Paterno (26 page)

“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 they 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.”

J
oe 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.

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.