This wasn’t even the worst of it. Between the time Nixon landed in Fort Smith and the time he spoke with Royal, it had been suggested to him that Pennsylvania (another state he lost in 1968) might not take too kindly to being snubbed. A solution was slapped together, one that would become college football legend.
“If I could add one thing while we’re talking here,” Nixon said to Royal. “I do want to say that Penn State, of course, felt that I was a little premature in suggesting this. So we are going to present a plaque to Penn State in the one hundredth year with the longest undefeated, untied record. Is that fair enough?”
“That is fair enough,” Royal answered.
Paterno, unsurprisingly, did not find this fair enough. Or anything close to fair. It was bad enough that Nixon had taken it upon himself to put the power of the presidency behind Texas as the No. 1 football team in the country. But for him to offer Penn State a ludicrous consolation prize for having the nation’s longest unbeaten streak was more than he could handle. Paterno immediately called Penn State’s PR man Jim Tarman and said he wanted to release a statement. Tarman tried to calm him down, but Paterno’s temper was in full bloom. He was not going to take this, not from anybody, not even from the president of the United States.
The statement Paterno released was cushioned by Tarman, but his biting rage still managed to come through:
First, I wish to congratulate Coach Royal, not only on a great victory, but for having the courage to go for two points. This will stand him in good stead in the Cotton Bowl. It appears that Texas and Arkansas read the script from our Orange Bowl game last year and from our win over Syracuse.
In response to numerous telephone calls I received today regarding President Nixon’s television remarks concerning a plaque to Penn State for having the nation’s longest unbeaten streak, I have heard nothing official about any such plaque.
Before accepting such a plaque, I would have to confer with my squad. I’m sure they would be disappointed at this time, as would the Missouri squad, to receive anything other than a plaque for the No. 1 team. And the No. 1 team following the bowl games could be Penn State or Missouri.
To accept any other plaque prior to the bowl games, which are supposedly to determine the final No. 1 team, would be a disservice to our squad, to Pennsylvania and to the East, which we represent, and perhaps most important to Missouri, which might just be the best team in the country.
Due to the fact that I had to babysit with our four children while trying to watch today’s game I did not get to hear all of President Nixon’s remarks. But it would seem a waste of his very valuable time to present Penn State with a plaque for something we already have undisputed possession of—the nation’s longest winning and unbeaten streaks.
It was this last sentence that Tarman worried about most, but Paterno would not leave it out. He found it insulting to be given a plaque for something that “any idiot consulting a record book could see.” He found it incredible that the president of the United States would butt in to the already preposterous college football system, where champions were picked by ballot and undefeated teams like his were told that they were second best because they didn’t look good enough. For the rest of his life, Paterno fought for a college football playoff, so that, in his words, “the champion could be decided on the field.” Yet even though people would assign great, even unlimited power to Joe Paterno, this was one of many battles he did not win.
Penn State beat Missouri in the Orange Bowl 10–3 in a defensive display so dazzling and overwhelming that Tigers coach Dan Devine called Penn State the best defense he’d seen in twenty years of coaching. Paterno then made his final pleas to the media. None of it mattered when the votes were tallied. Texas came from behind in the last minute and beat a not overly impressive Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl and was named the national champion by the sportswriters. The coaches had already named Texas No. 1 in the UPI poll; in those days they chose their national champion before the bowls even began. Penn State was undefeated, untied, and No. 2 again. For his part, Nixon was a bit sheepish about the whole thing; at the National Football Foundation’s Gold Medal Dinner just a few days after the Texas–Arkansas game, he admitted that maybe naming a team No. 1 wasn’t the smartest thing for a president to do.
In his early years as an assistant coach at Penn State, his mother and father would sometimes say to Joe, with disappointment in their voices, “I thought you were going to be president.” In 1970, Paterno had become known across the country as the football coach with the gall and guts to take on the president.
PATERNO NEVER FORGAVE THE SLIGHT. In 1973, the year he achieved secular sainthood, he said this about Richard Nixon: “I’d like to know how the president could know so much about college football and so little about Watergate.”
In 2012, two weeks before he died, Paterno said, “With all due respect to the office of the president, which I respect very much, President Nixon should have kept his big mouth shut.”
Race
Mike Cooper was a talented young quarterback from Harrisburg. For his first two years playing at Penn State, he was a backup to Chuck Burkhart, the quarterback who threw wobbly passes but never lost. This troubled Cooper; he felt sure he threw better than Burkhart, ran faster than Burkhart, and could move the team better than Burkhart. But he understood that, with Burkhart winning every game, it was difficult to argue that he could do better. “I thought I was better than Burkhart,” he told the Penn State student newspaper just before he graduated. “But we were winning with him.” When Cooper was a senior in 1970, after Burkhart had graduated, Paterno named him starter.
That made Mike Cooper the first black starting quarterback in Penn State history.
PATERNO SPENT HIS COACHING LIFE at a school where only a tiny percentage of the students—fewer than 2 percent in his early years, still fewer than 5 percent at the end—were African American. This created tensions. There were years when the Penn State football team did not have many black players, and there were black players Paterno tried to recruit who said they did not feel comfortable on the State College campus. After the 1979 Sugar Bowl, where Penn State played Alabama, Charlie Pittman complained to his former coach that Alabama—Alabama, which did not have its first black player until 1971—had more African Americans than Penn State. “I know,” Paterno said. “We have to do better.”
Through the years people would express many different opinions about Paterno’s views on race. Some thought him a bleeding heart; others called him a racist. The criticisms weighed on him as few criticisms did.
He came to Penn State as an assistant coach before Brown v. Board of Education, before Emmett Till was murdered, before Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. The civil rights movement inspired him. His father, president of the Interfaith Movement, inspired him. He expressed his strong feelings about racial equality in conversations with friends, to the point where sometimes he sounded naïve and even patronizing. “I wish I was black,” he often told Jim O’Hora and other coaches and friends. But he tried to be part of the fight. In 1962, when Penn State played in the Gator Bowl in still-segregated Florida, an airport restaurant in Orlando refused to allow his star Dave Robinson to sit with the white players. The entire team left the restaurant in protest, but Robinson still had nowhere to go.
“Come with me,” Paterno told him, and together they walked to a coffee shop. Robinson, who would become one of pro football’s most respected players with the Green Bay Packers, remembered the determination on his coach’s face. Here was someone who would not allow him to be treated as anything less than a human being. “Joe Paterno cared,” he said. But perhaps what he said in private means even more. “A football coach can have such a powerful influence,” Robinson’s friend Bill Curry said. “Dave Robinson told me that Joe Paterno helped make him into a man.”
From his early years as head coach, Paterno saw his effort to bring more African Americans to State College, to be involved in their lives, as a cau
se. He was always at his best when he had a cause. He raged against schools he felt were using black players without taking their education seriously. He fought to raise academic standards, believing that to expect less from young men, white or black, was to bury them with second-rate expectations. Penn State football’s graduation rate for black athletes was always among the highest, and sometimes was the highest, among big-time college football programs. Just one example: In Paterno’s last year, according to the New America Foundation, Penn State showed no achievement gap between white and black football players, and called that “very rare for Division I football.” It was a hallmark of Joe Paterno’s Penn State teams.
But some pointed to the low number of black players on Paterno’s teams, especially at key positions such as inside linebacker, and said that Paterno’s words did not equate to action. “It’s like everything else,” Paterno said. “All you can do is try your best. For a long time, we would lose many of the black players we recruited to Ivy League schools. In later years, we did better. But we never did well enough. I would never say we did well enough. I hope that the players we did get, we had a positive impact on their lives.”
PATERNO RECRUITED MIKE COOPER WITH the intention of making him the first black quarterback in the school’s history. He wanted very much to shatter that barrier. “Mike Cooper was a wonderful and talented young man,” he said. “And what happened to him still makes me sad.”
Cooper started the first game of 1970 and played well; the 55–7 victory over Navy was Penn State’s twenty-third victory in a row. But then things went bad. Penn State went to Colorado and were pounded 41–13. Though it was the Nittany Lions’ first loss in almost three years—“Let them have their glory; we’ve had our share,” Paterno said in the locker room—Paterno remembered that the atmosphere in State College immediately turned sour. A week later, the team was thumped again, this time by Wisconsin. Two weeks after that, on homecoming, they were beaten soundly by Syracuse. Letters poured into Penn State. The phone rang constantly in the Paterno home. Fans booed their own team during the Syracuse game. The message was clear: people wanted the black quarterback benched.
Paterno struggled with what to do. He did not want to cave in to the pressure, especially pressure so racially charged. (“Some of the letters I got have haunted me for forty years,” he would say.) On the other hand, Cooper was not playing well. Paterno had hoped that Cooper’s confidence would kick in, but after the Syracuse loss he had to concede that it might not happen.
After that season, Cooper said of the racism, “I didn’t consciously think about it. But subconsciously, I guess it did affect me. I didn’t play up to what I thought my potential was.”
Penn State had a promising sophomore quarterback named John Hufnagel. Paterno was so certain that Cooper would succeed that he had moved Hufnagel to defense. Now, though, he decided to bring Hufnagel back over to offense. It was a winning football move. With Hufnagel leading, and Cooper and Bob Parsons playing backup, Penn State won its last five games, scoring at least 30 points in each. In time, Hufnagel became an All-American.
Now letters poured in calling Paterno a racist. He thought that Cooper never really understood or forgave him for not staying with him. Cooper graduated from Penn State and moved back to Harrisburg, where he worked for the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. Teammates rarely heard from him. Penn State would not have a black starting quarterback again until the 1990s.
Kenny Jackson, who played wide receiver for Paterno, coached with him, and became a close family friend, watched the way people projected society’s shortcomings on Paterno. “I loved Joe Paterno. He did not see color. He saw a young man he could help and mold. That’s it. He would not treat you different for being black, but he would not treat you special either. It was honest. Joe was honest. Think how much better the world would be if everybody was like that.”
Joe and Sue Paterno with their daughters, Diana and Mary Kay (in Sue’s lap) (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)
{ Intermezzo }
George Scott Paterno was the miracle child. Well, the first miracle child; another would come later. The Paternos had four children in five years—Diana, Mary Kay, David, and Joseph Jr., called Jay—and Sue then suffered three miscarriages. It was while she was in the hospital after the third miscarriage that doctors told her she would never have another child. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
“I want more children,” she said.
“Well, we don’t think you’ll be able to carry a child.”
“I know you’re doctors,” Sue told them, “but you’re not God.”
By the time Scott was born in 1972, family life had been more or less resolved. Sue was in charge of everything at home. There were things Joe could do, such as read to the children at bedtime, and there were things Joe couldn’t do, such as everything else. His one attempt to give the diaper-wearing toddlers baths—complete with crying and confusion and Joe griping, “They don’t get undressed! I told them to get undressed and get in the tub!”—became family legend. His ineptitude around the home was the seed of countless family stories. Once, he decided to help Sue break down the dining-room table after guests had left. In one deft motion, he pulled out the middle leaf of the table, smashed it against the chandelier, broke three globes, and watched helplessly as glass rained down all around him. He then stood against the wall, watching Sue sweep up the glass and then vacuum any remaining tiny shards. When she was finished, he asked simply, “Is there anything else I can do?”
Still, Joe was an overwhelming presence in his family. The kitchen table was their center. Every evening—at different times, depending on the day’s practice schedule, but still every evening—the entire family sat around the kitchen table, ate dinner, and talked until bedtime. No Paterno child ever ate dinner at someone else’s house. “That table was my childhood,” said Scott. There Joe would allow conversations on any topic—school, friends, politics, history, literature, religion—except football.
“Dad would always take the opposite view of whatever opinion a kid would express,” David remembered. “And by doing so, he taught us to defend, explain, and convince not just ourselves but everyone at the table why we thought our idea was the right one. It taught us to think deeper about what we believed, and it taught us to challenge him too—because you can be sure we quickly learned to pull the same skepticism on his ideas.”
Lessons were dished out like pasta. Arguments filled the evenings. The complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia that Sue placed on a shelf next to the kitchen table was the referee for all arguments.
Joe Paterno the father, like Joe Paterno the coach, had tenets that he would repeat again and again. He hated foul language, for instance. “It’s a sign of poor intelligence.” He was, his daughter Mary Kay remembered, particularly put off by the word “fart.” He often threatened to wash out the kids’ mouths with soap, and once actually followed through, though he proved to be a somewhat less than effective schoolmarm. “He barely touched the soap to our tongues—you didn’t even feel it,” Mary Kay said.
Yet many of the players of the late 1960s recalled Paterno swearing often, a jolting change from Rip Engle, who never said anything south of “gosh.” Like most things in Paterno’s life, his decision to stop swearing grew out of a story. In the late 1960s, Paterno did a lot of recruiting on a school-purchased telephone in his home office. As he talked with recruits on the phone, his toddler son Jay, the son most drawn to football, would often sit on the floor, playing with little football figures and designing plays for them to run. Because recruiting is a tough game, many players would tell Joe they had decided to go to another school. He was always gracious when they gave him the bad news; he told them he was disappointed, but the school they had chosen was a good one, and they would have a great career there—and hey, don’t forget to hit the books. He meant all that, but Joe was a competitor, and losing made him crazy. As soon as he hung up the
phone, he would grumble to himself, “Son of a bitch! I hope you hate it there.”
One time, Joe hung up the phone, and before he could say a word, Jay piped up in his squeaky voice, “Son of a bitch! I hope you hate it there!” Everyone in the family says that’s when Joe, on the whole, stopped swearing. (In 1995, when a Rutgers coach charged Paterno with running up the score, Paterno lost his head and shouted on camera, “That’s bullshit!” This created a brief scandal in Pennsylvania, and family members and players, many who said they had never heard him use an off-color word, would not let him live it down.)
Joe was devoted to rules and regulations. The same man who walked out of the restaurant when his daughters shared a cucumber from an all-you-can-eat salad bar would not allow his children to use the pencils he brought home from work because, he said, “that’s university property.” He hammered his children with the same phrase he used on his players and everyone who ever saw him at a coaching clinic: “It’s not enough to be fair. You must appear to be fair.” This was a constant force in his fatherhood. Doing the right thing was not enough, he told his children. They had to go one step higher than the right thing. This, as much as anything, is what his children thought about at the end.
When everyone in the family looked back, they agreed that Joe wasn’t around all that much. Sue was the everyday presence in their lives. She cooked, cleaned, helped with homework, and dealt with every school issue, friend issue, and life issue. Joe would show up for dinner. In many ways, they understood that their role was to not bother him, to not weigh him down, to free him up to do his work. When his fame grew, he could not watch Diana’s cheerleading or Mary Kay’s gymnastics without being bombarded by autograph requests and photo hounds. Once, when he tried to take the family to the amusement park in nearby Hershey, he was so overrun with well-wishers and fans that at some point he went back to the car and designed plays while the family rode the rides. “It’s not fair,” more than one of the kids said. “He’s our father.”
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