Paterno (20 page)

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.

J
oe 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 call 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.” Paterno 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.”