Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  THERE WERE OTHER COACHES—BEAR BRYANT at the lead, but also Woody Hayes, Vince Lombardi, Jimmy Johnson, and Bill Parcells—who inspired and frightened players with their passion and demanding expectations. They gave raucous speeches. They poured out their emotions. They found ways, in the words of onetime Alabama coach Bill Curry, to “reach inside your chest, massage your heart so that it pumped twice as hard, and make you feel like you could do anything in the world.”

  Paterno was not like that. Now and again he would give an emotional pregame speech. Now and again he would galvanize his players with a few choice words on the sideline. Mostly, though, Paterno believed that the hard work of coaching and playing happened during the week, during practice. There, on the practice field, he raged and encouraged and insulted them. He seemed inescapable to his players; there was something almost supernatural about it.

  “I still dream about it,” said Mark Battaglia, the starting center on the 1982 team. “He would be very, very vocal, very involved . . . . He had an uncanny ability on the practice field to see you from a very long distance away and run over and start yelling at you with his high-pitched voice.”

  “He just saw all the little things,” 1982 co-captain Pete Speros said. “You’d jump offsides in practice and he’d let you have it for twenty minutes.”

  “Sometimes, you’d lose sight of him,” said Rodger Puz, “and you would not intentionally ease up, but maybe you’d lose a little concentration. Invariably, from two football fields away, you’d hear that high-pitched yell: ‘Hey, Puz! That’s lousy! That’s terrible! You’re the worst player we’ve ever had here!’ ”

  “He would get in your face,” said Mike Suter, who had a moment in that 1982 season that Penn State fans will never forget. “He would shout, ‘This is how you make a tackle!’ You would hear stories about other coaches being up in a tower. I never saw Joe doing that.”

  On the practice field, his cutting comments and high standards and obsession with time created a football whirlwind. The players were almost never on the field for more than two hours. “Joe knows that football is not the most important thing,” Paterno’s longtime assistant Fran Ganter said in a television feature that followed Penn State through a week of preparation. “It just isn’t. And so he would say, all the time, ‘We’ve got to get those guys off the field so they can study and be college students.’ ” Paterno believed that his team spent less time on the field practicing than any major football program. That was by design.

  But that time was precious, so much so that coaches would spend much of their week begging for an extra two minutes to work on something. Defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky would plead for three more minutes to work on goal-line defense. Ganter would plead for an extra minute to work on the screen play. Paterno loved being the controller of time, and he rarely gave his coaches anything extra; if he did, he would demand a few seconds in barter. “Get it done in the time you have,” he told them. The players ran from drill to drill—nothing set off Paterno like seeing someone just standing around and waiting—and were expected to concentrate throughout. There were no excuses for lapses. “You’re wasting my time!” he would shout, and for him that was breaking the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not waste my time.”

  Tuesdays were for hitting: the players called them “Bloody Tuesdays.” Wednesdays allowed for slightly less violent play and refinement; Paterno worried constantly that the coaches were working on too many things. Simplify. Always simplify. Thursdays were without violence; this was the time to reach for perfection. Fridays were for rest. And every second of those practices was to be treated with respect. “I remember they’d post a practice,” Suter said, “and they’d have a time like 4:07 to 4:15 for individual drills.”

  Penn State practices stopped for nothing. Paterno closed them to reporters, not only because he wanted secrets kept but also because he did not want anyone to see him scream at his players. He had little sympathy for injuries, perhaps because until the end of his life he had so little concern for his own pain. “I got hurt once,” recalled Jack Curry, a receiver on Paterno’s first team, “and I took so much abuse for it I swore I’d never get hurt again.”

  “If you had something wrong with your leg, a broken hand, a pinched nerve, if you were sick, that didn’t get you out of practice,” a 1982 player, Lou Bartek, remembered. If someone was hurt badly enough that he couldn’t practice on the field, Paterno would have him stand on the sideline wearing a giant red X on his jersey. “You felt like you were a casualty of war or something with the Red Cross,” Kenny Jackson said. “You didn’t want to be over there.”

  “Oh yeah, listen, I was tough,” Paterno admitted. “It wasn’t ‘nice guy Paterno’ out there. The thing I believed was that players didn’t know how good they could be. They didn’t understand their own limitations. I thought it was our job as coaches not to make them as good as they thought they could be but to make them a lot better than that. That meant playing through pain. It meant never letting up. It meant demanding more from them than anybody ever had before. I wasn’t interested in them liking me.”

  For the most part, they didn’t like him, certainly not while they were playing for him. “There were times I wanted to scream at him,” tight end Mike McCloskey told columnist Bill Lyon in 1982. “And there were times I wanted to punch him out.”

  After hearing from scores of former players, a clear “Stages of Paterno” chart built in my mind. Not everyone went through all the stages. Some never grew to like Paterno; some liked him even when being yelled at. But in large part, the Stages of Paterno might look something like this:

  During recruiting process: Parents like Paterno; players ambivalent but respectful.

  During college: Players despise Paterno.

  Immediately after graduation: Players respect what Paterno has done for them but are mostly glad that the experience is over and they can go on to real life.

  Later in life: Players find they think about him every day, remember lessons he taught, believe that in large part he made them into the people they became, and have grown to love him.

  This, not incidentally, is similar to the feelings many sons have toward their fathers.

  EVERY YEAR PATERNO ORDERED A fresh blue line to be painted in front of the football practice fields. That blue line represented a separation. He would tell the players that when they crossed the blue line, nothing mattered except football. Nothing. Not family. Not school. Not girlfriends. Not problems. Nothing. He would tell them there was nothing they could do about those other parts of their life when practicing football, so they were to put them all away. This, he said, was what discipline was about. He would also tell them that they should draw blue lines throughout their life: when in class they should not be thinking about football; when on a date they should not be thinking about class or football; when helping a friend they should paint a blue line around the scene and focus on the moment.

  Paterno considered the blue line something close to holy.

  “When you’d cross back over the blue line,” Pete Speros explained, “he’d come up to you and ask how your family was doing. You’d say, ‘Wait a minute, a few minutes ago you just ridiculed and embarrassed me.’ . . . That’s the attitude that he took, and we all got molded to it. It was effective, really effective. But you’d leave a lot of practices shaking your head.”

  THE GAMES WERE DIFFERENT. PATERNO did not want to overmanage the games. He would say, “Practice is for the coaches. Games are for the players.” He did not want a team of robots that would do only what they were programmed to do. He did not even want players calling him Coach Paterno; he demanded they call him Joe. A linebacker from Brooklyn, Greg Buttle, remembered asking Paterno something in practice: “Coach Paterno, can I do it this way?”

  “No, Player Buttle,” Paterno responded. “Do it the way we talked about.”

  No, Paterno did not want to control games. He believed the coaches were supposed to teach players how to play football at t
he highest level. Few things made him happier than seeing a player anticipate an opportunity, freelance away from what he was taught, and make a game-turning play. He believed the greatest thrill of coaching was when discipline joined inspiration. “I always believed you have to give players that freedom,” he said. “I can’t say I was thrilled if a player tried for something and cost us a big play. Still, my thought was, you prepare them to play, and then you let them play. I believe you can’t be a great team if you have players who are afraid to make a mistake.”

  In Paterno’s mind, it was this fearlessness that made the 1982 team so special. That team certainly had great talent. Curt Warner was a once-in-a-generation running back; Paterno compared him to all-time greats Lenny Moore and Gale Sayers, and Warner would have a marvelous pro football career. Quarterback Todd Blackledge finished sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting. Receiver Kenny Jackson had breathtaking speed and was the fourth pick in the 1984 NFL draft. The defense was loaded with terrific players, like linebacker Scott Radecic, defensive end Walker Lee Ashley, and safety Mark Robinson.

  He’d had teams with more physical talent. What made this team special, he insisted, was that he could count on them. He knew that someone on this team would find a way to make a winning key play.

  The team was also lucky. In the fourth week of the season the Nittany Lions played second-ranked Nebraska at dusk in Beaver Stadium. This was before the stadium had lights, and CBS, which was broadcasting the game, brought portable lights because of the late start. Nebraska led 24–21 in the final seconds. Penn State had played somewhat sloppily (two touchdowns were called back because of penalties), but they got the ball back with a minute and eighteen seconds. They haltingly moved the ball up the field and then faced a fourth down and 11. Blackledge’s strong pass to Jackson got the first down. On the next play, Blackledge threw a 15-yard pass to Mike McCloskey that moved the ball to the Nebraska 2-yard line with just a few seconds left.

  The replay shows that McCloskey caught the ball out of bounds. Paterno saw the film later and conceded the fact. The referees had missed the call. Missed calls are part of football, part of sports, but in later years Paterno would get touchier about missed calls. When reminded that his 1982 team was greatly aided by a couple of bad calls, he smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s human nature to forget the ones they called for you.”

  With four seconds left in the game, Blackledge threw a low pass in the end zone to a tight end named Kirk Bowman, who players on the team openly called “Stone Hands.” Bowman made a tough catch, and Penn State beat Nebraska.

  THE NEXT GAME DEFINED PENN State’s season. It was the last time Paterno’s team faced an Alabama team coached by Bear Bryant, and Penn State fell apart; there’s no other way to describe it. Blackledge threw four interceptions. The Nittany Lions suffered four sacks, lost a fumble, and had two punts blocked. Penn State lost by three touchdowns.

  But two season-turning things happened that day, two things that spoke to Paterno’s coaching style. The first, curiously, involved one of the biggest mistakes not only of that year but of any Penn State year. Mike Suter was a hardworking backup defensive back (he had an interception that day) and one of the key blockers on special teams. With the game still in doubt, Suter backed up into Penn State punter Ralph Giacomarro and blocked his own team’s punt with his butt. Penn State probably would not have won the game, but Suter’s play was so freaky and embarrassing that it seemed to be all anybody talked about afterward. Suter never forgot how Paterno responded: “I remember walking off to the sidelines and Joe looking at me with his arms out, like ‘What the . . . ’ And then in the locker room reporters talking to me. I said I wasn’t sure what happened.

  “The next day, in the film room, Joe was not happy with our play. He talked about a lot of plays that went wrong. But mine wasn’t pointed out any more than any other . . . . Joe never really talked to me about it, except he came up before the Syracuse game [the next week] and said, ‘I took you off the punt team this week. I didn’t want you hanging your head. Play a solid game at safety and show who you are.’ ”

  That was vintage Paterno. He would tear players to shreds, make them feel as low as they ever had in their lives over the tiniest mistakes during practice. But he seemed to know when they needed him to back off and be supportive. When Suter got home after the game, he’d heard from his brother that an announcer on a new sports television network, ESPN, had called him “the loneliest man in college football.” But he didn’t feel lonely. His teammates rallied around him. And Paterno, undoubtedly knowing how badly Suter felt about the play and how much he wanted to atone for it, stood behind him. When asked about his college career, Suter replied, “Playing for Joe Paterno? Are you kidding me? It was awesome.”

  The other thing that turned the season around involved another player who was not a starter. His name was Joel Coles, a gifted running back who had the misfortune of being at Penn State at the same time as the more gifted Curt Warner. That meant Coles hardly played. “Would I come back, knowing how it turned out?” he asked Bill Lyon after the season ended. “No, I can’t say that I would.”

  But after the Alabama game, Coles stepped forward and gave a speech everyone in the locker room remembered thirty years later. He shouted that they still had six games left, and they still had a chance to show everyone the greatness of their team.

  “He gave one of the most inspirational, emotional, spirited motivational speeches,” Mark Battaglia said. “It helped galvanize us. He said we could do one of two things, and we were going to do the one and finish the season. And it was a critical turning point.”

  “If Joel doesn’t step up there and give that speech,” Paterno would say, “I don’t think we go on to do what we did. In fact, I know we don’t.” This, at heart, was what Paterno believed coaching was about. Joel Coles was disappointed; he thought he was going to be a big college football star, and it hadn’t worked out for him. But Paterno told him—told all of them—that the important thing is not what happens to you, but how you react to what happens. In that moment, Coles saw what he had to do, spoke out, spoke from the heart, and though life isn’t like the movies and stirring speeches don’t always lead to victory, it is true that the Nittany Lions won every game for the rest of the regular season, and no team finished within a touchdown of them. The amazing run of dominance led Penn State back to New Orleans and the Sugar Bowl, where they would play for the national championship, just as they had three years earlier against Alabama. This time, they would face Georgia and a near-mythical running back named Herschel Walker.

  WHEN HERSCHEL WALKER WAS A young boy in Wrightsville, Georgia (slogan: “The Friendliest Town in Georgia!”), he did not do much of anything. His father asked him, “What do you like to do?”

  “Watch TV,” Herschel said.

  His father made a deal with him: he could watch television, but during the commercials he had to exercise. Herschel agreed, and so during the commercials he did push-ups and sit-ups and went outside and ran sprints. Though it was said that he never lifted weights, he was soon the biggest, strongest, and fastest football player in all of Georgia. In his first padded practice at the University of Georgia, the legend goes, a senior intending to teach the kid a lesson rushed in to unload a hit on the hyped freshman. The senior woke up woozy a few minutes later. The first time Walker carried the ball in an actual game for Georgia, he broke four tackles and scored a touchdown against Tennessee. “My God,” Georgia’s legendary broadcaster Larry Munson croaked, “a freshman!”

  College football had never seen anything quite like Herschel Walker. He was faster than anyone out there. He was stronger than anyone out there. Georgia’s offense, like Penn State’s offense in 1973 with Cappelletti, was two-dimensional: sometimes Walker ran left, and sometimes Walker ran right. Yet that, along with a great defense, was enough to make Georgia the 1980 national champion. In the bowl game, Walker dislocated his shoulder in the first quarter against Notre Dame. “Pain is sort of in your mind,�
� he said. He had the shoulder popped back in and ran for 150 yards in the victory.

  This was the force of nature Penn State faced in 1982. Georgia had not lost a game. Walker had won the Heisman Trophy. Early in the year, he had gained more than a hundred yards against Brigham Young and South Carolina even though he played with a broken thumb in both games.

  The players would say that they saw something a little bit different in Paterno in the weeks leading into the Georgia game. He worked them harder than normal. A freshman running back named Steve Smith (who would become a team captain and would go on to a nine-year NFL career) had the honor of playing Herschel Walker in practice, and the Penn State defenders hit him so hard and often that, at some point, Smith said, “I don’t want to be Herschel Walker anymore.”

  For the game, Paterno and his thirty-eight-year-old defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky unveiled what they called the “Magic Defense”: the plan was for the defense to change formations on every play and leave the Georgia offensive linemen wondering whom they were supposed to block. The goal, in essence, was to stop Herschel Walker. Of course, this was the goal of every team that played Georgia, but Paterno was willing to go further than other teams. He would leave openings down the field and dare Georgia to throw the ball. He would have his defenders sell out on almost every play and hit Walker with everything they had. “We want to make Herschel Walker mighty sore,” Penn State defensive end Walker Lee Ashley said before the game.