Paterno

by Joe Posnanski

  More than anything, this game was pure cinema, with villains and heroes, Axis and Allies, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, evil and good. Of course, it wasn’t really good against evil; it never is except in the movies and professional wrestling. But this game was close enough.

  Penn State was supposed to represent the good. The Nittany Lions had finished the regular season 11–0 for the second straight year. In the 1985 season, they finished the regular season No. 1 but lost to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. “We were the better team,” linebacker Trey Bauer declared, echoing the thoughts of his teammates. Their undefeated record in 1986 impressed few across the country: they played just one ranked team, a Bearless Alabama they beat 23–3; the rest of the schedule was bland; and the games were too close. They almost lost to Cincinnati, they almost lost to Maryland, and they almost lost to a subpar Notre Dame team.

  The offense was led by an affable and much maligned quarterback named John Shaffer, who wasn’t especially fast and couldn’t throw particularly well but had a knack for being on the winning side—a quarterback right out of the Joe Paterno–Chuck Burkhart mold. All year, it seemed, the offense always did just enough. Paterno thought that was largely because of Shaffer. From the seventh grade through his senior year in college, Shaffer’s teams won every game he started except for the one against Oklahoma. When Shaffer graduated, he played for the Dallas Cowboys, but after only a short while he asked to be released. He had won enough football games. He went to work on Wall Street instead.

  The team’s core was its defense, particularly its linebackers. Penn State was already known as “Linebacker U,” but this was especially true in 1986. Seven linebackers on that team were drafted into the NFL, another had a long and successful professional career in Canada, and a ninth was perhaps the team’s most vocal leader. That was Trey Bauer.

  It was Bauer, as much as anyone, who inspired the flash of insight in the minds of Paterno and Sandusky. Miami was one of the most talented teams in the history of college football. The offense featured the 1986 Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Vinny Testaverde; three future NFL wide receivers, including future NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irvin; and Alonzo Highsmith, a running back who would be picked third in the NFL draft. The defense was equally talented, overloaded with future pro stars, but it was the Miami offense that got Paterno and Sandusky thinking.

  “Can we handle it?” Paterno remembered asking.

  “Beats me,” Sandusky replied.

  TREY BAUER HAD PLAYED HIGH school football for his father, Charlie, in Paramus, New Jersey. He was an Ohio State fan growing up, but he ruled out playing for the Buckeyes after getting into a rip-roaring argument with the recruiting coordinator and then hanging up on the guy. It was a long story. With Bauer, there were a lot of long stories. He showed up at State College a year after he attended a camp there. He liked the campus and told Paterno he was coming. Paterno asked about going to New Jersey to visit his parents. Bauer responded, “Why? They’re not the ones coming here. I am.”

  In his freshman year, Bauer was thrown out of study hall, and even thirty years later he claimed it wasn’t his fault. It was another long story. Paterno didn’t see it that way. Bauer’s hair was long; he had a habit of getting into fights; he was a pain in the neck. After the study hall incident, Bauer showed up ten minutes late for a team meeting. “Bauer, I’ve had it with you,” Paterno shouted at him. “Call your parents. You will never play a down at Penn State. I will do anything I can to help you transfer to another school, but you’re done here.”

  Bauer was stunned. He called home and got his mother and father on the phone. He told them what Paterno had said. Charlie Bauer, a Paterno fan through and through, said, “I’d throw you off the team too. You’re a pain in the ass, your hair’s too long, and you’re a punk.” Meanwhile Bauer’s mother was crying and saying, “No, Charlie, don’t say that.” Nobody knew what to do. Finally Bauer made a decision.“ I’m not leaving,” he told his parents.

  “What?” his father said.

  “I’m not leaving. I don’t want to leave.”

  And that’s exactly what Bauer told Paterno. Paterno seemed at a loss. He told Bauer, “You’re never going to play here.” And Bauer replied, “Well, I’m not leaving.” He cut his hair. He worked hard in class. He straightened up his act, at least somewhat. He kept showing up and always on time. And Paterno, without ever saying anything about it, made Bauer one of his leaders.

  “I know that’s what Joe wanted me to do,” Bauer said. “But I can’t say it was a test. He was going to throw me off the team. He was sick of me. But I think he also knew where my heart was . . . . From that point on, there was something unspoken between us. He knew that I wasn’t going anywhere. And I knew that he knew.”

  WITH BAUER’S LEADERSHIP AND TOUGHNESS, and with a group of defensive players who played together as well as any Paterno team, the two coaches decided to try something even more extreme than the Magic Defense they used against Georgia. In the month or so of preparation before the bowl game, they devised a defense to attack the one glaring flaw they saw in Miami’s offense: arrogance.

  For four weeks, Sandusky taught his players to back up. It was not a natural movement for them. The defense had been built around toughness and fury. Shane Conlan was an attacking linebacker; defensive back Ray Isom launched himself at receivers; Bob White and Mike Russo took on two and three blockers at a time. Now the coaches were asking them to pull back, to give way. Paterno and Sandusky rarely agreed; they did not like each other. Paterno often fired Sandusky, and Sandusky often quit, and the two men clashed so violently in team meetings that other coaches expected a fight to break out.

  But every now again, like before the 1983 Sugar Bowl against Georgia, their goals and judgments meshed. They decided that the way to beat Miami was to bait them into destroying themselves. Paterno gave the order, and Sandusky put it into motion. The two men, for one month at the end of 1986, worked together better than they ever had before and certainly ever would again. One person close to the program said, “I know this sounds bitter, but I think that’s the last game Jerry Sandusky really coached.”

  For that one game, they were of one mind.

  “What if they don’t fall for it?” Paterno asked Sandusky.

  “Beats me,” Sandusky said.

  PATERNO ALSO TOLD SHANE CONLAN that he would never play another down at Penn State. But in Conlan’s case, it was a near miracle that he ended up at Penn State in the first place. He was a skinny kid from a tiny school in a tiny hamlet called Frewsburg in upstate New York. He played running back, mostly. Nobody recruited him. Then, in one of those crazy acts of providence that seemed to happen in Paterno’s life, an eight-millimeter film of Conlan playing in high school ended up in the office of Penn State’s assistant defensive coach, Tom Bradley. “It was so grainy you could hardly see anything,” Bradley recalled. “And what you did see was bad football. I mean bad. Go into any restaurant and pick eleven people and we could beat this team. But I saw Shane playing, and he was tough. And I had this feeling about him.”

  Bradley called Conlan’s coach, Tom Sharp, and asked him who else was recruiting him. “Nobody,” Sharp said. That was discouraging. But Sharp asked Bradley to come watch Conlan play in a basketball game. So Bradley drove up to Frewsburg (“I’m thinking, I must be nuts!”); he knew he had arrived when he saw the barn with “Welcome to Frewsburg” painted on it. Conlan fouled out in the third quarter of the game, and Bradley thought, “Well, he is aggressive.”

  Bradley told Paterno he had a good feeling about Conlan and wanted to bring him in.

  “You’re going to have to coach him,” Paterno said.

  “I know,” Bradley agreed.

  “You better be right,” Paterno warned.

  During a practice in Conlan’s freshman year—he had been moved to linebacker—he was covering teammate Kevin Baugh, who pulled one of those stunts that work on freshmen: Baugh pretended that he had pulled a hamstring. When Conlan asked
, “Hey, are you okay?” Baugh ran right by him and scored a touchdown. The next thing Conlan heard was that familiar high-pitched voice yelling, “You stink, Conlan! You hear me? You will never play here! You’re a quitter! You stink! Get out of my practice!”

  But Bradley’s instincts were on target. Shane Conlan was a remarkable football player. First, he was a great athlete: “People never really understood just how fast and strong Shane was,” Trey Bauer would say. Second, he had a great mind for football: “Shane was always where he was supposed to be,” Paterno said. Third, he was tough. That came from his father, Dan. Conlan never complained. In fact, Conlan hardly ever even talked.

  “If you’re lucky,” Paterno said, “you get to coach a guy like Shane Conlan once in your life.”

  THE DAYS LEADING UP TO the 1987 Fiesta Bowl were mayhem. Miami coach Jimmy Johnson had arrived in Phoenix ahead of his players, which allowed them to hatch a plan to show the nation just how serious they were about this game: they came off the plane wearing army fatigues. Penn State players, of course, wore jackets and ties. Sports Illustrated had just named Paterno Sportsman of the Year—only the second coach, after UCLA’s basketball legend John Wooden, to be so honored—and sportswriter Rick Reilly’s story painted the now fully formed portrait of Saint Joe. “Over the last three decades,” Reilly wrote, “nobody has stayed truer to the game and at the same time truer to himself than Joseph Vincent Paterno, Joe Pa to Penn State worshipers—a man so patently stubborn that he refuses to give up on the notion that if you hack away at enough windmills, a few of the suckers will fall.”

  The narrative, good versus evil, had been put into motion.

  “Look, they weren’t bad guys,” Trey Bauer insisted. “It was more like the inmates were running the asylum. They were just doing whatever they wanted. They were so talented, I think they figured it didn’t matter what they did—they were going to destroy us anyway.”

  Jimmy Johnson seemed to have the same attitude. In his first press conference, he casually referred to Paterno as “Saint Joe” and at one point during the week said with a wink, “Everybody respects Joe’s image . . . and nobody would dare say anything bad about it.” Johnson seemed to think the army fatigues stunt was beneficial to his team’s unity. “We have a oneness I’ve never seen before,” he announced.

  Five days before the game, both teams gathered for a steak fry; they were supposed to present little skits to poke fun at each other. Penn State went first, led by punter John Bruno. He made fun of Jimmy Johnson’s hair in a bit that included a giant can of hairspray. He also made a joke that was in poor taste, about how Penn State had ideal race relations, so much so that they even let the black player eat at the training table with the white players once a week.

  There would be some disagreement about the impact of Bruno’s jokes. A few news reports at the time suggested Miami’s players were actually more offended by the hairspray joke than the racial one. Miami players and others later claimed that they were reacting to the training table joke. But it seems likely Bruno’s jokes had nothing to do with what followed. When it was time for the Hurricanes to do their skit, Miami’s Jerome Brown tore off his clothes to reveal the army fatigues underneath—confirmation that what was about to happen wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision but had been planned—and shouted, “We’re not here for you all to make monkeys of us. We’re here to make war. Did the Japanese sit down with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them? Let’s go!” With that the Miami players walked out, all of them now wearing fatigues. Johnson and the other Miami coaches just watched.

  John Bruno would cut some of the tension with the best line of the night—“Hey, didn’t the Japanese lose that one?”—but the scene was chaotic. “Are you kidding me?” said Bauer. “Who was in charge? I mean, we had too much respect for Joe to walk out to the bathroom much less walk out of the place.”

  Paterno was privately outraged by the scene. “Combat fatigues?” he wrote in his autobiography. “Why not hang bayonets and hand grenades on their belts too?” But he was also thrilled. The trap was set. It was clear the Miami coaches and players did not just want to beat Penn State; they wanted to destroy and embarrass Penn State. And those were exactly the ambitions Paterno was hoping for.

  “They left after they ate, right?” Paterno joked with reporters. “Typical football players.” Quietly he told his players not to comment on the walkout. They would have plenty to say once the game began.

  FOOTBALL COACHES HAVE AN ARCHETYPE in their minds, a player who represents the kind of athlete they love to coach. It could be a quarterback who can run and throw and adjust to whatever the opposing defense offers. Paterno was lucky enough to have guys like that; Todd Blackledge, Chuck Fusina, Kerry Collins, and Michael Robinson come to mind. He also had quarterbacks who had a knack for winning, like John Shaffer. He was blessed that way.

  But it might not be a quarterback. It might be a linebacker who is tough as sandpaper, who makes tackle after tackle and, in the biggest moment, finds ways to force the fumble or tip the pass or make the interception that wins the game. Paterno was doubly blessed there. The list of wonderful linebackers at Linebacker U is long: Jack Ham, Lance Mehl, Shane Conlan, Brandon Short, and, well, you could keep going for a while.

  Then again, the archetype could be a running back, someone who just loves running the ball, again and again, never tiring, never wilting, a runner who pounds forward and finds a way to drive into the end zone and will, every now and again, break a long run that destroys the other team’s spirit. In this Paterno was triply blessed. The list of astonishing and impassioned runners at Penn State is even longer than the list of linebackers: Charlie Pittman, Franco Harris, Lydell Mitchell, Curt Warner, D. J. Dozier, Blair Thomas, Ki-Jana Carter, Larry Johnson, and, of course, John Cappelletti.

  Over forty-six years Paterno would coach brilliant players at all positions, and those young men would be inspired by different muses, driven by different demons, motivated by different methods. As Paterno said about Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris, who played for him at the same time, “They were different. Lydell would run through a wall for you. Franco would walk to the wall and feel for cracks.”

  Still, if Paterno had the perfect player in mind, the player who represented what it was all about for him as a coach, the player might have been Bob White. He grew up in Haines City, Florida, where migrant workers harvested citrus and the Ringling Brothers had stationed their theme park, Circus World. He never knew his father, and he worked in the citrus groves and tobacco fields to help his mother and grandmother keep going. His middle school basketball coach, Bob Eisenberg, saw a bright future for Bobby White. He was an extraordinary young athlete, but more than that, he had a kind of wisdom that was uncommon for a young man. Eisenberg was from McKeesport, in the heart of Pittsburgh, and he thought Bobby would have a better chance up north. “My mother was against it,” White recalled. “But she knew it was a good chance.”

  White moved to McKeesport and lived with a social worker for a while, then a school librarian. He developed into an extraordinary football player. He was big and strong and fast, but what separated him was that he played with this quiet rage. “If it was Bobby’s responsibility to control the A-gap,” Trey Bauer said, referring to the gap of space between the offense’s center and left guard, “it wouldn’t matter if the whole place caught fire. He was going to control the A-gap.”

  More than a hundred schools recruited White. He remembered that they promised him dreams: he would be a starter right away; he would be an All-American; he would make millions in the NFL. But Bob Eisenberg was right about White’s uncommon sense. He did not fall for dreams. White wanted to play for Joe Paterno.

  Paterno was skeptical. He loved the young man’s spirit, but he did not think White could succeed as a student at Penn State. In his autobiography he wrote, “Here was a kid who had never read a whole book!” White would say that was an exaggeration, but only a slight one. He had not grown up in an environment of readin
g, to say the least. But when he wanted something, he fought to get it. He spurned big offers, under-the-table promises, guaranteed fame. He wanted to play for Joe Paterno.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Paterno said: he would take White on, but only if he agreed to be personally tutored by Sue Paterno. White happily agreed. Together Sue and Bob read Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and A Tale of Two Cities, classic junior high and high school books about which White said, “Honestly, I had never heard of them.” He struggled with his classes at first, but he was smart and he was driven, and in time he graduated with a degree in administration of justice. Not long after that, he got his master’s degree in counselor education. He was also captain of the 1986 Penn State football team.

  On the first play of the Penn State–Miami game, Penn State quarterback John Shaffer was sacked for a 14-yard loss. Two plays later, he was sacked again. This was how it would go all day. Penn State’s offense had no chance to move the ball against Miami’s brilliant and ferocious defense. “Years later, I watched a tape of the game,” Trey Bauer recalled. “And I said, right in the middle, ‘We have no chance to win this game.’ And I played in that game.”

  Paterno was unconcerned. He had suspected that his offense would struggle against Miami; he had told his offensive coordinator Fran Ganter that the offense’s main job was to avoid turning over the ball. The real question in his mind was whether Miami’s offense would fall for Penn State’s ploy. It didn’t look good at first. Miami took the ball and drove down the field. Quarterback Vinny Testaverde completed a pass to Michael Irvin. He completed another to Charles Henry. He completed a 10-yarder to Alonzo Highsmith.