Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  PATERNO PROSELYTIZED PENN STATE FOOTBALL. In those days, the power of college football was concentrated in the South, the Midwest, a bit out West, more or less everywhere but in the Northeast. The stars of coaching were Bear Bryant at Alabama, Woody Hayes at Ohio State, Darrell Royal at Texas, John McKay at Southern California, and Ara Parseghian at Notre Dame in Indiana. To people around America, eastern football sparked images of undersized Ivy League kids bashing into each other between classes on Chaucer. When Paterno became head coach at Penn State, there were 46,000 seats at Beaver Stadium, and many of those were empty on game day.

  So Paterno preached. He and Penn State’s sports information director, Jim Tarman, traveled to Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Cleveland, and New York—and also to smaller places like Altoona and Scranton and Hazleton—and they gave speeches, told jokes, shook hands, and, most of all, wooed reporters. They carried heavy suitcases filled with bottles of whiskey, just enough to loosen the conversation, and they traveled to every Optimists Club and Rotary Club and Alumni Club they could find. The reporters inevitably showed up at the hotel, where Paterno turned on his Brooklyn charm. The reporters enjoyed the liquor but also found a football coach unlike any they had ever encountered. He talked with them about Greek mythology and the writing style of Fitzgerald and the politics of Nixon. He did not hide his disdain for corruption in college sports (a favorite topic for newspaper reporters), and he refused to speak in clichés (a favorite trait of newspaper reporters). Paterno loved to argue, and he found that newspaper reporters and columnists generally enjoyed doing so as well. “Joe turns it on,” the longtime Philadelphia sports columnist Bill Lyon warned, “and you’re dead.”

  Later, especially in the last fifteen years of his life, Paterno would wage a cold war with the media. He would become secretive, dismissive, and cranky. In response, many of the reporters became distrusting and snarky. It’s hard to tell who turned first or hardest, and in the end it did not matter. College football had changed. The media had changed. The world had changed. And, though it sounds simplistic, perhaps Paterno did not want to change. “We used to be a lot closer,” he would say, not without regret in his voice.

  It’s true: in those early years, reporters loved Joe Paterno, and he loved them, and together they built up the aura and importance and wonder of Penn State football. “You do a little research,” the longtime Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez said, “and you see what Knute Rockne did for Notre Dame. He took that little school and he crisscrossed the country on a train before we had media like we have today. So the big newspapers are writing about this midwest Catholic school Notre Dame like it was some bastion of learning and a huge university . . . . Joe did the same thing at Penn State. To put it on the map, to get people around the country to know who Penn State is, and to have him stamp that school as one of the best football schools—I think he did the same thing Rockne did.”

  In November 1968, toward the end of Paterno’s first undefeated season, Dan Jenkins wrote a story for Sports Illustrated whose soaring opening paragraph created the template for the Joe Paterno stories that would follow for three decades:

  A Beethoven symphony swirls through the mind of a defensive tackle. A linebacker earnestly dashes to physics class on the morning of a game. Test tubes intrigue a cornerback; math fascinates a center; engineering problems make a safety swoon. And while the youthful keeper of these characters, 41-year-old Penn State coach Joe Paterno, should be fretting about his team’s possible climb toward No. 1 or an Orange Bowl bid, he stares at the boutique-colored leaves of the pastoral Alleghenies, thinks about Romantic poets and longs to drive his kids over to Waddle or Martha Furnace or Tusseyville so they can sit down and talk to a cow.

  Jenkins was a famously sardonic writer—he was the author of the raunchy and hilarious football novels Semi-Tough and Life Its Ownself—and yet even he could not help but fall for what seemed sweet and old-fashioned and enlightened about Joe Paterno and the program he was building. Paterno never did drive his kids to Waddle to talk to cows, nor did he spend much time staring at leaves, but after Jenkins, writer after writer celebrated his ambitions.

  Mike Reid was that defensive tackle who heard Beethoven playing in his mind. Reid had grown up in Altoona, about forty miles from State College, and he was a terrifying and marvelous football player. “Mike Reid was the only guy I really—I don’t say I feared him, but I stayed away,” his teammate Don Abbey said. But Reid was not typical. He never wanted football to take up too much of his life. He never believed the coach’s stuff about football defining character.

  Reid loved music. He would often joke that for him football was the sissy game, and music was the manly endeavor. When he was twelve, he bought an organ for $1,500, saving pennies from his paper route for two years to pay for it, and he spent every free minute playing, tinkering, listening to the sounds. He was a star football player and an eastern collegiate heavyweight wrestling champion, so people found it hard to understand how much music moved him.

  But it did. Abbey remembered the time he and Reid went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the music began for the famous space ballet involving docking stations, Reid said admiringly, “Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube.’ ” In front of them a couple of kids snickered loudly. When the movie ended and the two kids started to leave, Reid stood up, pushed them back in their seats, and made them understand that they had just been listening to beautiful music.

  Paterno was the ideal coach for Reid. He encouraged Reid to follow his musical dreams even if it meant missing practice, as it often did. Paterno made it clear that he expected Reid to think beyond football, to chase hard after his muse and what mattered to him most. After graduation, Reid became a pro football star in Cincinnati, but at twenty-seven, he quit football to concentrate on his music. In time he became a renowned songwriter and an admired composer. Though he would lose touch with Paterno and Penn State football as both of them became more celebrated, he always believed that Paterno had helped him become a man. “I had a fear of Joe,” Reid told reporter Bob Hertzel of the Times West Virginian. “And it certainly wasn’t physical because any one of us could have grabbed his scrawny little neck and wrung it . . . . I lived in fear of disappointing him, the same way I did with my Mom and Dad.”

  Dennis Onkotz was the linebacker who insisted on taking a physics exam on the day of a game. “I won’t sleep anyway,” he had told Paterno. In many ways he and Reid defined The Grand Experiment as much as Paterno did. Onkotz was both an All-American and an Academic All-American. He led the team in tackles and posted a 3.5 grade point average. Paterno had this utopian ideal of what college football could be, but Reid and Onkotz and others were living it. They were showing him possibilities beyond his own aspirations.

  “Everything is changing,” he told Dan Jenkins. “And the kids want to change the world.”

  Nixon

  When the 1968 football season ended, Paterno was offered what he called a staggering amount of money to become the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was a tempting offer for many reasons, money being only one of them. Sue had grown up in Latrobe, about forty miles from Pittsburgh. Art Rooney, who owned the Steelers, was a tough former boxer whom Paterno admired deeply. The chance to coach the greatest players tempted the strategic side of him. But he turned it down. “I think coaching should be fun, and I’m not sure I could get that out of pro football,” he told reporters. It wasn’t a particularly big story in 1968. The Steelers hired a relatively obscure Baltimore Colts assistant named Chuck Noll, who would lead them to four Super Bowl victories. The next big offer for Paterno would stun America.

  Paterno had relatively little trouble turning down the Steelers because he knew that “unless we become fatheads” his 1969 team would be one of the best in the country. Deep down he believed it would be the best team in the country. Penn State’s defense—featuring Jack Ham, Mike Reid, Dennis Onkotz, and Steve Smear, among other stars—would prove almost impossible to score against. The offense
was built around three great running backs—Charlie Pittman, Franco Harris, and the motivated Lydell Mitchell—and a quarterback who had never lost a college game, Chuck Burkhart. It was a dream team, and Paterno thought he might never get to coach one quite as gifted. He believed that Penn State could again win every game. And he believed that this time, unlike in 1968, when his undefeated team finished second in the national rankings, they could finish as the No. 1 team in America.

  On the field, things went more or less the way Paterno had envisioned. Penn State outscored opponents 312 to 87 over the season. They shut out West Virginia and Maryland. Only two games all year were close, and one of those was only cosmetically close; the Nittany Lions led Kansas State 17–0 before resting their starters and settling for a closer-than-it-was 17–14 score. The other game was legitimately close, a comeback 15–14 victory over Syracuse that left Coach Ben Schwartzwalder seething about the officiating. “If there were three or five bad calls, there would be no reason to complain,” he said after the game. “This isn’t five or six or even seven calls. This is a case of twenty-five or more bad calls. And it was seemingly unending.”

  Schwartzwalder charged Paterno with cursing and intimidating the officials. That set off Paterno’s fierce temper. Through the years, he would sometimes act rashly when he believed his honor or authority were being questioned. “It is one part of my personality I’ve never been able to conquer,” he said with regret in his voice.

  As for Schwartzwalder’s sour grapes, Paterno told the New York Times, “It’s disappointing that a leading member of our coaching profession would resort to this type of attack after such a great game by two outstanding teams.” As for the complaints about his cursing and intimidating, he said, “I’m not going to even waste time to dignify such an accusation.”

  That bit of ugliness aside, Penn State breezed through a marvelous season. After Syracuse, no team came within 20 points of the Nittany Lions. But the larger story, at least at the time, was how little respect the so-called experts had for eastern football. Penn State had started the season No. 3 in the polls and had moved up to No. 2 before the close victories against Kansas State and Syracuse. After those, the Nittany Lions dropped all the way to eighth in the Associated Press poll (voted by sportswriters), and they were not in the top five in the United Press International poll (voted by football coaches). Even when they moved up to No. 4 in late November, Paterno griped, “This has got to be the first time in history a team wins every game for two straight seasons and doesn’t get a No. 1 ranking a single week.”

  In those days, bowl games recruited teams the way teams recruited players. There were four major bowl games—Rose, Orange, Sugar, and Cotton—and a handful of minor bowls, such as the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando and the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston. There were complicating factors involved in the invitations; for instance, a convoluted agreement with the Big Ten Conference stipulated that a team could not go to the Rose Bowl in back-to-back years. But for the most part, bowl scouts in labeled jackets crisscrossed the country in an effort to identify and then woo the right team to come play in their game.

  Both the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl wanted Penn State. So, in the third week of November, Paterno and his players had a decision to make. If they went to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, they would play the winner of the Texas–Arkansas game. Both of those teams were undefeated, so that would make for a fascinating matchup, but it would also mean Penn State would play Texas or Arkansas in the Southwest in front of a mostly hostile crowd. The other option was to go back to the Orange Bowl in Miami, an experience the players had enjoyed the season before.

  When it came to the national rankings, it did not seem to matter which game they chose. Ohio State was undefeated and all but locked in as No. 1. Many people were calling that Ohio State team the best ever, but because of the strange agreement the Big Ten had with the Rose Bowl, the Buckeyes were not going to any bowl game. They would surely end the season undefeated and would undoubtedly win their second straight consensus national championship. Everyone else was playing for No. 2.

  This made Penn State’s decision superfluous—or so it seemed. The players wanted to go to Miami again for various reasons. Some of the black players, such as Pittman, Mitchell, and Harris, were reluctant to go to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, which they had heard to be a racist city, and which they still associated with the assassination of President Kennedy a little more than five years earlier. Other players simply thought Miami was a more exciting destination. Paterno probably did not feel especially moved to play Texas or Arkansas in their home territory when the national championship was already decided. In the end, Penn State announced that it would play Missouri, considered by many to be the best offensive team in the country, in the Orange Bowl.

  Then, five days after the announcement, Ohio State was stunned by Michigan and its new coach Bo Schembechler, once Woody Hayes’s key assistant. That changed everything. The Associated Press poll suddenly looked like this:

  1. Texas

  2. Arkansas

  3. Penn State

  4. Ohio State

  5. Southern California

  Suddenly, Penn State’s decision to play in the Orange Bowl looked disastrous. Texas and Arkansas would play each other the next week, and the winner of that game would unquestionably be ranked No. 1, with Penn State ranked No. 2. If Penn State had chosen to play in the Cotton Bowl, they would have had a chance to play for the national championship. “We can’t worry about it now,” Steve Smear told a UPI reporter. “But I sure wish we could change our mind.”

  They could not change their minds; they had committed to the Orange Bowl. Instead Paterno thought it best that Penn State go on a public relations attack. He gave interview after interview about how good his team was, how amazing its winning streak was, how Penn State had as good a case as Texas or Arkansas or anybody else to be voted No. 1.

  And then the president of the United States stepped in.

  PATERNO REMEMBERED THAT YEAR, 1969, as a time when everything felt heightened, when young people and old shouted and it seemed no one was listening: “Everybody was protesting everything.”

  The Texas–Arkansas game received a lot of hype. It pitted the No. 1 team against the No. 2 team in what was being celebrated as the hundredth year of college football. So, yes, it was inevitable that the game would be on the radar of President Richard Nixon. For one thing, Nixon was a huge football fan. He had played football at Whittier College (more to the point, he was on the team). He idolized players and coaches. As David Maraniss writes in his biography of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, Nixon had his counselor John Mitchell do a background check on Lombardi as a possible running mate in the 1968 presidential election. (That idea went nowhere; Mitchell found out that Lombardi was a Kennedy Democrat.)

  It may have been Nixon’s great love of football that inspired him to get in the middle of the Texas–Arkansas extravaganza, but perhaps even more significant was his love of votes. Nixon had lost Texas by a slim margin in the 1968 election, and he had been crushed by third-party candidate George Wallace in Arkansas. He had no real footing in the South. What better way to gain ground in Texas and Arkansas than through college football?

  On the Saturday morning of the game, Nixon flew into Fort Smith, Arkansas, where a sizable crowd welcomed him. “To get this kind of welcome, in the heart of the country, right here in Arkansas, means a great deal to me,” he proclaimed. “All that I know is that we are going to see today, in this one-hundredth anniversary of football, one of the great football games of all time, and both of them I wish could be number one. But at the end, whichever is number one will deserve it, and the number two team will still go to a bowl and be a great team.”

  Paterno was unaware of this speech, which not only gave the official White House No. 1 spot to the Texas–Arkansas game winner but suggested strongly that the loser was the No. 2 team. Apparently Penn State did not even merit mention. The worst indignity for Paterno
and Penn State, however, was yet to come.

  The Texas–Arkansas game was a classic—at least, that’s how it was portrayed. Texas turned the ball over six times and fell behind 14–0. Then the Longhorns scored a touchdown and added a 2-point conversion. Arkansas quarterback Bill Montgomery, with his team deep in Texas territory, tried an ill-advised pass that was intercepted. This gave Texas the ball and the chance to drive for a touchdown that gave them a 15–14 lead. Montgomery threw another interception in the last minute, and Texas won by the same score with which Penn State had beaten Kansas in the Orange Bowl. People almost immediately began calling it “The Game of the Century.”

  Nixon was omnipresent. During halftime he chatted happily with ABC announcer Chris Schenkel and Bud Wilkinson, the legendary former coach at Oklahoma whom Nixon had hired as a special consultant. “Great stuff,” White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman would write in his diary. “Especially at half-time, when P gave thorough analysis of the game so far, and outlook for second half, which proved 100% accurate. And some really good stuff in the locker rooms, talking to the players. A real coup with the sports fans.”

  After the game, Nixon visited the victorious locker room and—to the horror of Joe Paterno, his team, and the state of Pennsylvania—presented Texas coach Darrell Royal with a presidential plaque. “For a team to be behind 14 to 0 and then not lose its cool and to go on to win, that proves that you deserve to be number one, and that is what you are.”