The Lion in Autumn (16 page)

“[Coach Graham] said, ‘Now watch how the Yankees walk.' And sure enough, DiMaggio and those guys walked with a little swagger,” Paterno recalled. “He said, ‘Look at their shoes.' I said they were nice—I didn't know what he was talking about. The Cardinals come out. He said, ‘Now take a look at the Cardinals' shoes.' Every Yankee had polished shoes. They were all polished. The Cardinals had scuffed-up shoes, some of them didn't have the same length in their pants, the whole bit. He said, ‘The Yankees are different.' You know, they had the
pinstripes and the whole bit. And I think that's something that we try to do.”

Paterno's continued insistence on unadorned uniforms was the coach's way of establishing both an espirit de corps and a unique identity for his program. Football is a team game. Players who understood that and were willing to submit their individuality to it were, he believed, more likely to be successful and unified.

“Whatever you do, you do trying to create a tradition,” he would say. “We talk to people about the fact that we're conservative and we like team people. We're not looking for flashy people. I think people every once in a while need symbols to reinforce those sentiments.”

Paterno's fashion sense turned out to be as shrewd as his football instincts. By dressing his teams in anonymity, he managed, just as he had hoped, to both pull them together and grant them a unique image. When players complained, he quoted Napoleon, who had said that part of what made a distinctive leader was a distinctive appearance.

During an era when America was conspicuously shedding the conformity of the 1950s in dress and most everything else, the Nittany Lions' uniforms were seen as drab eyesores.

“My friends used to tell me that when Penn State wore its plain white uniforms, they used to try to adjust their TVs because it seemed like there was too much snow on the screen,” said Shuman.

As other schools experimented with wild helmet insignias and every possible color combination short of pink and black, Penn State stuck to its blue-white blandness: plain pants; black shoes; short white socks; nameless blue jerseys with white numbers, or, on the road, the opposite; and white helmets that, once the numbers were removed in the late 1970s, were adorned only with a thin blue strip down the middle.

“A lot of people ask me about the lousy-looking uniforms that we have,” Paterno said. “But . . . you see us on TV and you say, ‘Hey, Penn State is playing.' And your wife says, ‘How do you know it's Penn State?' And you say, ‘Look at the lousy uniforms.' ”

More recently, however, as a retro craze has overtaken sports fashion, those uniforms have become hip again, and a point of pride for Penn State players and supporters—even if they do now include a
Nike swoosh, a tiny reminder of the tide of commercialism that has washed over even Paterno's program.

“I've had guys who played on that team tell me that before the 1986 Orange Bowl, Penn State players voted not to wear the little bowl insignia on their uniforms,” said Shuman. “They said that even that little orange was too flashy.”

While complaints about the uniforms—once common in the locker room—have virtually vanished in recent seasons, Paterno still fights with players about their off-the-field attire. No hats indoors. No facial hair. No earrings. Coats and ties on the road. He occasionally has relented, as on his edict that players wear socks to class even in warm weather.

“Why? Well, you're sitting in the front row, the professor looks down, the girl next to you and the guy next to you have lousy-looking, dirty feet, and you've got socks on,” he said in explaining why he had instituted the ban in the first place. “[It might make] the difference between a B and a C, so don't be stupid.”

The rule against hats is such a pet peeve with Paterno that he has had a sign placed in the locker room—“Nobody in this room comes in with a hat.” Paterno likes to tell the story of his pregame meeting with Alabama's Bear Bryant before their 1979 Sugar Bowl confrontation. Bryant was not wearing his trademark houndstooth hat. The Penn State coach asked him why.

“He said, ‘I don't wear a hat indoors.' Can you imagine that?” Paterno said. “We're playing in the Superdome and he said, ‘If I wore a hat, my mother would get upset.' They're all symbols. In and of themselves they mean nothing. If I tell a kid I don't want his earring on, it doesn't mean a thing [other than you're] a Penn State football player. You're something . . . different. I want you to be different.”

That 1979 Superdome conversation with Bryant came before a game that would keep the Nittany Lions from a fourth unbeaten season and the national championship Paterno coveted. After years of griping about a lack of respect in the polls, Paterno finally had a chance to win a title on the field.

In 1978, Penn State was 11–0 and No. 1 going into the Sugar Bowl. But Alabama prevailed, 14–7, twice stopping Penn State on fourth-quarter goal-line plunges. Those two up-the-middle running plays provoked criticism about Paterno's conservative nature that would linger for the next quarter century. The close defeat, he later said, was the most gut-wrenching of his career. It precipitated an off-season of deep reflection. “I just got outcoached,” he said. “I didn't prepare well enough.”

With a little more than seven minutes left in that New Year's Day game, Alabama led, 14–7. But Matt Millen forced a fumble and Joe Lally fell on the ball at the Crimson Tide 19. Penn State had a second-and-goal at the six when quarterback Chuck Fusina hit Scott Fitzkee near the goal line. But as the receiver turned toward the end zone, he was struck hard and stopped two feet short.

It was third-and-goal. Paterno called for bruising fullback Matt Suhey, the son of the couple with whom he had lived nearly thirty years earlier, to take it up the middle. Suhey had been the team's leading rusher, and this time his power dive brought to mind a powerful magnet. As he hit the line, the entire Alabama team was sucked toward him like so many iron filings. Paterno thought—still believes—Suhey got in. The officials disagreed. The ball would be marked six inches short of the end zone.

Now there was one play remaining. Paterno assumed that Bryant would have his defense ready to stop another Suhey plunge or a quarterback sneak by Fusina. He called a time-out and summoned Fusina to the sideline. According to his 1989 autobiography,
Paterno: By the Book
, as the quarterback approached, he decided he wanted him to fake a run and pass to the tight end.

“A couple of my soundest assistant coaches insisted I play the percentages—just crash through the couple feet for the touchdown,” he wrote. “ . . . That moment was one of the few in my life when I backed off from a strong instinct and let myself worry about what people might say if the decision was wrong.”

Instead, he told Fusina to give the ball to tailback Mike Guman and have him run behind all-American tackle Keith Dorney.

“It was the only play to go with,” he rationalized immediately
after the game. “If you've got less than a foot to go, you've got to figure you can take the ball and go up over the pile.”

Before the referee could spot the ball, Fusina asked him how far the Nittany Lions had to go. “About a foot,” he was told. Alabama defensive end Marty Lyons, hearing the conversation, shouted, “You'd better pass for it!”

Guman took the handoff and left his feet. Lineman Don McNeal hit him low and linebacker Barry Krauss high, the latter striking with such force that he cracked his red helmet right along its seam. In the muscle-bound geology of football, the force of all that impact raised a red-and-white peak in the center of the pile.

But the play's result was clear this time. Guman had not scored. Alabama took over. Paterno's national-title hopes had been snuffed out again.

“Alabama just beat us at the line of scrimmage,” said Paterno. “We should have been able to bang it in from there.”

By then, Paterno had earned a reputation as a persistent critic of college football's excesses. It was widely believed that the teams in Alabama's SEC were among the worst perpetrators. Some said the SEC stood for “Surely Everybody Cheats.” Many of that conference's coaches took exception to Paterno's moralizing. And according to his brother, that resentment contributed to the Alabama defeat.

“It was rumored every coach in the conference was offering information to Bear Bryant about how to beat Penn State,” George Paterno wrote. “It was the South, coached by the kingfish of the ‘good old boys,' against the extremely confident, annoying, skinny ‘Wop' leader from the East.”

The loss to Bear Bryant severely stung Paterno's ego. He second-guessed himself for months, taking out his frustration on his staff and players.

“I couldn't tolerate all that self-blame,” he wrote.

THOUGH THE PENN STATE PROGRAM
had little firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon, a 3–9 season can transform the attitudes of malleable young players. The football careers of most of these Nittany Lions had been filled with winning—games, championships, accolades, and personal awards. When that suddenly and unexpectedly stopped, characters were tested. Some players sulked. Some blamed coaches or teammates. Some retreated into themselves, while others pushed harder.

Paterno understood that until the winning resumed, they all were extremely vulnerable. So heading into a new season with the 2004 Nittany Lions he had constantly sought to prop them up with positive reinforcement. Every forward step they took became a signpost on their journey back to prominence. The haircuts, extra work in the weight room, the willingness of seniors to step forward, the encouraging rout of Akron, all were, in their minds, displays of a renewed spirit and a football rebirth.

“A three-and-nine season is miserable for everybody,” said sophomore offensive tackle Levi Brown. “Nobody wants to go through that. So you try to get some of it, like the constant losing, out of your head. . . . We're trying to capitalize on every little good thing we do.”

The best therapy would be early-season victories. Paterno had told his players there was no reason they couldn't start 3–0, a perfect
springboard into the killer Big Ten schedule that began at No. 20 Wisconsin on September 25.

Now, after the loss to BC, hopes had to be revised, confidence bolstered. The size of the psychic wound Boston College inflicted on Penn State hinted at just how fragile Paterno's once rock-solid program had become.

“That was a game everybody was real emotional about. We wanted to win,” said senior wideout Ryan Scott in its somber aftermath.

Fearing this first setback might trigger another season-long retreat, Paterno and the seniors immediately moved to counter that possibility. Before flying back to State College late that Saturday night, the coach, surprisingly upbeat in the locker room despite his downcast performance with the media, told his players to keep their heads up.

“You played hard,” he said. “But there are an awful lot of areas where you need to improve. You've got ten games left. You can win them all. But you can also lose them all. It's up to you.”

“At practice Monday,” he said, with a glance at Austin Scott, “I expect you all to work hard.”

When Monday came, no one was surprised when some of the seniors—Mills, Wake, and Gerald Smith—called a players-only meeting, a preemptive strike against any negative residue. Its theme was clear: The loss to Boston College didn't mean they were headed for a repeat of 2003.

“[They] looked everyone in the face,” said defensive tackle Scott Paxson, “and said whatever happened last year isn't going to happen this year.”

“I don't want to go back to last year,” Mills told them.

“We're not the same team as last year,” Robinson said.

Smith might have been the most emotional of the speakers. In the spring, he had been one of those eager to rectify the locker-room problems that helped sink the previous season.

“There was a lack of leadership last year,” he would say. “The upperclassmen this year really wanted to step up and set a foot down and try to establish a positive foundation for the team. We're young, fairly young, and that's one thing we wanted to do.”

Now, with his teammates all around, and with his career-best five
catches against BC lending him a pulpit, the wide receiver from Ellicott City, Maryland, reemphasized what Paterno had told them Saturday night.

“[Gerald said] we can go two ways,” Mills recalled. “We can let this loss get at us and affect us the whole season. Or we can get better.”

That first practice for the Central Florida game lasted about fifty minutes. It was routine—mostly meetings and film study. Paterno and his aides discussed a couple of minor position moves. The man who once wanted to move Hall of Fame QB Jim Kelly to linebacker had tried senior defensive end Jason Robinson at tight end against Boston College. Junior receiver Gio Vendemia also had been moved, to cornerback.

According to Paterno, his players had been “alert” during the workout. That encouraged him. He had wondered how he was going to handle them, both after the BC game and throughout the following week. That was a coach's perpetual dilemma: Good cop or bad cop? Praise them or bury them? Last year he would have angrily lit into them.

“That's one of the biggest things you get to do in college coaching or any coaching—whether it's high school, college, or pro—depending on how your kids play, the depth of their concern about having gotten licked, and that kind of thing,” he would explain. “If you have a couple of flippant kids and some kids just walking around after the game like it really wasn't that important, obviously, you take a different attitude. . . . There are a lot of things that go into it and sometimes you make a decision that you regret. I wish that there was a formula that told you, ‘This is exactly the way you do it every week.' I think that for this football team I want to encourage them because they have worked hard and are concerned about getting on with it.”

After fifty-four years, he had developed pretty good instincts. And this time, unlike the wake of the ‘03 loss to BC when he thought his team had given up, he sensed a different attitude. There was no need to panic. Paterno believed this team had played “good, tough, and hard” in the loss.

Paterno liked that about them. It would have been easy for his players to doubt their coach, to buy into the notion that he was over the hill and incapable of substantive change. Instead, they had made a
commitment to listen to him, to practice and play hard for him, to follow his rules. Consequently, the staff decided to remain upbeat at what they saw as a critical juncture.

“They're trying [to be positive],” center E. Z. Smith said. “They get intense when they have to be. And if they need to get intense with us, we understand that it's the nature of the game. But for the most part they are very positive.”

His players had been waiting for Paterno's response. The coach's surprisingly buoyant demeanor was another indication that he was going about things differently this season. The Nittany Lions, with nine games left, including their entire conference schedule, welcomed his positive attitude.

“He told us we still have a chance to do some big things this season,” Michael Robinson said. “People are talking about salvaging the season. It's a loss in the second game. What are we salvaging? The season has barely started.”

A daylong rain, the nasty remains of Hurricane Ivan, pounded Penn State's campus on Friday, September 17. Before it ended early the following morning, up to eight inches had fallen on central Pennsylvania, triggering the area's worst floods in thirty-two years.

That Friday night, outside the Nittany Lion Inn, a seventy-three-year-old campus hotel, a continual flow of cars splashed up the circular driveway. Their doors opened outside the lobby entrance. Umbrellas bloomed and guests emerged beneath them. Though operated by the university, the inn, like the athletic department and the school's dining facilities, was classified as an “auxiliary enterprise.” It had its own budget and generated its own revenue. Big contributors, powerful alumni, former Penn State players, all preferred the blue-blazered ambience of the Nittany Lion Inn on football weekends. That afternoon, a board of trustees meeting had taken place at the inn and many of its thirty-two members were staying around for the following day's game. The guests typically packed its bar, “Whiskers,” on Friday nights, before and after the booster banquets that also were held there.

Paterno's teams' achievements over the last several decades had made it impossible for the average fan to book a room there on football weekends. But in the final weekends of the miserable 2003 season some had been available. It was one more sad reminder of the delicate condition of Penn State football. But on this rainy night, the two-story hotel was full and bustling. In a basement banquet room set up for Paterno's media cocktail reception, a handful of reporters talked and drank as they waited for their host.

Once again, the coach failed to show up. What had initially been seen as an aberration now had the appearance of a trend. The sportswriters increasingly were baffled.

Wilkes-Barre's Kellar believed Paterno might have been annoyed when the
Centre Daily Times
reported that week that the reason Austin Scott had not played against Boston College was that he had missed a meeting. Jenny Vrentas, a junior engineering major who was one of three
Daily Collegian
writers on the school paper's football beat, suggested Penn State's players and coaches may have been upset by her criticism during the week of defensive back Anwar Phillips. Phillips's fellow defensive back, Alan Zemaitis, had exposed that displeasure during a teleconference a few days earlier.

Or, perhaps, they were all too paranoid. Maybe the old coach simply didn't want to get drenched in the storm. That seemed unlikely. Paterno didn't casually cast traditions aside, particularly ones that he had fathered.

“No,” said David Jones, a veteran Penn State writer for the
Harrisburg Patriot-News
and a longtime thorn in Paterno's side. “He's at war.”

Meanwhile, the persistent storm was causing problems for that week's opponent, Central Florida. At Orlando's airport, the possibility that the team's flight to State College might have to be diverted elsewhere meant UCF's chartered jet had to take on extra fuel. Considerable weight had to be shed before the plane could depart. The cheerleaders, athletic department official Art Zeleznik, and faculty athletics representative Bill Callarman were removed and booked on a commercial flight through Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

As it turned out, their jet was redirected, to Harrisburg. Players
and coaches boarded buses there for the two-hour trip to State College along Route 322, which would soon be closed because of flooding. They wouldn't arrive at their hotel until late Friday night. At 2:30
A
.
M
., the eastbound lanes of I-80, the main east–west access to State College, also would be shut down, guaranteeing even more congestion in the traffic that poured in and out of town on a football Saturday.

Paterno, as was his weekly habit, praised Central Florida in the days leading up to the game, even though that school's football program appeared to be the antithesis of all he had built in Happy Valley.

The Golden Knights had little or no tradition. They wore garish gold uniforms, relied on speed and spontaneity, had serious academic problems, and a small and fickle fan base. And in George O'Leary, the former Georgia Tech coach, they also had their third coach in eleven months.

The forty-one-year-old college in booming Orlando hadn't fielded a football team until 1979, when Paterno was in his thirtieth season at Penn State. Then came a slow march up the ladder, propelled by the promise of TV riches, from Division III to Division II in 1982, to Division I-AA in 1990, and finally to the big-time Division I-A level in 1996.

As the level of competition increased, so had the size of the university. Its student body had grown from thirteen thousand in 1980 to more than forty-four thousand in 2004, making it second in size only to the University of Florida in its home state.

“We've become the school of choice for the average Florida student,” said ex–football coach Mike Kruczek.

But not yet for the average Florida football fan. The Knights, surrounded by all the Orlando area's entertainment options, drew an average of only 21,920 fans to its games at the 73,000-seat Gator Bowl in 2003. Still, given its enticing location, Florida's bottomless high-school talent pool, and an apparent willingness to accept academic risks among its matriculating players, Central Florida, which was set to join Conference USA in 2005 after three seasons in the MAC, possessed enormous potential.

“I really believe Central Florida is a sleeping giant,” O'Leary had said when he took the job the previous December.

While Miami, Florida, and Florida State enjoyed a sizable advantage in reputation and recruiting, Central Florida hoped to close the gap with the hiring of O'Leary and the recent construction of a $7 million, football-only training facility on campus.

Finding players wasn't its problem. There are enough Division I prospects coming out of Florida each year—250 to 275 by most estimates—that UCF could do quite well with the table scraps. Forty-nine of the sixty-three players O'Leary brought to State College were Floridians, many of them drawn there by a schedule that included attractive interconference opponents like Wisconsin and Penn State.

Paterno, on the other hand, hoped to get something out of the matchup too. In part because his coaching staff remained so static, he had never established strong connections in populous southern and western states like Florida, California, and Texas, where many of the best and speediest prospects were being developed.

His philosophy had always been that by recruiting in distant locales, he might be ignoring talent in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. That had worked for decades, until the nexus of football talent, along with jobs and population, shifted south and west in the 1980s and 1990s. Penn State's roster for the Central Florida game, for example, included only one Floridian, John Wilson, a backup offensive tackle; one Californian, fourth-string backup QB Mike Hart; and no Texans. Among its Big Ten rivals, Minnesota had eight Floridians, Ohio State five. Purdue had fourteen Texans, Wisconsin eight. Michigan had ten Californians.