The Lion in Autumn (18 page)

What else could possibly go wrong?

Had she been listening to the Penn State game, she'd have gotten her answer in a hurry.

Three hours after his son-in-law's life-threatening accident, Paterno still knew nothing of the mishap. What he did know, as he looked at the motionless, prostrate body of Michael Robinson, was that in less than one quarter of football he had lost his two best offensive players, his top two quarterbacks.

Standing near the middle of Wisconsin's football field, Paterno watched as Robinson was hoisted into an ambulance. Less than thirty minutes earlier, Mills had been helped off the field to the locker room.

It was the one thing Paterno had feared most. He knew that even with Mills and Robinson, his offense was subpar. Without them, well, he couldn't envision too many ways the Nittany Lions could reach the end zone.

Mills had been hurt on the game's opening play when Robinson, who had been lined up as a wideout, ran down his left-sideline bomb
and made a spectacular twisting catch. The 49-yard play advanced the ball to Wisconsin's 32 and appeared to signal the awakening of a moribund offense.

But while everyone was watching the ball, Mills took a hard shot from Wisconsin defensive end Erasmus James. James, a six-four, 263-pound senior, was so fast and agile that NFL scouts already were describing him as “can't miss” and “a pass-rushing terror.”

Mills tried to stay in the game, but on Penn State's second play, he was intercepted—incredibly his ninth in less than three games, his eighth in less than five quarters. The hit had partially separated the senior quarterback's left shoulder, which would later require a cortisone shot in the locker room. He had hurt the right one earlier in his career and still had not regained his arm strength. When he awkwardly jogged to the sideline and revealed his latest injury, Mills was removed and Robinson was informed that he'd be at quarterback the rest of the way.

Wisconsin was ready for him. Their quick defensive front shut off his scrambling lanes. And his absence as a wide receiver meant the Badgers could stick eight defenders close to the line and force Robinson to throw. With the first quarter nearly complete, he had run five times for – 3 yards, and completed just one of three passes.

Wisconsin, having converted yet another Nittany Lions turnover—a Tony Hunt fumble at Penn State's 44—into a touchdown on a 5-yard John Stocco run, led 7–0 when, with 1:55 left in the period, and facing a first-and-10 at his own 18, Robinson dropped back.

Penn State's offensive line had had little luck trying to to slow Wisconsin's pass-rush. On this play, the defensive linemen came at the quarterback from all angles. Robinson evaded the first wave and spun to the right. As he did, a diving James, who had overpowered Andrew Richardson, met him in a teeth-rattling collision. The defender's helmet slammed into Robinson just as the QB was being hit by Jason Jefferson. The Nittany Lion crumpled instantly from the high-speed assault. The ball fell softly from his hands, like a drop of blood from a wound, though officials would rule it was not a fumble. Robinson was still on the grass as a crowd began to gather above him. Players on both teams surrounded the fallen quarterback, who by then also had drawn the serious attention of the two team doctors. Paterno hovered over
Robinson, and along the Penn State sideline, several teammates prayed or held hands.

Back home in Richmond, Virginia, the player's mother, Rita Ross, screamed and scampered nervously around her house, praying out loud that her son would move. After several torturous minutes, he still had not done so. A Madison Fire Department ambulance, No. 63, rolled out onto the field and a stabilizing board was unloaded.

“Seeing that happen to Michael Robinson, that brought a lot of memories back,” said Tom Bradley, Penn State's defensive coordinator. “Anytime they take out that board, you get a sickness in your stomach.”

The board had come out four years earlier, on September 23, 2000, at Ohio Stadium. That day Penn State freshman Adam Taliaferro severely injured his spine when his head had collided with an Ohio State player's knee on a kickoff.

Joe Paterno, remembering David's ordeal, had cried like a baby when he told his team of Taliaferro's paralysis. Sue said she had rarely seen her husband so shaken. At least once a week for the next several months Paterno visited Taliaferro at the Philadelphia hospital where he was rehabilitating. He would be paralyzed for eleven months before regaining most of his motor skills.

Finally, strapped to the board, Robinson, his hands folded across his lap, his feet pointed outward, his neck encased in a brace, was loaded onto the vehicle and driven to the university's hospital.

“I remember dropping back,” Robinson recalled. “I looked at Terrance Phillips, and I came off the second receiver . . . then all I remember is Dr. [Wayne] Sebastianelli trying to wake me up.”

That happened in the ambulance, en route to the University of Wisconsin Hospital. Once the player was conscious, Sebastianelli kept prodding the left side of his body.

“Feel that?”

“Do I feel what?” Robinson responded.

It would be more than an hour before Robinson regained complete feeling.

Lost in the concern over his condition was the whispered suggestion that James's helmet-to-helmet hit on Robinson should have been
penalized. Asked about that a few days later, Paterno was reluctant to get involved in another officiating dispute.

“Don't get me into that, OK?” he said. “I think all of you saw the game on television and, if not, probably had a chance to look it over. I think you can make your own decision on that.”

But Robinson's mother had no doubts. She told
Sports Illustrated
she hoped someone would injure James, a reaction that prompted the Wisconsin all-American to suggest that “what she should wish for is a better offensive tackle to protect her son.”

After Robinson left the field, Paterno immediately told Galen Hall to eliminate most of the plays they had drawn up that week. Then, surprisingly, he turned not to Morelli, who he had said two weeks ago was being primed for just such an occurrence, but to third-string QB Chris Ganter. Paterno told the son of his longtime assistant to keep it simple. Ganter, a fourth-year junior, was brave but ineffective in the longest exposure of his career.

“I really thought about playing Morelli a couple of times,” Paterno would say. “In fact, Jay Paterno and I talked about that in the second half. Neither he nor Chris Ganter got a lot of reps during the week. It's tough to get three quarterbacks ready. We really had to change a lot of things we'd planned to do. We weren't comfortable that Anthony would be familiar with a lot of the things because we hadn't been practicing them a lot during the week.”

Just about the only noteworthy development for an offense that managed just one field goal was the debut of Mark Rubin. The possession receiver from Amherst, New York, had a pair of catches for 21 yards. More significantly, he became the fifth true freshman Paterno had played this fall.

Defensively, the Nittany Lions again played well enough to win. They shut down the Badgers' passing game but couldn't contain their running game in the second half. What was somewhat embarrassing was that the bulk of the damage was done by a 270-pound fullback who rarely carried the ball and who had been fasting for twenty-four
hours. Matt Bernstein became Barry Alvarez's top option after in-game injuries to Jamil Walker and Booker Stanley. Wisconsin already was without top back Anthony Davis, who sat out the game with an eye injury.

Bernstein had attended Yom Kippur services with his family Friday and, in approximate observance of the holiday's mandate to fast from sundown to sundown, didn't eat between 4:45
P
.
M
. the previous day and just after kickoff, when he had turkey and orange slices. Fortunately for the Badgers, the relatively late kickoff had permitted him to play.

He carried the ball twenty-seven times for 129 yards, most of it in the second half as Wisconsin mercifully killed the clock against the depleted Lions in a 16–3 victory that left the Badgers with a 4–0 record.

Penn State was 2–2, 0–1 in a conference in which they now had lost nineteen of their previous thirty-three games.

Paterno was smiling as he shook hands after the game with Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez near midfield. He had recently been told that while Robinson had suffered a concussion and some early paralysis, he was now groggy and sore but able to move freely. The quarterback would spend the night in the Wisconsin hospital.

As Paterno walked off the field, Art Baldwin, the husband of Board of Trustees chair Cynthia Baldwin, approached. The two men huddled and Baldwin informed the coach about Hort. Paterno's face turned ashen. As he returned to the locker room, his thoughts turned back to David and Taliaferro, and overwhelmed with emotion, he cried.

With Baldwin, Spanier, and Jay Paterno accompanying him, the coach left the stadium without talking with the waiting media. He was driven, with a police escort, to Dane County Airport. There, as his team huddled in prayer for Robinson and Hort in their locker room, they boarded the jet and returned to State College.

Bradley addressed the puzzled media, who soon would be informed of Paterno's departure and Hort's injury.

“Coach was leaving, and I said, ‘Coach, we'll get everybody home,
go ahead,' ” Bradley said. “He's a family guy from top to bottom; that's number one with him. If you saw the tears in his eyes, you'd know that's a sad occurrence. I feel for him right now. Our prayers are with him and Mary Kay and her family. It's going to be a tough situation. It doesn't sound good right now.”

“It's pretty crazy all the stuff's that been going on,” Mills said afterward, his arm in a sling. “It's one thing after another.”

THOUGH AUTUMN HAD
officially arrived earlier that week, the afternoon and evening of September 25, 1982, were pleasant enough for shirtsleeves in Happy Valley. As the sun set, an artificial glow illuminated the sky over packed Beaver Stadium. For the first time in the team's ninety-five-year history, Penn State was playing a home game beneath lights. The temporary lighting—it would be another four years before permanent illumination was installed—was a concession to TV, which would broadcast the game between Joe Paterno's eighth-ranked Nittany Lions and Tom Osborne's second-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers to a nationwide audience that afternoon.

It was late in that game's fourth quarter, with Nebraska in front, 24–21, when Mike McCloskey broke toward the sideline on a simple out-pattern. With each hurried stride Penn State's tight end took, the rumbling murmur of more than eighty-five thousand voices rose in pitch. He turned his head and body in time to see quarterback Todd Blackledge's second-down pass twisting toward him through the haze. By then, a Nebraska linebacker was coming too.

From above, the geometry of the pass play seemed miscalculated. While McCloskey was headed for a corner of the field just shy of the south end zone, the ball appeared to have been thrown a little too quickly and looked as if it would fly, untouched, out of bounds.

The tight end recognized this and, with the instinctive calculations of a veteran, adjusted. He increased his stride, extended his arms, and began to lunge toward the sideline. His hands reached the ball, but as he tried to pull it into his body, it squirmed in his arms like a restless baby. Suddenly, his attention shifted toward the fast-approaching white line. McCloskey threw down his right foot, dropping it like an anchor near the stripe. Then he lowered the other.

That second foot landed out of bounds. But what about the first? All that was required for a legal catch in college football was that a receiver have one foot in bounds. When his right foot scraped along the grass, it had been perilously near the sideline stripe. And even if it had come down in bounds, did McCloskey have possession of the ball at the time?

Nearby, an official's arms jerked forward as he prepared to make a call. The frenzied crowd took a deep collective breath.

Two thirds of Penn State's 1982 season remained. But that play, that call, would end up being its most significant moment. Had the ruling gone the other way—as television replays showed it probably should have—Joe Paterno might still be looking for a first national championship.

“A quirky wind,” Paterno later said of the play, “had gusted in our favor.”

There was something quirky indeed about that 1982 team. It just didn't mesh with the popular image of Penn State football. Paterno's philosophy, as everyone knew by then, emphasized the game's practical arts—defense and running the ball. But that year, in his seventeenth season as head coach and nearing his fifty-sixth birthday, he had made an adjustment many thought they'd never see.

“We are going to try and make big plays happen,” Paterno predicted before the season.

It was easier said than done. Senior Curt Warner was a superb and threatening tailback. The West Virginia native had run for 1,044 yards as a junior in 1981. He needed to be a focus of the offense. But Paterno also had a strong-armed quarterback in Blackledge, and two gifted
wide receivers, Kenny Jackson and Gregg Garrity. That kind of a passing talent could gobble up big chunks of yards faster than Warner. So even as the tailback was being touted as a preseason Heisman Trophy candidate, Paterno was altering his offense to incorporate more passes.

Actually, in the ‘82 season, Warner would carry the ball more times (198 to 171) and rush for just three fewer total yards than he had in ‘81. But he also caught 24 passes and was overshadowed by Blackledge in an attack that clearly tilted toward the pass.

“Some of the dreams that I had kind of went down the drain,” Warner would say later of that season. “But I think I became a tougher football player. By the end of the season I was as tough a football player as there was in the country.”

As a result, this Paterno team would become, for Penn State, a statistical anomaly. Its defense wouldn't even finish in the top fifty nationally. And the offense, for a first time ever under Paterno, would gain more yards through the air than on the ground.

Blackledge, at six-three, 227 pounds, was the first protypical NFL QB Paterno had coached. That season he would throw 46 more passes than any Penn State QB ever had—292 in all, a school-record 22 of them for touchdowns. His season total of 2,218 yards would be just three shy of Chuck Fusina's five-year-old Penn State record.

Paterno had recognized this team's potential when he first began to assemble it. The Sugar Bowl loss to Alabama in 1979 had ratcheted up his already potent craving for a national title. And even though he had lost eleven starters from the 10–2 1981 team, he began campaigning early.

“If this isn't the best team I've had here,” said Paterno, in an uncharacteristic burst of braggadocio before the season opener, “it's certainly as good as any.”

Following home victories over perennial eastern doormats Temple, Maryland, and Rutgers, Penn State was 3–0 and ranked eighth nationally when a far more formidable opponent came to Beaver Stadium.

Nebraska was No. 2 in the polls and it was hard to make a case that any team in the country had more talent. Osborne's Cornhuskers possessed a devastating offense, with running backs Roger Craig and Mike Rozier, wide receiver Irving Fryar, quarterback Turner Gill, and
offensive linemen Dave Rimington and Dean Steinkuhler. A week earlier, in routing New Mexico State, 68–0, they had amassed a mind-boggling 883 yards in total offense, a respectable three-game total for many teams.

This game, which had attracted a record crowd to Penn State's stadium, was exactly the kind of attention-grabbing, poll-impacting, intersectional matchup Paterno had envisioned when he moved to upgrade his schedule a decade earlier. Reluctantly, he had come to the realization that the rest of the nation didn't care how many times, or by how many points, his teams beat Maryland, Rutgers, West Virginia, and Army. He understood now that the pollsters, in making their subjective decisions, factored in the reputations of the losers as much as the performance of the winners.

“I don't think our fans were all that thrilled anymore about watching us win some lopsided game against an eastern team,” Paterno would later recall. “The competition in the East then just wasn't what it once was.”

So Paterno had signed a deal with Nebraska for a series of four games from 1979 through 1982. The Cornhuskers had won the first two, but a year earlier, in Lincoln, the Lions had prevailed, 30–24.

That schedule, both more appealing and more difficult, would turn out to be a crucial element in the Nittany Lions' 1982 season. If the victory over Nebraska had instead been a win over a more traditional opponent like Army or Navy, Penn State almost certainly would not have been in a position to play for a national championship on New Year's Day. After they beat Nebraska, the Nittany Lions immediately shot up five spots in the polls to No. 3, helping dull the effect of what would be their only loss that season, 42–21, a week later at Alabama.

In the Nebraska game, Penn State's defense, led by end Walker Lee Ashley and safety Mark Robinson, both of whom would enjoy long NFL careers, limited the Cornhuskers' running game to 61 yards in the first two quarters. On offense, utilizing Warner's legs and Blackledge's arm in equal proportions, the Lions would build a 21–7 lead in the third quarter.

But Nebraska, aided by missed field goals and a touchdown overturned by a penalty, rallied. The Cornhuskers' comeback was capped
when Gill dived in from the 1-yard line to finish off an 80-yard, fourth-quarter drive. It put them ahead, 24–21, with just 1:18 left.

Out of time-outs, Penn State began the ensuing drive on its own 35. In the past, having relied so lopsidedly on the run, Paterno's teams would have found it nearly impossible to traverse 65 yards in just over a minute without benefit of a single time-out. This team was different. Its pass-oriented offense gave it more resiliency. Five times in 1982 these Nittany Lions would come from behind to triumph.

After huddling with Paterno on the sideline, Blackledge calmly marched his team down the field. On a fourth-and-11 at Nebraska's 34, he hit Jackson for exactly 11 yards. Then, after scampering for six yards on first down, the quarterback dashed out of bounds at the 17 with just thirteen seconds remaining.

The next play was the pass to McCloskey.

Standing at the 50-yard line, Paterno waited intently for the ruling. “I couldn't see anything from where I was,” he said. “But I knew he was close to being out of bounds.”

As the official ran toward the spot where McCloskey had crossed the sideline, he balled his hands into fists, folded his arms close to his body, and thrust his elbows downward to signify a legal catch. With nine seconds remaining, Penn State had a first down at the two.

Nebraska players pleaded with the officials, insisting a mistake had been made. Across the field, Cornhuskers assistants, though not Osborne, screamed their displeasure.

Recalling his Sugar Bowl frustration in 1979, Paterno now called for another pass play. Blackledge took the snap, looked left, and then swiveled his head back to the right. Backup tight end Kirk Bowman, a former guard who had earned his nickname of “Stonehands,” was open—so open that he was flailing his arms, desperately hoping to catch the quarterback's eyes. Finally, Blackledge saw him. And though his throw was low, Bowman bent down to catch it for the go-ahead score.

“The thing I remember most,” said Paterno, “was Kirk Bowman making the catch in the end zone, because I think that was maybe the first or second catch he had ever made in his life at Penn State as a tight
end. It wasn't an easy catch either. Todd Blackledge didn't put that ball on the money.”

Penn State students, most of whom were occupying the grandstand areas surrounding the end zone where the Lions scored, literally jumped for joy. Replays of the moment on CBS show the entire crowd hopping up and down in delirious unison. As the game ended, fans stormed the field and, with a frightening intensity, ripped down the goalpost closest to where McCloskey had made his catch. Later, only slightly less frantic, they paraded it past the Nittany Lion statue and Old Main.

Players from Nebraska, which would go on to finish at 12–1 and No. 3 in the country, remain convinced that one call cost them another national title. McCloskey, they still insist, was out of bounds. From some angles, slow-motion replays confirm their belief.

Penn State's players are split. “You look at the film,” McCloskey said, “and you make up your own mind. . . . I was dragging my foot along the ground. It's difficult to tell.”

But Paterno admitted in his 1989 autobiography that after seeing the televised replays, he was convinced that, “without question,” McCloskey was out of bounds.

Shortly afterward, Nebraska students took to wearing T-shirts that portrayed Beaver Stadium's field as a familiar, rectangular grid—except for the slight bump protruding from the 2-yard line.

Paterno got another coaching lesson from Bear Bryant the next week, in the 42–21 loss at Alabama. Afterward, he challenged his team.

“You've got six games left,” he told them in the locker room, “let's see what you're made of.”

Penn State responded as he had hoped, rolling over the next four opponents—Syracuse, West Virginia, Boston College, and North Carolina State—by a combined score of 158–24. On November 13, when they traveled to No. 13 Notre Dame, the Nittany Lions were No. 5 in the nation.

The trip to Notre Dame was yet another illustration of Penn State's
scheduling revolution. A year earlier, the Nittany Lions' schedule—with Nebraska, Miami, Alabama, Notre Dame, and Pitt—had been rated the nation's toughest. This year's included all of those teams but Miami.

The game against the Irish would be the second in a twelve-game contract the two independent powerhouses had signed in the late 1970s. It would be Paterno's first trip to the place Knute Rockne transformed into a college football's golden-domed Camelot. Growing up Catholic in Brooklyn, he was well aware of Notre Dame's mystique and the school's potent hold on generations of fans who had never even visited South Bend. Since coming to Penn State, he had lost a lot of recruits because of it. But as much as he admired the school's proud football heritage and its commitment to academic excellence, he occasionally was irritated by the arrogance he believed surrounded the Irish program.

He experienced it quickly that weekend. Reporters who met Penn State's plane at the South Bend Regional Airport on Friday night asked the coach how it felt to be making a first visit to such hallowed ground, as if the Nittany Lions were football bumpkins making their debut in the big-time spotlight.

“We'd played a lot of big games in a lot of big places by then,” Paterno would recall, “and I'm thinking,
Who do these people think they are?
”

During their hotel meeting that night, the coach couldn't bite his tongue any longer. He delivered one of his rare fire-and-brimstone talks, reminding his players that Penn State possessed a mystique of its own.