Perhaps most meaningful of all, Paterno felt he had lived up to his ideals. He often worried about that. When reliving the Patriots story almost forty years later, he said, “When I took the job, I found out something about myself. I found that I could be bought. I found out that I had a price.” I pointed out to him that, in fact, just the opposite was true: he turned down the Patriots job. He could not be bought. Paterno shook his head and said something curious: “No. They bought me. I took the job. Afterward, because of Sue and the players, I went back and turned it down. Billy Sullivan would have had every right to be angry with me. I broke my word with him. He was a gentleman about it, but I broke my word.”
He paused for a long time. When interviewing Paterno, I found, the silences were to be honored because they often led to his saying the thing closest to his heart. Finally, he spoke again. “That was the greatest temptation of my life. When I turned down that job, there was no turning back. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life.”
PATERNO WORKED FOR WEEKS ON his Penn State commencement address. He clipped out articles, scribbled down thoughts, asked the people closest to him for help. For a long time, he had been self-conscious about speaking. He had practiced talking into a tape recorder over and over to rid himself of the Brooklyn whine, until one of the speech professors told him that the accent was part of his charm. He had the ability to entertain crowds with his speeches, in large part because of the piercing one-liners he invented for the occasions.
From a talk at Gettysburg College: “I understand that they are bringing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address back here. I guess a lot of people felt you were going to need it after Paterno gives his Gettysburg Address. Some of our alumni wish I could get four scores in sixty minutes, much less in a twenty-minute speech.”
From a talk to a group of orthopedic surgeons: “I’ve been really nervous about this speech because I figured I’d be talking to some witty, talented, clever guys. But after being with you guys for two days, I feel better.”
From a speech to the Quarterback Club in 1979, after his team lost to Alabama in a game for the No. 1 spot: “Everyone wants to hold up that one finger to say ‘We’re number one!’ I still see one finger in my travels today. It’s a different finger, and the hand is turned the other way.”
From a talk at a political rally in 1974, just after Watergate: “What am I doing here? I’m not a politician. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I’m a Republican.”
Yes, Paterno had his way of connecting to audiences quickly. That was an extension of his coaching. But he thought of the 1973 commencement address differently. This was his chance to explain who he was and what he was about, not only to the Penn State students but also to himself. In many ways, the previous twenty-five years had been a blur to him. He had been a quarterback and student at Brown University with the expectation of becoming a lawyer. And then, in a dizzying sequence, he had become a football coach; his father died; he lived in a friend’s basement; he did not date much; he met Sue, and they were married, and he was named head coach at Penn State, and the team did not lose for the better part of three years, and people began calling him a genius. He was offered a million dollars. When he turned it down, people started to see him as something larger than life.
For what? What did all this mean? For all his ambition, and for all the effort he spent considering the questions of fate and destiny, Paterno had not spent much time thinking about his own fate and destiny. The New England offer had presented him with perhaps the first difficult choice of his life. Until then, he had allowed himself to float wherever the tide carried him. But now, well, he was not exactly playing it humble when he began his speech by saying, “Some of you have every right to feel let down that after four years of hard work you have to listen to a coach at your graduation.” He’d had serious doubts about giving the speech. “But in spite of these and other misgivings, I accepted because I realize that in a day when materialism is rampant, many of you felt that my interest in doing other things besides making money has in some way helped you to reaffirm your ideal of a life of service, of dignity, and a life of meaning.”
He made the speech while the Watergate investigation was heating up, and he could not resist what would become his famous jab at Nixon knowing so much about college football and so little about Watergate. But that was mostly where the joking stopped. Joe Paterno had something to say.
I’m sure that it is obvious to all of you that you are going out into a fragmented, disillusioned and oftentimes confused society—a society which has promised more than it is now willing or perhaps able to deliver to our minority groups and, among others, to our poverty victims. There is corruption, fear, mistrust, lack of leadership, unequal justice, privileged economic groups and all the abuses you would expect in a nation without consistent direction—in a country without a common purpose and a people unsure of moral commitments. We are experiencing the frustration of a society, which is desperately struggling with itself, afraid that at any moment it will be ripped apart by deep-rooted racism, which regardless of all our enlightened medication persists as a cancer which defies cure. We cannot get rid of a war we do not want to fight. We cannot wash our hands of the blood that has been shed when we only wish peace and freedom for everybody. We are a decent people struggling with ourselves.
This was Paterno in full bloom: opinionated, thoughtful, forceful, controversial, the man Angelo and Florence Paterno had hoped might someday be president. As the years went on, he showed this side of himself less and less to the outside world. Maybe, Paterno wondered, he became a bit less idealistic, a bit less trusting of the world, a bit less certain of his ability to do much more than affect the lives of his family and football players. More likely, he had been beaten up by the expectations. He grew tired of being called a hypocrite and a moralist, of having critics turn every one of his mistakes and soft spots into a referendum on his character. He retreated inward and built walls around himself and his program. But in 1973, Paterno was open and vulnerable and willing to speak from the heart.
Our forefathers, who carved out this country, had blind faith in America. They had no responsibility to the rest of the world, and they had only to be concerned with what was best for their nation. They had never been beaten and they had supreme confidence. Our state of mind is different. We cannot morally escape our responsibility to the rest of the world, and we can never again do what is right just for America. We will never again have supreme confidence that everything we do is right. Not after Vietnam and Kent State, not after the assassination of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, not after the death of Bobby Kennedy, and not after Watergate. But this doesn’t mean we can be less decisive than our forefathers. We must always act, but when we are wrong, we must be mature enough to realize it and act accordingly. This is where greatness lies.
There is another thing I tell my team. I tell them to keep hustling. Go all out on every play no matter how bad things look—because, if you keep hustling, something good will happen . . . . So keep hustling. You’ll do all right. Enjoy yourselves. Enjoy life. Have some fun. Our squad enjoys kidding me because on a nice day before a game I like to walk into the locker room and say, “Boy what a day—oh to be young again.”
I cannot adequately describe to you the love that permeates a good football team—a love of one another. Perhaps as one of my players said: “We grow together in love—hating the coach.” But to be in a locker room before a big game and to gather a team around and to look at grown men with tears in their eyes . . . huddling close to each [other] . . . reaching out to be a part of each other . . . to look into strong faces which say, “If only we can do it today,” . . . to be with aggressive, ambitious people who have lost themselves in something bigger than they are—this is what living is all about.
Paterno’s speech made news all over America. “ ‘The System Is You,’ Paterno Tells Graduates” was the headline in Charleston, West Virginia. In Centralia, Washington, the he
adline was “Paterno Speaks Out.” Sports Illustrated reprinted large chunks of the speech in its “Scorecard” section. “Paterno urged graduates to admit when they are wrong,” reported a paper in San Antonio, Texas. The New York Times and Washington Post each wrote about Paterno’s speech in relation to Watergate. “Joe’s Penn Statement: Compete!” is how the story was headlined in the Chicago Tribune.
Paterno had reached new heights as an icon. Now all that was left was to lead one of the most remarkable and emotional seasons a college football team ever had. And, this being Joe Paterno’s sainthood year, that’s exactly what happened.
PATERNO KNEW THAT HIS 1973 team would be good. They had won ten of twelve games in 1972 and returned many of their best players, the biggest star being their running back, John Cappelletti. In the first two years of Cappelletti’s career at Penn State, he had played defense. The team already had great running backs in Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris, and Paterno always wanted his best athletes on defense, always preferred winning low-scoring games in which his defense imposed its will. He would have loved for Cappy to become a great defensive player, but he struggled as a defensive back, and when he was a junior in 1972 Paterno relented and put him back on offense.
Few thought that would work. Cappelletti struggled holding on to the football, and for a time people called him “John Fumbletti.” But he found his rhythm as the 1972 season went along. He ran for 162 yards against Syracuse, inspiring the Syracuse coach and longtime Penn State doubter Ben Schwartzwalder to whine to Sports Illustrated, “Cappelletti sure played better than he did in the movies we looked at.” The next week, Cappy carried the ball a school record thirty-four times against West Virginia. His football personality was coming into focus. He was big, strong, and virtually indestructible. He was relentless, always pushing forward for an extra yard, never worrying about himself or his statistics or even his physical well-being. Paterno loved the guy. He would never admit to loving any one player more than the rest, but it’s fair to say, based on the way he talked over the years, that he never loved any player more than he loved John Cappelletti.
In truth, he had a special affinity and love for the entire 1973 team. Through the years, whenever people asked Paterno how good his team was, he would borrow the line of legendary coach Bobby Dodd and say, “Ask me in twenty years.” He meant that he wanted to see what became of those players, how they lived their lives. It’s easy enough to go back and see what happened to those players from 1973.
Quarterback Tom Shuman, who readily admitted that his main job in 1973 was handing the ball to Cappy, remembered getting called into Paterno’s office so the coach could tear him apart over grades. Shuman offered a little insight into how Paterno did such things: “[He] very clearly let me know that I had a good bit of talent on the football field, but that I was going to be a huge disappointment to my parents, myself, and the university if I didn’t immediately get my nose into my books.” This was classic Paterno, using every angle to get inside players’ heads. His favorite trick was to use a player’s mother as motivation, saying, “I promised your mother that I would make sure that you got an education, and you’re making a liar of me.” Shuman, like hundreds of others, took the hint, hit the books, made the Dean’s List, played pro football for a while, and became a national sales manager.
Fullback Bob Nagle became a systems engineer. Flanker Chuck Herd became a conference planner at Penn State and worked as a personal ministry Bible school teacher. Split end Gary Hayman became an attorney. Tight end Dan Natale owned a sporting goods store. Left tackle Phil LaPorta went into construction.
Left guard Mark Markovich had come to Penn State for the same reason so many did: because he felt Paterno was the first honest coach he had come across. Other coaches had told him he would be a star tight end for their program. Paterno said bluntly, “You’re too slow and don’t have good enough hands to play tight end. You’ll be an offensive lineman.” Markovich was taken aback but realized that Paterno was right. He became a second-team All-American offensive lineman and a first-team Academic All-American. He later became president of the Illinois Machine & Tool Works.
Center Jack Baiorunos became a dentist. Right end Buddy Tesner became an orthopedic surgeon, as did cornerback Jim Bradley. In fact Bradley was the longtime team surgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The other cornerback, Buddy Ellis, became a certified public accountant. Linebacker Mike Orsini became an otolaryngologist, or, as Paterno called him, “an ear, nose and throat doctor, what does he need the fancy title?” Kicker Chris Bahr, whose brother Matt also kicked at Penn State and whose father coached soccer at the school, worked as a financial planner. Others were teachers, executives, coaches, and brokers. John Quinn became a high school principal. Woody Petchel became a company president.
Paterno would readily admit he couldn’t see the big picture back then. He had this unformed idea in his mind, this idea about the difference between excellence and success. Later his teams would have great success. They would win national championships. They would become so popular that Penn State expanded Beaver Stadium to seat 107,000 people. Paterno himself would be named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, and he would make a lot of money. He and Sue would use much of that money to build a library and a student faith center, and they would endow scholarships and fellowships. But Paterno was always careful to say that success and excellence are two different things and not always intertwined. Success is nice, he would say. Excellence, though, is life-affirming.
In 1973 Penn State won every game on its schedule, almost all of them convincingly, and the nation yawned. Perhaps this was because Penn State did not face a single ranked team until it beat Pitt in the final game of the regular season and Louisiana State in the Orange Bowl. But 1973 was an odd season in the annals of college football. Six of America’s most beloved teams—Penn State, of course, but also Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Michigan—finished the season undefeated (though Ohio State, Michigan, and Oklahoma had a tie on their records). This left Penn State ranked sixth in the nation.
Paterno insisted, perhaps a bit too intently to be believable, that he didn’t care. “I’m not worried about the polls,” he said again and again. Penn State outscored opponents 447 to 129, and only two teams all year stayed within a touchdown. Cappelletti was a revelation. He carried the ball thirty-three times in a grueling victory over Air Force (“That was a great feeling, when I looked up and saw there were only seven seconds to go,” he recalled.) Two weeks later, before the West Virginia game, Cappy was visited by his younger brother, Joey, who had just turned eleven and whose leukemia was growing more and more aggressive. “What do you want for a birthday present?” John asked.
“Four touchdowns,” Joey said promptly.
“I think we’ll score four touchdowns.”
“No,” Joey said. “I want you to score four touchdowns.”
Cappelletti was not healthy; he had sprained his shoulder. But he was not the complaining kind. In the third quarter, Penn State led 35–14, and Paterno pulled his starters, including Cappy. “You’ve had a good workout,” Cappelletti would remember Joe telling him. At that point, Cappy had scored three touchdowns. He was going to say something to Paterno about wanting to score one more touchdown for Joey, but he did not. He was not the complaining kind. Instead he wandered off to the bench. It was Markovich, his best friend, who explained to Paterno about Joey. Paterno was adamant about keeping his players humble, about preventing his team from becoming fragmented by stars or individual glory. He would say again and again, often with a bite in his voice, that he did not care about personal statistics or achievements. But he loved Joey Cappelletti.
“Cappelletti!” Paterno shouted. “Get back in there.” It was like a made-for-TV movie. In fact it would become a hugely popular made-for-TV movie called Something for Joey. Cappelletti plunged in from two yards out, his fourth touchdown of the day, the moment that soon would induce tears in living rooms across America. But nob
ody told that story after the game. Instead Paterno just said, “I don’t know if I’ve been around a greater football player than Cappy.”
Against Maryland the next week, Cappy carried the ball thirty-seven times, breaking his own school record. A week after that, he broke the record again, this time carrying the ball forty-one times against North Carolina State. He ran for 220 yards and scored three touchdowns. He seemed to be superhuman. “Cappy just literally took the game over. He just literally carried people,” Paterno said. The English lit major was so overwhelmed he used “literally” twice—incorrectly. After that game, Cappelletti was the favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.
The next week, against Ohio University, Cappy ran for 204 yards and again scored four touchdowns. Paterno was now getting into the spirit; he had pulled Cappelletti from the blowout when he had 198 yards and put him back in so he could break the 200-yard mark again. In the last game of the year, Cappelletti carried the ball thirty-seven times in an overpowering victory over rival Pitt. He won the Heisman Trophy in a runaway.
When Penn State beat Louisiana State in a boring 16–9 Orange Bowl, in which Cappelletti played hurt and gained only 50 yards, the national media was unimpressed. “The match was so lackluster,” wrote John Crittenden of the Miami News, “that I hoped some of the Penn Staters would be honest enough to say, ‘We don’t deserve to be No. 1.’ That didn’t happen, though.” Not only did that not happen, but Paterno went the other way. “I just held the Paterno Poll,” he told reporters after that game. “I did it in our locker room. Our players voted Penn State No. 1. It was unanimous.” He then bought championship rings for every player.
Paterno might have been happier coaching the 1973 team than he ever felt again. He would love coaching for the rest of his life, of course, but there was an innocence about 1973 that could not be repeated. Sports Illustrated’s William Johnson wrote a long feature on Paterno in November of that year, with the telling lead sentence, “It is arguable whether Joe Paterno, at 46, is an authentic folk hero.” That article followed a story line that would be repeated in countless Paterno stories yet to be written: the scholarly coach who lives modestly, babysits his kids, listens to opera as he draws up game plans, rails against cheating, and is most proud of his team’s high graduation rate. Yes, it was all true. But over time, it descended into cliché. Nobody’s that good. The cynics would pick at his record and his motivations. Some players got in trouble, some failed to graduate, and Paterno was called a hypocrite. The expectations changed. The Paterno children grew up, and their father was too busy to babysit his grandchildren. It would never feel easier or freer than it did in 1973, when everyone was young, when Paterno could speak his heart, and when the game plan was simply to give the ball to John Cappelletti while his younger brother, Joey, watched happily.
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