Paterno (23 page)

“Has anybody told you about the Coke breaks?” former player Rodger Puz asked. Puz lived a full life after college; he was a petroleum engineer, then he went to law school, graduated cum laude, and became a prominent lawyer in Pittsburgh. He never forgot those Coke breaks. While the players practiced in the scorching heat of August, Paterno would have the team managers bring out six-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola and put them on a bed of crushed ice, where all the players could see them. This was before coaches understood (or particularly cared about) the importance of keeping athletes hydrated. Going for a long time without water was viewed as a way to toughen up the players.

“You would see those Cokes over there,” recalled former star wide receiver Kenny Jackson, “and, man, I can’t even tell you how much you wanted one. It was like the most important thing in the entire world. You’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re stinking, and there were those Cokes, man. If somebody had said to you at that moment, ‘I’ll give you a million dollars or I’ll give you a Coke,’ you’d take the Coke.”

Just when the players thought they would collapse from thirst, Paterno would blow his whistle and yell, “Okay, Coke break!” Players ran full-speed for the Coca-Cola. “It was like a commercial,” Jackson said. (Ironically, Penn State became an exclusive Pepsi school a few years later.) They drank those Cokes as fast as possible because they had only two and a half minutes before break was over.

“He’d give you about two seconds to drink that Coke,” Jackson remembered.

“We would chug those things down,” Puz said. “And for the rest of practice, you would hear players belching all over the field.”

“Burping like crazy,” Jackson said.

“You’d be running around and you could hear the Coke bubbling inside you,” Puz said.

“I’m telling you, it was the greatest thing ever invented,” Jackson said. “Oh, Joe had his tricks, boy. You need to tell Joe to get that back. Coke breaks help you. I never wanted anything in my life more than I wanted one of those Cokes at practice.”

When I asked Paterno about Coke breaks, he shrugged. “Guys remember that stuff?” Then he smiled and said, “I always told them, ‘You’ll be surprised, when you get older, what you remember and what you don’t.’ But Coke breaks? Geez.”

T
he strange part was how calm Paterno felt as he stood on the sidelines of the Penn State–Pitt game in late November 1981—strange for a couple of reasons. First, of course, Paterno never felt calm. He did not like calm; he thrived on tension. Even in the summer, when there was nothing to do, when he sat in the sun at the beach house in Avalon, New Jersey, read books, listened to waves roll on the shore, he wasn’t exactly calm. “No, it’s not easy for me to turn off my mind,” he admitted. After a few days at the beach, he would invariably be ready to go home, back to his office and back to work.

The second reason calm seemed out of place, though, was more
compelling: Penn State was losing to Pittsburgh 14–0. It was the last regular-season game of a wonderful but ultimately unsatisfying 1981 season. Penn State had been ranked No. 1 in America when they lost at Miami on Halloween Day. Two weeks later, they were beat up by Bear Bryant’s Alabama team again. (Paterno faced Bryant four times; Alabama and the Bear won all four games.)

Now Penn State was losing at Pitt by two touchdowns. Led by future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino, Pitt was ranked No. 1 in the country. Still, somehow, Paterno felt calm. Absurdly calm. He walked up and down the sidelines and he did not scream. Players remembered him saying, “Okay, guys. We’ll be fine. We’re better than they are. Let’s just take care of business. We’ll be okay, it’s all going to work out.”

Things did work out for Penn State. Paterno and defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky shifted the defense into a bewildering zone that confused Marino. He had thrown two quick touchdown passes, but after that he threw four interceptions. Paterno also unleashed the offense, breaking away from the conservative style he had made famous. He allowed his promising quarterback Todd Blackledge to take chances and throw downfield to talented receivers like Kenny Jackson. The two combined on two long touchdown passes. Penn State won 48–14. Paterno was sure it was a sign.

“When I was being recruited by Penn State,” Jackson said, “everybody told me, ‘Man, you’re a good receiver, why do you want to go there? He ain’t gonna throw you the ball, man.’ But Joe told me, he said, ‘People don’t realize it, but we’re going to throw the ball a lot.’ And he did.”

Paterno seemed to understand, in that moment on the sideline, that his team was on the brink of being something special. Even after returning from his visit to Brooklyn, his attention had been drifting. Penn State asked him to become athletic director as well as head coach, apparently to take advantage of his fund-raising talents, and to the surprise of family and friends he took the job. “I know people
think I took it because I was power-hungry. But it really wasn’t that. I thought I could help.”

He kept the job for two years, and mostly disliked it. He thought the best thing the job did was give him a new appreciation for women’s sports. He had come into the job with a primitive view of women’s sports (and, perhaps, women in general): “I honestly didn’t think women really wanted to compete.” Over time he grew to feel differently. “I was kind of a Neanderthal about all that—at least that’s what my daughters told me. But then I watched some of our women’s teams play, and I thought, ‘These young women are great athletes and they play with great passion.’ They made me a better person, I think.”

It is paradoxical, perhaps, that the most far-reaching move Paterno made as athletic director was to hire women’s basketball coach Rene Portland. She had been a star player at Immaculata College just after Title IX had changed the landscape for women’s athletics, and Paterno was impressed with her intensity and sense of purpose. She reminded him a bit of himself. Portland was a hugely successful coach for Penn State; she won more than six hundred games and took Penn State to twenty-one NCAA tournaments.

But she was also staunchly and publicly antihomosexual. She was quoted in a
Chicago Sun Times
newspaper story saying, “I will not have it [homosexuality] in my program.” In 2005, a player named Jennifer Harris filed a federal lawsuit accusing Portland of cutting her from the team because of her perceived sexual orientation. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and Portland resigned. This, of course, was decades after Paterno had given up the athletic director’s job, but there were those, especially at the end of his life, who said that he should have used his power to put a stop to any discrimination happening on the women’s basketball team.

“What power are these people talking about?” Paterno asked. “I didn’t stick my nose in other people’s programs.” His son Jay recalled a conversation he’d had with his father about Portland just after her resignation. Joe told him, “I really don’t know anything about it.
I don’t want anyone telling me how to run my program, why should I tell anyone else how to run theirs?” When Jay said he would not want one of his own daughters discriminated against or treated badly, he remembered Joe agreeing: “You’re right. Everybody deserves a chance. If that was happening, that was wrong.”

But what Paterno really learned from his time as athletic director was that he didn’t want to be athletic director. He liked to coach. He was good at other things when inspired: charming the media, energizing the alumni, giving speeches, building business plans, seeing widespread possibilities, and nobody was better at raising money for Penn State. Those things did not bring him joy the way coaching did. There were several attempts to get him to jump into politics, but he would always say that he did not feel qualified. His reluctance probably had little to do with qualifications; it was all about desire. Coaching was the thing that jolted him out of bed in the middle of the night to scribble notes. Coaching was what woke him up in the morning, always before the alarm, and inspired him throughout the day. He loved it, all of it, the preparation, the game plans, the teaching, the sense of purpose, the competition, and, at the end, the confirmation of a job well done.

“It might sound like a cliché, but I think Dad always saw coaching as four-dimensional chess,” Scott Paterno said. “That’s chess where the pieces constantly change in strength. So one year, he would think, ‘Okay, we have a weak left tackle, how can we work around that?’ And the next year he would think, ‘Okay, our linebackers are good, but our defensive line is young, how can we build a great defense?’ And then he could take his plan, put it into action, and change young men’s lives along the way. That’s what drove him.”

As he calmly stood on the sideline of that Pitt game knowing, absolutely knowing, that his team was going to win, a lot of things clicked for him. He quit the athletic director job within a couple of months and passed it to his longtime friend Jim Tarman. He reworked his offense away from a stale and conservative power game into a modern, fast-paced passing attack built around players’ speed. And he thought,
“You know what? Next year, we’re going to win the national championship.”

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.”