Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  THE HEISMAN TROPHY DINNER WAS the crescendo in a year filled with highs. Cappelletti had scribbled part of his speech on the back of an envelope. There was a certain part he wanted to get exactly right; after he thanked his parents, Paterno, his teammates, and others, he reached that part. Paterno knew it was coming. He had told Sue, who was sitting near the back, not to cry.

  “The next part,” Cappy said, “I’m very happy to do something like this. I thought about it since the Heisman was announced ten days ago. And this is to dedicate a trophy that a lot of people earned, I’ve earned, my parents and the people I’ve mentioned and numerous other people that are here tonight and have been with me for a long time. The youngest member of my family, Joseph, is very ill. He has leukemia. If I can dedicate this trophy to him tonight and give him a couple of days of happiness, this is worth everything.

  “I think a lot of people think I go through a lot on Saturdays and during the week, as most athletes do, and you get bumps and bruises, and it is a terrific battle out there on the field. Only for me it is only on Saturdays and it’s only in the fall. For Joseph, it is all year round, and it is a battle that is unending with him, and he puts up with much more than I’ll ever put up with. And I think this trophy is more his than mine because he has been a great inspiration to me.”

  Sue Paterno did cry. So did everyone else in the New York Hilton ballroom. Vice President Gerald Ford, who everyone suspected would soon be president, teared up. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who on his death would be considered for sainthood, was there to give the blessing and simply said, “You don’t need a blessing. God has already blessed you in John Cappelletti.”

  Paterno saw Billy Sullivan after the ceremony, after the most remarkable year a college football coach ever had. “Do you see now why I couldn’t leave Penn State?” Paterno asked him.

  “Yes,” Sullivan said. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “I don’t know if he really understood,” Paterno would say. “But I did. There was no amount of money that could have made me as proud as seeing John Cappelletti that night.”

  ACT III: SUCCESS

  I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

  —CATO THE ELDER

  { Aria }

  Joe Paterno

  speech to Penn State Quarterback Club

  winter 1979

  Let’s talk about being number one. The big question is: “Is it worth it?” Personally, I never really felt it was important to be number one. I had always believed deeply in the statement that to travel with hope is something better than to arrive. It might end up being true.

  But it wasn’t! To get to number one was generally fun. It was great excitement. The game we played against Alabama, though we lost, was a thrilling game to be a part of for everybody involved.

  But you never get anything for nothing. And the price of number one can be too high unless we are careful.

  You can’t turn back the clock. People . . . alumni . . . subway alumni [alumni that live in big cities like New York and Philadelphia and come in only for games] . . . they have had a taste of it and most of them will probably not be happy with less. A two-game losing season might be an unhappy one. These are the new expectations. And in order to stay up with such high expectations, we have to do many things.

  We have to have more off-season training by the players. That makes it harder for them to excel in their classes. This is one of the costs.

  We must set a tougher schedule so we can be number one. That sounds good, but it means we’re never going to win twenty in a row again. The better the competition, the harder it will be to win every week.

  This means we need better recruiting in a wider area. If we are going to play a tougher schedule, we must recruit the best.

  In order to recruit the best, we have to get better facilities to keep up with the Joneses. We need a bigger weight room, an indoor practice facility, a bigger stadium, a better press box so more of those sportswriters will come and write better stories about us.

  We need bigger and better fund raising to protect the integrity of the football program. There are costs here too. This creates ticket problems. Old friends are cast aside for “fat cats.” Alumni make way for subway alumni. College football is getting so big. We have a ten million dollar budget. It’s almost impossible to run college football the way we used to.

  On a personal level, the cost is high. I can’t go anywhere now without having to pose for pictures or sign autographs. I’m a private person, and now my family must go out without me because of the attention. I can’t protect my family. The game now requires year-round recruiting, seven-days-a-week coaching, there are summer camps and speeches off campus. With success comes interest, visitors, staff. This week alone we’ve had Virginia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Minnesota high school coaches come to see how we do things.

  Is it worth it? Yes. It’s worth it because I believe we can get over our growing pains and build a better organization. I believe we can be number one. And we can do it properly, with academic integrity. We are unique. By being number one, people will know where we are, who we are, what we believe in—and all this on a national scale.

  In the end the cheer “We Are Penn State” says it all. We are proud. We are loyal. We are honest. And we are number one in everything, win or lose.

  So number one? Is it worth it? I hope so. But if not, it’s a helluva lot of fun.

  Paterno with his friend and rival, Alabama coach Bear Bryant (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  Bear

  Joe Paterno’s feelings about Bear Bryant were never simple. He loved the Bear and wanted more than anything to beat him. He admired the Bear and was also repelled by him. He tried to emulate Bear and, at the same time, strove to be his opposite. It was complicated. The only uncomplicated part is that Paterno never beat the Bear.

  Paul Bryant, the eighth of nine children, grew up on a farm in Dallas County, Arkansas. His father, Monroe, fell gravely ill when Paul was a boy, and his mother, Ida, generally took care of the farm. (“Miss Ida was always a lady, but she was tough as a sack of nails,” her nephew Dean Kilgore was quoted saying in Keith Dunnavant’s fine book Coach.) Everything about Bryant’s life seemed legendary. When he was thirteen, he wrestled a bear at a local carnival for one dollar in prize money. He was never paid the dollar, but he did secure one of the most apt nicknames in American sports history. When he was in the navy during World War II, he disobeyed an order to abandon ship after the S.S. Uruguay was struck and sinking, and in disobeying he saved his own life and the lives of his men.

  He truly was a bear of a man, six-foot-three, a handshake that buckled men’s knees, and a fierce voice that cut through the southern wind. In thirty-eight years, his teams had only one losing season; that was his first year as coach at Texas A&M. Before that season began, he took his team down to a scorching Texas town called Junction and put them through a ten-day summer camp so savage that two-thirds of the players quit. The survivors won only one of ten games. Two years later, though, Texas A&M went undefeated. Two years after that, Bear left to coach at Alabama, where he won six national championships and became the state’s living hero. It was said that the most famous thing in the whole state of Alabama was Bear Bryant, and the second most famous was his houndstooth hat.

  “He had this—I don’t know what you call it, but I guess it was charisma,” Paterno said. “It was really bigger than charisma. It’s the thing that great generals have. Patton had it. MacArthur had it. He would say, ‘Do something,’ and people would do it. Why? They were afraid of him. They loved him. They wanted to please him. He just had that thing leaders have.”

  “Do you have that thing?” I asked Paterno.

  “Me? No, no, not like Bear Bryant.” And then he told a story he had told many times before. In 1981 Bear Bryant and Alabama came to play in State College. Before the game, Bryant called Paterno. In Paterno’s memory the phone cal
l went like this:

  Bryant: Joe, you know the governor of Pennsylvania, don’t you?

  Paterno: Yeah, I know him a little, Bear.

  Bryant: Good. We gotta land our plane up in Harrisburg. If you could call up the governor and get him to close off the roads and get us a police escort up there after the game, I’d be appreciative.

  “What did you do?” I asked, at which Paterno smiled and replied, “What do you think I did? I called up the governor and told him that Bear Bryant wanted a police escort after the game up to Harrisburg. And he told me, ‘It will be a cold day in you-know-where before I’ll give those guys from Alabama a police escort.’ ”

  While I laughed Paterno said, “But you know what? You better believe Bear Bryant would have gotten us a police escort in Alabama. That’s the difference. The only people who listen to me are the ones who have to listen or else I’ll bench them. Everybody listened to Bear Bryant.”

  Paterno knew that Bryant was no angel. That’s how he would say it: “Hey, the guy was no angel.” Bryant drank heavily, and he worked the angles like the most powerful southern politicians. He and Paterno were on opposite sides of college football’s purpose. “I used to go along with the idea that football players on scholarship were ‘student-athletes,’ ” Bryant said. “Which is what the NCAA calls them. Meaning a student first, an athlete second. We were kidding ourselves, trying to make it more palatable to the academicians. We don’t have to say that and we shouldn’t. At the level we play, the boy is really an athlete first and a student second.”

  “Maybe Bear was more realistic than I was, I don’t know,” Paterno said. “But I really believed—still believe—that they are students first. I know we tried to make it that way at Penn State. Bear cared about school too. He would suspend players who skipped class, you know. But we probably did see it a little bit differently.”

  Paterno and Bryant faced each other on New Year’s Day 1979 with the national championship on the line, and Paterno wanted to win that game more than any of his life. His teams had continued to win with regularity after the perfect 1973 season. They finished in the top ten three of the four subsequent years, and there were countless stories written about the football heaven Paterno had built in the place people called, without irony, “Happy Valley.”

  But Paterno never enjoyed calm or comfort; he distrusted both. Whenever the coaches’ meetings seemed too agreeable, he would throw an argument grenade into the room to get people yelling again. Nothing irritated him more than satisfaction. Guido D’Elia, who worked with him for more than thirty years, said Paterno never once thanked him or praised him, not directly. Once, D’Elia’s video work helped Penn State land a big recruit, and as he was walking toward the football offices Paterno yelled from across the parking lot, “Hey, I heard you did something not too bad.”

  D’Elia smiled; from Paterno, this was practically a song of praise. When Paterno saw that smile he shouted, “Don’t let it go to your head!”

  Paterno was compelled by the next challenge, the next task, the next problem. He liked to think about Hercules’ twelve labors, perhaps because they reminded him of a twelve-game football season. Any one of Hercules’ labors was a terrific challenge. But completing one or two or three wasn’t enough. He could not celebrate. “There’s something about me, it’s not something I’m proud of: I can’t enjoy success. I just think you should always try for something more. It’s like I tell my kids all the time, I quote Browning that a ‘man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?’ ”

  In 1978, Paterno wanted a special team that would finally be recognized by everyone in the nation as No. 1. The 1978 team had rolled through the season. The offense averaged about 30 points a game, led by quarterback Chuck Fusina, who finished second in the Heisman Trophy balloting. (He got more first-place votes than the winner, Oklahoma’s Billy Sims.) But as usual for Paterno’s Penn State, it was the defense, featuring future NFL stars Bruce Clark, Matt Millen, and Lance Mehl, that defined the team. Penn State went into Columbus and shut out Ohio State in its season opener, something no team had done since 1901. “There wasn’t any time in the game we thought Ohio State could hurt us,” Paterno chirped happily afterward. The Nittany Lions had back-to-back shutouts against Texas Christian and Kentucky. Late in the year, they played a Maryland team ranked No. 5 in the country and won 27–3.

  They finished the season 11–0, undefeated, and, for the first time in Paterno’s career, ranked No. 1 in America. They would play Bear Bryant and Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. This was their moment, the chance for Penn State to finally win the national championship that Nixon and voters and eastern football bias had denied them. This was also Paterno’s chance to beat the icon, to stake his claim. It mattered to him more than he wanted to admit. “It was clear to all of us how much Joe wanted to win that game,” Matt Millen recalled.

  “Bear Bryant was the best coach,” Paterno said. “John McKay used to say, ‘Bear’s not a coach, he’s the coach.’ I wanted to beat the coach. Maybe it was ego. But I wanted to win, and I thought we would win. I thought we had the better team.”

  Their confidence was surprisingly apparent for a Penn State team. “There isn’t anybody on the team that doesn’t think we’re going to win it,” Penn State linebacker Rich Milot told the Daily Collegian in a somewhat mangled but unmistakable boast. And then to be clear, he added, “And win it big.”

  The days leading up to the game were wonderful for Paterno. He spent a lot of time with Bryant, watching the way the great man walked, the way he talked to people, the way he responded to questions, the way he did not even flinch when introduced at the press conference as “the legend in his own time.” When David Israel of the Chicago Tribune asked if it was hard being a legend, Bryant said, “Son, I don’t know. I ain’t tried it yet.” For Paterno, it was like coaching against a hero out of the movies, like coaching against John Wayne.

  At one point, Bryant said, “I’m delighted to be playing Penn State, a great educational institution with a great, deep-rooted football tradition and the leading coach in America.” When Paterno was asked what he thought about being called the leading coach in America by the Bear, he smiled and said, “I don’t want to argue with him.” Yes, it was all great fun. And Paterno thought Penn State would win. “We had such a good team. We didn’t underestimate Alabama, we definitely didn’t, but I really thought that team could beat anybody in the country.”

  PENN STATE PLAYED SLOPPILY. CHUCK Fusina threw four interceptions. The offensive line could not do anything against Alabama’s great front line; Penn State ran for just 19 yards the whole game. Several penalties hurt the Nittany Lions, especially in the second half. But the stunner was that Paterno himself seemed to wilt in the big moment. With the game still scoreless late in the first half, he uncharacteristically got greedy and called a couple of timeouts in an effort to get the football back for a last-second score. Instead Alabama used the extra time to drive 80 yards for a touchdown and take the lead.

  Alabama led 14–7 in the fourth quarter, and with about seven minutes left Penn State drove down to the Alabama 1-yard line. A touchdown and 2-point conversion—and there was never a doubt Paterno would go for 2—would give Penn State the lead. It was fourth down, and then something happened that Paterno would never forget. The coaches were deciding which play to run. Paterno said that in his heart, he wanted to have Fusina, his star quarterback, throw a pass. It made perfect sense to him. Fusina was his best offensive player, his leader, the man he called the greatest winner he had ever coached. And Alabama would not be expecting a pass. This was his chance to win the game, to beat the Bear. “I knew it in my gut,” he said.

  A couple of coaches disagreed. A pass went against Penn State’s enduring philosophy, Paterno’s own philosophy, of overpowering teams. They thought Penn State should run the ball, bash it over the line. One even shouted the coaching cliché, “If we can’t pick up ten inches when we need it, we don’t deserve to be national champion.” P
aterno rarely let an assistant coach overrule him. He would listen to opinions and consider them, but if he had a strong feeling, as one longtime coach said, “You might as well save your breath.”

  This time Paterno listened. Why? He explained it in his autobiography this way: “I backed off from a strong instinct and let myself worry about what people might say if a decision was wrong.” He explained it to me this way: “I could see the headlines in the next day’s paper. It was the only time in my life, the only time, I thought this way. I could see headlines that said, ‘Bear Teaches Paterno a Lesson.’ When it came down to it, I was afraid to take the chance.”