wonderful sense of humor, both about himself and the world. “The guy’s a phony,” a Florida State hater said to Culpepper.

  “Yeah?” Culpepper replied. “Well, to do it that long, it’s one hell of an act.”

  PATERNO CALLED HIS ATTEMPT TO marry football, academics, and life lessons “a grand experiment.” In short order, those three words would become capitalized, and “a” would be replaced by “The.” These simple changes reshape the meaning, no? “The Grand Experiment” sounds so much more certain and cocksure and presumptuous. There’s a reason for this. Paterno first talked about his bold ideas with a Philadelphia sportswriter named Bill Conlin, who was, well, certain and cocksure and presumptuous. Paterno may have referred to it as “a grand experiment,” but Conlin pierced through the timidity and called it “The Grand Experiment.” Conlin had grown up in Brooklyn, had seen Paterno play football in high school, had gone to Brooklyn Prep, and so even though the men were very different, they understood each other. Conlin’s life as a sportswriter was big and bold, full of arrogance and brilliance. His career would end right around the time Paterno’s coaching career ended, with a long story in a Philadelphia newspaper reporting accusations that he had molested children many years earlier. Conlin denied the charges and, shortly afterward, suffered a nervous breakdown. Even after that, though, in an email exchange with me, he wanted it remembered that he had coined “The Grand Experiment.”

  The Grand Experiment was built on Paterno’s beliefs about education and fair play, of course, but there was also a powerful third reason, perhaps the most powerful one of all: The Grand Experiment worked. Paterno understood that he did not have the charisma of Bear Bryant or the molten fury of Ohio State’s Woody Hayes or the studious calm of UCLA’s basketball coach John Wooden. What Paterno had was confidence and a clear vision. He was honest. He used that honesty, cultivated it. Other coaches recruited the players; Paterno recruited the parents. Other coaches made promises; Paterno made demands. Other coaches made their recruiting trips fun and exhilarating; player after player after player said that their Penn State recruiting visits were boring beyond exaggeration.

  Paterno’s honesty came from a real place, of course: from the Brooklyn streets, from his insistent mother, from what his brother called his “pathological need to do the right thing.” But he was shrewd enough to see how well it worked for him. The players who were drawn to his frank observations were exactly the sort of players he wanted in the first place. For instance, Lydell Mitchell was a star high school running back from New Jersey. Paterno happened to have a surplus of star running backs already. The great running back Charlie Pittman was already on his team; another gifted high school star from New Jersey, Franco Harris, seemed intent on committing to Penn State. But Paterno still wanted Mitchell, not only because of his speed and talent but also because “he was such a great person.”

  Mitchell, though, had decided to go to Ohio State. Or, anyway, that’s what he thought he had decided. One day after he had made his decision, Mitchell heard his name over the high school intercom and w
as told to report to the office. When he got there, he saw Joe Paterno waiting. He braced himself for an uncomfortable conversation.

  “Um, Coach, thanks for coming,” Mitchell said. “But I’m not interested in going to Penn State. I’m going to Ohio State.”

  “I know,” Paterno said. “You’re afraid to come to Penn State because Charlie Pittman is there and you can’t compete with him.”

  Whatever Mitchell might have been expecting Paterno to say, that wasn’t it. He was furious. “Yeah?” he said. “I’ll come up there and break every Penn State record there is.”

  That’s just what Lydell Mitchell did.

  Honesty worked with the kind of players Paterno wanted to coach. He did not promise players they would start. He told them plainly that they had to go to class or they wouldn’t play. He would often say, “We would like to have you come to Penn State. But we don’t need you.” He challenged them to reach for something bigger within themselves. Every time he gathered together a bunch of recruits, he would give the same speech: “Not all of you are cut out for Penn State. Here, we go to class. Here we wear ties when we travel. Here we wear plain uniforms, and we don’t showboat, and we follow rules. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I understand, and I suggest you go somewhere else.” That kind of recruiting pitch may not sound all that appealing, but it had three powerful pulls.

  One: It appealed to parents.

  Two: It appealed to the kind of players Paterno wanted at Penn State and eliminated many he did not. Any player who recoiled from his challenges was a player Paterno did not want anyway.

  Three: Perhaps most significantly, Paterno’s directness had a muscular salesmanship of its own. “Young men crave discipline,” he said many, many times.

  “Joe Paterno didn’t lie to me,” Steve Smear said, and dozens of others said the same thing. It turned out that many players did not want to be told how great they were. It turned out many wanted to go to college and be challenged mentally as well as physically. Many found themselves drawn to Paterno’s ideal of “being part of something bigger than yourself.” When Joe Paterno recruited you, player after player said, it felt like Penn State was offering something just a little bit more honorable than what the other schools were selling.