Paterno (38 page)

But that was at the end. First, there would be one more Paterno miracle.

P
aterno often admitted that his feelings about winning were contradictory and conflicted. He said that winning wasn’t the most important thing. The quest was what mattered. The journey was what mattered. Transcendence was what mattered. He longed for opponents to play their best game because only then could his own team reach its highest standard. He looked for talented football players who wanted to be a part of something larger, and he worked his whole career to create that something. He cherished those players who played football with intensity but lived with an even deeper and greater passion. When he looked in the mirror, he liked seeing an
Ivy League–educated man who listened to Puccini, read Shakespeare, pondered poetry, devised disarming football strategies, and believed that winning and losing football games was a frenzied and heart-pumping but ultimately meaningless element of a life spent teaching.

Ah, but Joe Paterno loved to win.

“Yes, I know, I preach a lot about being willing to lose, that there can be valor in losing to a better opponent,” Paterno wrote in his autobiography. “Yes, I know it seems contradictory, inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical. I’m sorry about that. The world is a more complicated and ambiguous place than I wish it were.”

After the meeting with Spanier, after the “To be or not to be” goal-line stand, after the five toughest years of his coaching life, Joe Paterno rededicated himself to winning. He was seventy-eight years old, written off, but he believed that he could still lead Penn State to victory without cheating, without compromising on academics, without resorting to shortcuts.

But there would be concessions. There had to be concessions. The media requests, some of which had already been weeded out, would be cut off almost entirely. The speaking engagements, the appearances, the dinners with sponsors that had become rarities were stopped entirely. The radio show, which was done live with callers, became a few minutes of talking into broadcaster Steve Jones’s tape recorder sometime during the week. The engagement with the board of trustees and other power brokers at the school would be reduced to a minimum. Paterno would concentrate on coaching football. “Let me coach my football team!” he screamed repeatedly at Guido D’Elia. Everything else—everything that didn’t directly involve the football team and its success—faded into the distant background.

Paterno attacked the recruiting process with an energy he had not shown in years. There were two players he desperately wanted: a wonderful athlete from a suburb of Pittsburgh named Justin King, and Derrick Williams, a wide receiver almost unanimously viewed as the top high school prospect in America. Paterno personally went to King’s home, went to see his cousin play basketball, tried to impress
upon King that Penn State football still meant something special. With King, Paterno had a slight advantage because King’s stepfather, Terry Smith, had played at Penn State for him.

Derrick Williams was trickier. He was from Greenbelt, Maryland, which did not put him in the usual sphere of Penn State recruiting dominance. Every major college team in America wanted him. The odds of his choosing Penn State, which had suffered four losing seasons in five years and was coached by an aging legend who had lost much of his fan base, seemed the longest of long shots. But Paterno saw something in Williams that others didn’t see. He saw a young man who longed for a deep challenge and the possibility of greatness.

He wrote in one of his handwritten letters to Williams:

Derrick, we are one or two “big play” skill people away from a team that can compete for the national championship in 2005 . . .

Everybody on our staff believes you are the wide receiver who can immediately fill that need . . .

Derrick, ordinarily I don’t recruit in the spring, but this year—but this year—the first day we are allowed on the road I’m going to be in Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I want to make sure you know how much we want you and how important you are in our future plans.

Before I retire, I want to have one more great team that can win a National Championship. We have been fortunate enough to have Undefeated-Untied National Championship Contenders in four different decades.

The rest did not need to be said. Paterno wanted Williams to know, to believe that he could play the starring role in bringing Penn State back to glory. Yes, of course, he could go to thriving programs at Oklahoma or Ohio State or Florida and be a part of something there. But at Penn State, he could achieve unimaginable heights. Williams bought in. “Penn State is missing a piece of the puzzle,” he told
reporters after choosing to go to State College. “Maybe it’s cocky or whatever, but I think I’m that piece.”

This kind of recruiting was unusual for Paterno. Throughout his career he had told high school players that he wanted them to come to Penn State, but the football team would be fine if they did not come. Always he had emphasized the team over the individual and insisted that no one was irreplaceable. Always he had insisted that winning was secondary to the life and academic lessons of college. He did not back away from those words, but he had to get Derrick Williams and Justin King. “I wouldn’t care if we didn’t get anybody but those two kids,” he said on his radio show.

Paterno sent a couple of coaches, including his son and quarterback coach Jay, to Austin to watch how Texas coached their offense around star quarterback Vince Young. Joe helped redesign the offense; he wanted it built around a gifted but unproven senior quarterback named Michael Robinson. The man who had always believed that defense wins championships wanted an offense as new and electrifying as any in America.

It worked. Penn State scored more than 40 points in back-to-back weeks against Cincinnati and Central Michigan. They pulled off a spectacular comeback against Northwestern—the winning touchdown a spectacular pass from Robinson to Williams—then smashed Minnesota 44–14. It was astonishing. Williams was almost impossible for defenses to cover, and Paterno said they had to find more ways to get him the ball. (Paterno, who for so long had been against freshmen even playing, called Williams the most talented freshman he’d ever coached.) Justin King was a defensive player, but Paterno used him a bit on offense as well. Two other freshmen receivers who were not as highly recruited, Deon Butler and Jordan Norwood, played major roles. When Penn State upset sixth-ranked Ohio State, people began to accept that this young Penn State team was very good.

Penn State lost a breathtakingly close game to Michigan, another game with an officiating controversy. Late in the game, with Penn State leading, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr was able to get the referees
to put a few seconds back on the clock, time the officials determined had run off incorrectly. That time was the difference. Michigan quarterback Chad Henne dropped back with six seconds left and threw an incomplete pass. But, because of the extra time, one second remained. In that one second, Henne threw a 10-yard touchdown pass to Mario Manningham that won the game. Paterno was so distraught and angry after the loss he did not allow his players to talk to the media.

“I just wanna get them on the bus, get to the airport and go home, so we can start thinking about next week instead of having them moan about what happened,” Paterno told reporters. He would always believe that his team got cheated at Michigan. He felt so strongly about what he saw as a pattern of controversy at Michigan—and about what he viewed as an old boys’ network in the conference—that, privately, he talked again about getting Penn State out of the Big Ten.

But this team was too good to falter after the loss. The Nittany Lions obliterated Illinois 63–10 the next week. They beat Purdue, Wisconsin, and Michigan State in succession and with relative ease to win the Big Ten and earn a place in the Orange Bowl. (The Rose Bowl, where the Big Ten champion usually went, was reserved that year for the national championship game.) Suddenly the press about Penn State and Paterno gushed. Reporters called him the miracle man. They admonished themselves for ever doubting him. “If nothing else,” Harvey Araton wrote in the
New York Times
, “Paterno’s resurgent season should shut people up long enough to allow him to retire on his own terms.” Araton did not have to point out that the
Times
was among the loudest in the crowd trying to push Paterno out.

Penn State played Florida State in the Orange Bowl, which meant that Paterno would face Bobby Bowden, the man who had passed him on the all-time victories list. At the start of the game, Bowden had 359 victories, Paterno 353. It was at the Orange Bowl that Paterno revealed the contentious meeting he’d had with Spanier and how he emerged victorious. “[Spanier and other officials] didn’t quite understand where I was coming from or what it took to get a football program
going,” he told the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
. “I said, ‘Relax. Get off my backside.’ ”

“When Joe told everyone how he had told off the president, that was terrible,” one Penn State official said. “It was beneath him. He could have just stayed quiet about it and let the season speak for itself. But I guess he was so angry that President Spanier tried to force him out that he wanted to get in the final word. It was close to insubordination, really. And after that, Joe lost a lot of support around the school.”

Penn State beat Florida State 26–23 in triple overtime, and the miracle season was complete. “Nobody believed in us,” Tamba Hali told reporters after the game, and for once that “no respect” cliché that so many teams relied on rang true.

“I would watch Coach Paterno,” said Adam Taliaferro, who was in law school at the time, “and I would see how passionately he believed the team was going to start winning again. And I knew that nobody outside the program believed in him. Nobody . . . . But they just didn’t know the strength of Coach. They didn’t understand how deeply he believed.”

I asked Taliaferro if he really believed the team would turn around during those hard years. He hesitated for a moment. “It was looking pretty rough. But I was at practice every day. I saw the way he was coaching . . . . You don’t underestimate Joe Paterno. I learned that when I was in the hospital. He was such strength for me. That’s how he is as a coach. Yes, I thought he would win again . . . if they would give him the chance.”

PATERNO’S TEAMS NEVER AGAIN SUFFERED
a losing record after that. They won another Big Ten title in 2008 and were again only seconds away from an undefeated season. But that did not mean that things went smoothly. Penn State fans expected more than just winning seasons and near glory; Paterno himself had taught them to expect more. “Ah, maybe we got a bit spoiled up here,” he would say.

His refusal to step down as coach evolved from questionable to
controversial to outrageous and finally to unalterable fact. In 2006, at age seventy-nine, he was beaten up physically. He had to leave the sideline against Ohio State because of what he called a nasty stomach flu. At Wisconsin, he broke his leg when Wisconsin’s DeAndre Levy and Penn State’s Andrew Quarless inadvertently ran him over on the sideline. There were those who thought this might be the thing that would finally convince him he was too old to coach. He sat out the next week’s game against Temple, but he was in the press box coaching a week later against Michigan State. He turned eighty barely a month after that.

His hearing began to go, leading to painfully awkward exchanges in the few press conferences he held. In 2010, at eighty-three, he had an allergic reaction to medication, and he looked so worn down that many observers were convinced he was near death. They were not wrong; even family members wondered if he would recover. At the bowl game that year, there were rumors that Paterno had been rushed to the hospital. This time the rumors were not true.

Still he coached.

He more than coached. Behind the scenes, he was as feisty as ever. He fought battles; many he lost. At the end, when it fit the narrative, there would be much talk about how Paterno ran State College and Penn State like an unopposed dictator. The truth was different. Paterno was powerful enough to fight off the president of the university and powerful enough to win some other fights. But he lost as many as he won. He did not want a new baseball stadium built adjacent to Beaver Stadium. He thought it a waste of money—“I think some Big Ten schools are going to drop baseball,” he griped to friends—and, perhaps closer to home, the stadium would cut deeply into prime parking spaces for football games. He fought against it furiously, using whatever political power he had. The stadium was built anyway. He strongly opposed the Big Ten Network, an all-sports television network the conference wanted to launch to make money for the schools. He thought it was misguided and sold the league short. The Big Ten Network launched anyway.

“I know people think I run things around here, but I’m really just a guy with a big mouth,” Paterno would say. “I have a lot of opinions. The only ones who have to listen to them are my players and my family. And even my family doesn’t listen to them all the time.”