Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  “Talk is cheap,” Herschel responded.

  This was more than talk. In the end, Walker rushed for 107 yards, which was his lowest total for any game where he got more than twenty carries, and he got twenty-eight carries in this game. His longest run was just 12 yards; he’d had longer runs in every game he’d played, except for the one that broke his thumb. He was essentially stifled. The Magic Defense worked exactly as planned.

  Except for Georgia’s quarterback John Lastinger. Paterno dared him to throw for a simple reason: “We thought there was no way they could beat us throwing the ball.” Lastinger had averaged fewer than seven completions per game the entire season. But for this game, he found his touch. Penn State led 20–3 when Lastinger began leading Georgia back. He threw one touchdown pass, saved another drive with a big third-down completion, and suddenly Georgia trailed by only 3.

  There were two key plays that sealed the game for Penn State. One of them is probably the most famous play in Penn State history; it happened in the fourth quarter, and ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson called it: “Now, Blackledge is gonna put it up on first down . . . he’s going for the bundle . . . Garrity! Touchdown!” That was a 47-yard touchdown pass from Blackledge to a former walk-on named Gregg Garrity, who caught the ball as he dived into the end zone. A photo of Garrity holding the football in his left hand with his arms up in the air in the touchdown signal would be on the cover of Sports Illustrated that week. “No. 1 at Last!” was the headline above his head.

  That touchdown gave Penn State a seemingly comfortable 27–17 lead. But it wasn’t comfortable enough. Lastinger had a little more magic left. He drove Georgia in for another touchdown, completing the drive with a 9-yard pass to tight end Clarence Kay. There were still almost four minutes left. The Magic Defense had frustrated Herschel Walker, but Georgia was still in position to win.

  Penn State got the ball back, and on third down and 3 to go, a time-out was called. There was still enough time left that a punt could lead to defeat. Blackledge came to the sideline and wanted to throw it. Paterno would remember other coaches saying that they should play the percentages and run the ball. It was not exactly the situation he had faced against Bear Bryant and Alabama three years earlier, but it was close enough. Blackledge was looking at his coach, and Paterno saw something in Blackledge: confidence. The kid was sure he could make the first down.

  “Throw it!” Paterno ordered. “Just make sure you throw it far enough. Let’s win this thing.”

  Blackledge’s rather dull 6-yard sideline pass to Garrity would not be replayed again and again in Pennsylvania, but it was the play that sealed the victory. Penn State won. Though Paterno had believed (and always would believe) his previous three undefeated teams should have been national champions, this team was his first to actually be called national champion.

  At two in the morning, Paterno left the celebration party to go to bed. “I didn’t sleep a wink,” he said. Instead he stared at the ceiling and tried, for just a few happy moments, to reminisce, to think about all that had happened, all those great players he had coached, all the people whom he had come to know along the way. It didn’t come easily to him; looking back never did. He also spent a few minutes thinking about his father, who had worked his way through law school, who had died almost thirty years earlier, who had wondered why his oldest son had become a football coach when he might have been president of the United States.

  “Pop,” Joe Paterno remembered thinking, “I think we did it the right way.”

  FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE WAITED FOR them at the airport in Harrisburg when the team plane landed. This thrilled Paterno, and he said a few words of thanks. He did not know that this crowd was only the beginning. The team got on a bus and began the ride back along U.S. Route 322 to State College. In the dark, in the cold, people lined the road to wave and blow kisses to the Penn State bus. Parents held up their small children. Cars were parked along the side of the road, and horns blared.

  A fire truck met them outside of Harrisburg, its siren blaring, lights flashing, and still there were people along the road, and more people pounding their car horns. A few minutes later, the fire truck from the next town picked them up. They went through Dauphin and Newport, Millerstown and Thompsontown and Mifflintown and Lewistown, Port Royal and Burnham and Reedsville. And the fire trucks kept meeting them at every county line, the sheriffs kept escorting them through every town, the people kept waving.

  Inside the bus, Paterno blinked back tears. He would say that this was the most humbling moment, the moment he realized the impact his football team had on people. For one hundred miles on a road in south central Pennsylvania, Joe Paterno felt as if he would live forever.

  Less than a month later, Bear Bryant, just four weeks after retiring as Alabama football coach, died of a massive heart attack at sixty-nine. For the rest of his life, Paterno kept a version in his files of the Heartsill Wilson poem Bryant read in his last public appearance:

  This is the beginning of a new day

  God has given me this day to use as I will

  I can waste it or use it for good

  What I do today is very important because I am

  Exchanging a day of my life for it

  When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever

  Leaving something in its place I have traded for it

  I want it to be a gain, not loss—good, not evil

  Success, not failure, in order that I

  Shall not forget the price I paid for it.

  Two Callings

  Joe Paterno could get testy whenever someone called his 1982 team his first national championship team. He believed his undefeated teams in 1968, 1969, and 1973 all had a claim on the title. He even had mixed emotions when his 1982 team was finally awarded the title. That same year, Southern Methodist, led by the great running back Eric Dickerson and several other future NFL stars, finished the season unbeaten (with one tie). Paterno admitted that SMU had its own right to the title, and, as he often had before, he lobbied for a playoff that would decide the championship more fairly.

  Still, however he may have felt about it, winning a national championship had moved Paterno into a different level in the sporting public’s mind, and he knew it. He had an even higher pulpit now, and people were even more eager to listen to him. In 1973, when he had his first splash of national stardom, he had spoken about the pursuit of excellence and not allowing the world to break your spirit. Now he had something else he wanted to say.

  A few weeks after Penn State beat Georgia, Paterno was invited to speak to the Penn State Board of Trustees. They likely wanted him to just say a few inspiring words and accept their congratulations. But Paterno had other ideas. He had decided that Penn State was underachieving as a university. He had grown tired of watching the school raise so little money and have what he considered such small ambitions. Fund-raising became his first mission.

  Paterno was never shy or reluctant about asking for money, perhaps in part because of his own mixed feelings about money. One of his favorite opening lines to potential donors was “How much money do you need?” It was a question he often asked himself. “I’m not opposed to making money, believe me. But I think the only reason to have money is to do some good with it.” He and Sue were relentless fund-raisers. They would not only chair fund-raising projects and personally entertain donors in their home, but they would invariably ask for significantly more money than expected. Business leaders around State College described what they called the “Paterno moment,” when, for example, a group announced that they were trying to raise three million dollars, and Paterno would shout from his chair, “No! Ten million!”

  When Penn State was trying to build a spiritual center on campus—it would become one of the largest in America and the place where Joe Paterno’s funeral was held—the Paternos gave a significant personal donation. More important, they convinced one of the richest men in the state, Frank Pasquerilla, to donate more money than he had intended. “My mom at
one point basically told Frank, ‘You’re not leaving this house until we get the last million for this,’ ” Scott Paterno recalled. The money was secured, and the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center was built.

  This kind of story was repeated often. One businessman recalled a conversation he had with his wife in which he told her, “I have to go over to Joe and Sue’s house, so we might need to refinance the house when I get back.” Years later, one of Paterno’s grandchildren told his grandmother how uncomfortable he was asking for money for the Pennsylvania Special Olympics. Incredulous, Sue asked him, “Are you sure you’re a Paterno?”

  Paterno had no misgivings about going into the board of trustees meeting and demanding that they raise a lot more money. It was time to make Penn State a world-class academic institution: “We have never been more united, more proud, and maybe it’s unfortunate that it takes a No. 1 football team to do that . . . . It bothers me to see Penn State football No. 1, then, a few weeks later, to pick up a newspaper and find a report that many of our academic departments are not rated up there with the leading institutions in the country.”

  To Paterno, the way to make Penn State a great academic institution was obvious: they needed to recruit brilliant, aggressive, and vibrant teachers. “We have some,” he said. “We don’t have enough of them.” Then they needed to recruit the most promising and dazzling students, “the star students that star professors get excited about.” And the key was to raise money, more money, to endow chairs, to build science and computer labs, to fund scholarships, to build the nation’s best library. He was particularly passionate about the library: “Without a great library, we can’t be a great university.” Over the next twenty years, he and Sue would donate millions of dollars and raise millions more to build a world-class library that would be called the Paterno Library.

  In challenging the board of trustees, and later challenging the faculty itself, Paterno was typically blunt. He praised some departments and called others lousy; he praised some professors and called others lazy. He said they needed to raise seven to ten million dollars over the next few months, while the opportunity was there. “I think we can be more than we are,” he insisted, “and make students better than they think they are.”

  There it was, Paterno’s philosophy in a sentence: Be more than we are, and make students better than they think they are. The speech sent a jolt through Penn State. Some board members were offended and thought Paterno was out of line. They thought he came across as sanctimonious and self-righteous—the usual Paterno complaints. But others were energized and inspired; they too believed Penn State was a great underachiever. The school had as many alumni as any university in the country and yet did not have a powerful fund-raising engine in place. In 1983, an energetic new president named Bryce Jordan would take Paterno’s vision and amplify it; he announced a $200 million fund-raising campaign to help make Penn State a great institution. Paterno’s close friend and Merrill Lynch CEO Bill Schreyer chaired the campaign and several like it in the future. And, of course, Paterno was front and center.

  “I never understood the unwillingness to ask for money for good causes,” Paterno would say. “I would always ask: ‘Do you want this to be a great university or don’t you? Do you want to help make this a better world or don’t you?’ How much money does one man need, anyway? It seems to me that if you are going to fight for something, you have to fight.”

  In 2010, Penn State launched its most ambitious fund-raising campaign: to raise two billion dollars. In 2012, even after a shocking scandal, Penn State ranked in the top twenty-five nationally among universities in fund-raising efforts.

  THE SECOND MISSION PATERNO CHAMPIONED in the afterglow of his national championship was more controversial. It involved race. Paterno believed that colleges owed their athletes (especially high-profile athletes like football players) an excellent education that would give them their best chance to live remarkable lives. If the school failed to provide that level of education, he said, they were failing the students, failing the school’s mission, and failing society.

  Paterno wanted tougher academic standards for football players. It sickened him that schools accepted great athletes who did not display the high school grades or necessary ambition to succeed in college, and then used them up for football. He understood the temptation, for he battled with his own competitive nature. He was strongly opposed to freshman eligibility, for instance, because he thought freshmen were rarely ready physically or emotionally for the intense life of a being a college football player. They needed a year to acclimate themselves, he insisted. But as strongly as he felt about it, he too played freshmen: not playing them would devastate his recruiting efforts and put his team at a severe, perhaps even insurmountable disadvantage. In the early days, he admitted, he “was too weak to fight that battle.”

  But in 1983, he decided to take on the battle for tougher standards. He backed a proposal by the NCAA called Proposition 48, which required incoming freshmen to meet a threshold high school grade point average and standardized test scores in order to be eligible to participate in college sports. Paterno was also in favor of Proposition 49B, which stated that players who did not meet those academic thresholds could still get athletic scholarships but could not play or practice with the team for a year, giving them time to raise their grades. As Paterno saw it, the propositions made freshmen ineligible for their own good.

  As usual, Paterno’s forcefulness on the issue infuriated some people. The bulk of the athletes who would be affected by Prop 48 were African American, and Paterno argued that the system had “raped” black athletes for far too long: “We can’t afford to do that to another generation.” When several presidents of mostly black universities spoke out against Prop 48—their main argument being that the standardized tests were racially biased—Paterno told a large audience at the NCAA Convention he was surprised to see “black leaders standing here and selling the black students down the river, selling them short.” This, of course, added more heat to the argument.

  “I deeply resent your statement about ‘black leaders selling their students down the river,’ ” Charles Lyons Jr., chancellor of Fayetteville State University, wrote to Paterno. “Many have spent their entire professional careers giving opportunities to low income and deprived black youngsters. But for them and the institutions which they head, these youngsters would forever languish and perish on the scrap heap of humanity.”

  Paterno felt chastened by Lyons’s letter—“I have a big mouth,” he would say with regret—and tried to tone down his rhetoric. But he did not scale back his argument. He believed he was right. He believed that schools had a responsibility to teach, challenge, motivate, and graduate athletes, especially those who came from the most deprived environments. He also believed that talented young athletes were selling themselves short if not challenged and inspired. He was willing to fight for this cause.

  In the end, Proposition 48 passed, but not before the fight turned nasty for Paterno. Penn State, like other rural schools, had always had a very small percentage of African American students. Some people said that Paterno supported Prop 48 because he did not recruit many black athletes. Penn State’s all-time football great Lenny Moore was quoted as saying that the football team had racial problems and that Paterno himself had not done enough to recruit more black athletes or hire more black coaches. Moore later claimed he had been misquoted; in his autobiography he wrote that the story belonged in the “Misquote Hall of Fame.” He insisted that his issues were with the school and not the football team, that Paterno was a good and fair man, vigilant and color-blind. At the time, Paterno was actually having more success recruiting African Americans—and graduating them at a high rate—than at any point in his career. The two men stayed friends, and Paterno wrote the foreword to Moore’s book, All Things Being Equal. But the quote still made all the papers.

  “You know what matters?” Paterno said years later. “Doing what you believe is right. It doesn’t matter what the
y say about you. It really doesn’t. Yeah, sure, some of the things people say hurt, especially if you don’t think they are true. But nothing good ever got done without criticism.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Bob White, a linebacker, 1986 team captain, and one of the great success stories of Paterno’s career, “the world is filled with people who will tell you that you can’t do something. The world doesn’t have enough Joe Paternos, who tell you that you can.”

  Joe and Sue Paterno ride in a parade through State College (Penn State University Archives, Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

  Evil and Good

  Joe Paterno never seemed happier than when he was designing something new. He loved the bursts of inspiration. They woke him from the deepest sleep and compelled him to grab one of the lead pencils he always kept by his bed and start writing. (“Lord, I hated those pencils,” Sue said. “They left marks all over the bed.”) Those bursts of inspiration prompted him to excuse himself in the middle of social gatherings and race back to his office, where he scribbled feverishly. Those bursts of inspiration were a reason he kept coaching long after he had accomplished so much. He did not know how to live without those moments of electricity.

  Perhaps the greatest burst of inspiration of his coaching life, greater even than his invention of a new defense back in 1967, happened at the end of the 1986 football season. It was a vision he shared with his defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky. Together they decided that the way to win the biggest college football game ever played was to walk into the bullfight wearing bright red.

  MORE PEOPLE WATCHED PENN STATE play Miami on television in the January 2, 1987, Fiesta Bowl than watched any other college football game ever played. There were logistical reasons for this: it was the only game played on a Friday night in winter, a good television-watching night. “Miami Vice and Crime Story will not be seen tonight so we can bring you this special presentation of the Fiesta Bowl” was how NBC introduced the game. The game was an anomaly: there were rarely games played after New Year’s Day. And the game had a biting clarity: this was a true national championship game. Miami was ranked No. 1. Penn State was ranked No. 2. Neither team had lost a game all season.