Paterno (13 page)

It was this—making teams beat themselves—that marked Paterno’s career, not only in the late 1960s but throughout his coaching life. Time after time teams would lose to Penn State and leave the field believing that they should have won. “We had a chance to beat Penn,” Miami coach Charlie Tate said after a 22–7 loss in 1968. (Notice how he called Penn State “Penn.” It would be a few years before Penn State became a brand name.) “But the injury to [our quarterback] and the blocked punt hurt.”

“The big thing is they didn’t make mistakes,” Kansas State coach Vince Gibson said after his team lost 17–14.

“The fumbles killed us,” Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder griped after his team’s 15–14 loss.

Two words,
if only
, haunted Penn State opponents for more than forty years. If only we hadn’t fumbled. If only we hadn’t committed that penalty. If only we had made that field goal. This was no accident, and because it happened time after time, it was not luck either.
Paterno’s overriding philosophy was simple and boring, and through the years fans often complained about it: Your best chance at winning is not losing. You prevail in football and in life by making fewer mistakes than your opponent. You triumph not with grand heroics and individual brilliance and the sorcery of strategy. No, football teams win, he told his players again and again, because of the small details you get right and the other guys get wrong. You trust your teammate a little bit more than the other guy trusts his. You sacrifice a little bit more for the good of the team. You hold on to the football, and you don’t take unnecessary chances, and you don’t jump offside in the big moment.

Again and again, over and over, Paterno told them: Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.

“I know it’s boring,” Paterno would say. “I know fans don’t want to hear it. They want to win every game 55–0. They want to throw the ball all over the field. They want gimmick plays. Sometimes that stuff will work. But that’s not how you win championships. That’s not how you get to the top. If there’s one thing I learned it’s that teams lose games far more often than they win. A good punt will win you more games than a great catch. I know people will say, ‘Ah, Paterno, you’re full of it.’ But I’ll take my chances with my way.”

His way guided Penn State through the 1968 season undefeated. The final victory, a dramatic 15–14 triumph over Kansas in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, was typical. Penn State did not play well; the Nittany Lions committed four turnovers, a stunning breakdown for a Paterno team. Because of these mistakes Kansas led 14–7 with one minute, thirty seconds left in the game.

Then the Penn State players put together a series of winning plays. Neal Smith blocked a punt. Quarterback Chuck Burkhart, who was not flashy and would take much abuse throughout his college career because of it, threw a long pass to Bob Campbell to move the ball to the Kansas 3-yard line. After a couple of failed attempts to get the ball into the end zone—and with less than twenty seconds left—Burkhart changed the play just before the snap, kept the ball, and powered into
the end zone. Burkhart was supposed to hand the ball off to Penn State’s star running back, Charlie Pittman, but he was sure he saw a small opening, and he ran through it. It was risky; Burkhart was such a limited runner that he had not scored a single touchdown all season. But Paterno said that what Burkhart lacked in pure talent he more than made up for with his nearly flawless instincts. He scored the first touchdown of his career.

“This will sound like a contradiction because I believe you win with teamwork,” Paterno said. “But football is a contradiction. Life is a contradiction. Sometimes you have to ignore what the coaches tell you, what the players tell you, what anybody tells you, and you have to go out and make the winning play. People thought Chuck wasn’t much of a quarterback because he didn’t throw the ball that well and he didn’t run it that well either. But Chuck understood what it took to win games as well as anybody I ever coached.”

Paterno had his team go for the 2-point play and the victory. He never considered settling for a tie; that would have gone against everything he believed about being unafraid to lose. The 2-point attempt failed; Burkhart’s pass fell incomplete. The game was lost. And then it wasn’t. Kansas had twelve men on the field. A review of film would show that Kansas actually had twelve men on the field for the two previous plays as well, but the referees had not realized it. This time they noticed. The penalty gave Penn State another chance. This time, running back Bob Campbell took a handoff and scored the 2 points that won the game.

“The penalty was the big play,” Kansas coach Pepper Rodgers grumbled about his own team’s blunder. He would not be the last coach to mutter those words after facing Joe Paterno.

HERE IS A STORY ABOUT
luck. In the spring of 1967, Joe Paterno called a sophomore football player named Steve Smear to his office. Smear had played offense in high school, but Paterno switched him to the defensive line, one of the many times he shifted a talented player
to defense and made him into a star. Smear would become captain of the undefeated 1968 and 1969 teams, a second-team All-American, and one of the legends of Penn State football.

“I remember that first he told me not to get discouraged by my new position,” Smear said. But this was not the point of the conversation. Paterno told Smear that a Penn State recruit had decided at the last minute to go to another school, and this had opened up a football scholarship. Paterno wanted to know a little bit more about a high school teammate of Smear’s. He asked Smear two questions.

“Is he a hard worker?”

“Yes, coach, absolutely,” Smear said.

“Is he a good guy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Paterno said. “Thanks, Steve. See you at practice.”

That was it. End of discussion. Paterno did not ask any questions about the young man’s talent as a football player. After the conversation, he made Smear’s old friend a last-minute scholarship offer. One of Paterno’s great strengths—and perhaps one of his great flaws—was his fierce loyalty and absolute trust in the people closest to him. Though he had coached Smear for only a year, he had unqualified faith in his judgment. “I knew Steve was a good guy. I knew he would tell me the truth.”

“It’s not always easy to get his trust,” said Tom Bradley, who played and coached for Paterno for thirty-five years. “But once you have it, you have it all.”

Smear’s former teammate and friend happily accepted the scholarship—he did not have many other offers—and when he got to campus Paterno moved him from the offensive line to linebacker. (Yes, another player shifted to defense; the story repeats again and again for the next forty years.) Paterno watched the player in spring practice for only a few minutes and then called in his graduate assistant coach, a young man named Jerry Sandusky, and said, “Here’s how I want you to coach him. Don’t coach him! Leave him alone! Don’t change a single thing!”

The new kid was Jack Ham, who would play with wild abandon for Penn State and the Pittsburgh Steelers and, in time, be inducted into both the College Football of Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Some football experts still call him the best linebacker in the history of football.

Jack Ham might be the best player Paterno ever found, but he did not spend any time recruiting Ham—he ended up with Ham after the recruiting period ended. It seems impossible to call this anything other than luck, but if something happens again and again, can you still call it luck? Paterno had a startling series of recruiting success stories in the mid- to late 1960s. Other schools certainly offered money under the table, freedom from academic pressures, and guarantees of future stardom, while Paterno offered only a scholarship and the promise of a good education. Is it luck? How often must good fortune happen before it becomes something larger than luck?

The college football recruiting scene was raw in the late 1960s. There were far fewer regulations and penalties than there are now. “It was the Wild Wild West” is how Paterno put it. Cheating was rampant and only cosmetically camouflaged. Top football recruits drove expensive new cars around campuses across the country and worked at well-paying and largely fictitious jobs such as making sure the sprinklers worked. A representative case might be Joe Namath, a western Pennsylvania high school legend whom Paterno ignored because “he wasn’t much of a student.” Other coaches were not so picky. “It was strange,” Namath famously told
Playboy
magazine, “coming out of high school and having colleges offer me as much as my father made in a year.”

Academic standards were preposterously low when it came to football stars. The National Collegiate Athletic Association had set the grade standard for scholarship athletes at 1.6 out of a possible 4.0—barely passing. Even with a bar that low, schools were famous for putting their football players in trumped-up classes that newspaper columnists invariably called “Basket Weaving 101” and “Elements
of Bottle Washing.” All of these forms of cheating and others would remain a part of college football throughout Paterno’s life, but the cheating was never quite so brazen and unabashed as in the late 1960s.

Paterno hated the cheating. The most conspicuous reason for this was his undisguised impulse to value right over wrong. There’s a story Paterno would tell sometimes: When he was in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Brown, there was a secret and contentious vote over a pledge named Steve Fenn, who was Jewish. There had never been a Jewish member of a Brown fraternity. The way Paterno remembered it, two frat brothers secretly blackballed Fenn. Paterno and his friends learned who one of the blackballers was and convinced him to rescind his objection, but they could not discover the identity of the other. This told Paterno that the man was both a bigot and a coward, two qualities he abhorred. When the secret voting started again, Paterno stepped forward and announced, “I’m embarrassed to say this, but I voted the blackball. I would like to withdraw it now.”

In many ways, that story describes not only Paterno’s sense of fairness but also his strategic sensibilities. He liked to challenge people. Everyone in the fraternity had to know Paterno did not vote the blackball. The ruse was transparent; Paterno had been one of Fenn’s most vocal supporters. But this did not reduce the power of the strategy; the only way the blackballer could call out Paterno as a liar was to reveal himself as a bigot. As Paterno told his quarterbacks through the years, “It doesn’t matter if they know a play is coming if they can’t stop it.” He expected that the anti-Semitic frat brother would stay shamefully silent, and he did. Fenn was admitted into the fraternity.

From more or less his first day as a head coach, Paterno called out those coaches at other schools who cheated and committed academic fraud. He railed against paying players large sums of money, not only because it was against the rules but because he thought it was no way to teach young men about the realities of life. Every one of his five children got jobs in college, even long after he had made
his first million. He believed giving too much to an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old—whether in the form of fame, expectations, or riches—could leave permanent scars.

For Paterno, college football was supposed to be about teaching young men how to live. He would say all the time, “I know this sounds corny” or “People may not believe me,” but this idea was his North Star. Teaching young men how to live. He insisted that schools should—
must
—challenge football players academically. He believed deeply in education. He may have carried some grudges from his years at Brown, but he also saw his time there as the most intellectually stimulating of his life. “When else in your life do you wake up every morning and the main goal is to learn?” He believed college football players should be challenged and taxed and inspired. He wanted them to be bone-tired at the end of practice. He also wanted them stretching their mental limits trying to decipher Virgil or to consider Napoleon’s motivations or to wrestle with physics formulas long after dark.

College football worked, he believed, only if the trade was even. At Penn State, a player would give his heart and body to the team, and along the way help make millions of dollars for the school and spark joy and passion in hundreds of thousands of Penn State fans. Paterno understood that was a large sacrifice for a player. In return, the player deserved a matching reward, the biggest any school could offer: his players would leave Penn State prepared to live a full life. What could mean more? That was the only way the trade was fair. Yes, he expected players to get their degrees—between 80 and 90 percent of Penn State football players graduated over the years—but that was only part of the deal. More, much more, he wanted players to be prepared for all that followed, to learn how to be successful, to be good husbands, good fathers, to know how to fight through the hard times and overcome mistakes and achieve more than they thought possible. This was Paterno’s deal, and if colleges failed those students, the deal was broken. Paterno looked at those schools who gave players money and grades and easy ways out, and it disgusted him.

“You will hear people talk about paying the players,” he explained. “And I think football players should get a little stipend, some spending money so they can go to the movies and go out with their friends without feeling embarrassed. But you can’t turn college football into professional football. The formula doesn’t work. If you pay a big star $100,000 to play college football, and you don’t discipline him and make him a better person, you are getting him on the cheap. You are using him. You are failing him.”

Paterno’s sense of fair play would strike people differently through the years. Some thought him holier-than-thou. His own brother, George, complained about what he considered Joe’s sanctimony. Others thought he was simply lying about his commitment to education or Penn State’s vigilance about not paying college players or his utopian dreams for college football. Every misstep he made, especially those at the end of his life, would confirm the hypocrisy charges to the critics and the cynics and the people who found themselves unmoved and unconvinced by his stand on ethics and academics.