The Lion in Autumn (21 page)

The tests, the doctors told Paterno, revealed the quarterback's concussion had been so severe that he might be out three or four weeks. “Our medical people tend to be conservative,” Paterno said. With a bye week coming up on October 16, the coach hoped his most versatile performer might be able to return October 23, for the homecoming game against Iowa.

If Mills couldn't play, Paterno said, Ganter would start, with Morelli backing him up. The coach instructed his son Jay and Hall to prepare a game plan that stressed a controlled attack—lots of runs and short passes. How they could make that work, when he knew Minnesota would be jamming the line of scrimmage, was something they'd worry about later.

He had few worries about Penn State's improving defense—even if Minnesota's 542.8 total yards and 332 rushing yards were,
respectively, third and fourth in the nation. Tailback Laurence Maroney was averaging 131.5 yards a game for the eighteenth ranked, 4–0 Gophers. Running mate Marion Barber III was not far behind, at 128.5.

“Minnesota is the best team we will have played so far,” said Paterno, “and that is not to take anything away from Wisconsin. This is a very, very explosive offensive football team that has had a lot of success. . . . They do a great job with the play-action pass off the running game so you can't gang up on the run.”

Penn State flew into Minneapolis on Friday night. As they did, back at the Rathskeller bar in State College, suspended wideout Maurice Humphrey, who was not yet twenty-one, was caught with a fake ID. It was a violation of his parole. He eventually would be sentenced to nine months in jail. Then a student at Penn State–Altoona, he had hoped to reenroll at the main campus next fall. Now, any hopes that the gifted receiver and Paterno had of his return to the team in 2005 were dead.

Back in Minneapolis, the Nittany Lions held their night-before meeting in a ballroom at the downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel. It had to be delayed when assistant coach Larry Johnson and a dozen or so of his players got stuck in a hotel elevator for fifteen minutes.

A scaled-down media reception was held in a nondescript room a few floors below. The sportswriters were getting the message. Only a few people showed up this week. Paterno was not among them.

The declining attendance had caused sports-information director Jeff Nelson to greatly reduce the menu and bar fare. Chips and salsa. Pretzels. Beer and water.

And an untouched bottle of Jack Daniel's.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis was a strange place for a team used to performing in the sunny glow of Happy Valley. The multipurpose stadium was dark and soulless, its ambience as unappealing as the fried cheese curds sold by vendors just outside its gates.

In the hectic hours before that night's 7:00
P
.
M
. CDT game, workers hustled around the domed facility painting lines on the field, frantically storing sections of unused bleachers, and hanging
maroon-and-gold banners that contained numbers the Gophers had retired and names from a distant past, like Bronco Nagurski and Paul Giel.

For a time it looked as if the Big Ten game might have to be delayed. At 2:30
P
.
M
., a baseball game was still being played on the Dome's turf field. The Cleveland Indians and the American League Central champion Minnesota Twins were tied at 5–5 in the eleventh inning of a game that would determine next week's AL playoff matchups.

The baseball game had begun unusually early, at 11:10
A
.
M
., to ensure that workers would have plenty of time to convert the field and stadium to their football configurations. But the conversion would take at least four hours and, when the game rolled into extra innings, Minnesota officials got nervous. Penn State–Minnesota was being televised regionally by ESPN so its starting time was inviolable.

Finally, baseball fans were informed by the public-address announcer that if the game were not concluded in the bottom of the eleventh, it would have to be suspended, then resumed and finished the following afternoon. When the home team failed to score, fans booed as they reluctantly departed. And the Twins, who had been lobbying hard for a baseball-only stadium and who still had a shot at gaining homefield advantage in their opening postseason series, felt like doing the same.

“Just stop the game, and do football now?” Ron Gardenhire, the Twins manager, sarcastically told reporters. “That's pretty sad.”

The snafu added weight to recent pleadings by University of Minnesota officials for state help in financing a new campus stadium. The school, whose Metrodome lease expires in 2011, estimated it would cost $220 million to construct a 55,000-seat facility. One alumnus already had pledged $35 million.

“I can't say enough how much that (not having a facility on campus) has retarded our growth,” said Mason.

When the Nittany Lions arrived at the stadium shortly after 5
P
.
M
., they walked across the field to get a feel for the artificial surface. Some of them paused and bent over at the second-base cutout to scoop up handfuls of dirt, as if this nondescript stadium with trash-bag walls and a sometimes sagging roof were hallowed ground.

Robinson was with them, dressed in a suit. He changed into a blue Penn State sweatshirt for the game and stood along the sideline with his teammates, wearing a headset to eavesdrop on the night's play calling.

For the second straight year, Minnesota, which had won the toss but deferred, began the game with an onside kick. On this one, Minnesota would recover, just as it had the year before. The ball bounded close to the Lions' Donnie Johnson, who, inexplicably, appeared to back away. “The guy over there didn't even make an effort,” Paterno said after the game.

The successful gimmick on the game's initial play was enough to doom the Nittany Lions, given their fragile mental states.

“For them to start the game like that,” said linebacker Wake, whom Paterno would again replace with freshman Connor a short time later, “it was a blow to our optimism.”

Minnesota turned the surprise into a field goal. The Gophers still led 3–0 late in the first quarter but were backed up on a third-and-11 at their own 13. On a draw, Moroney scampered 64 yards. Shortly afterward he scored on a 1-yard plunge and Minnesota had a 10–0 lead.

That was plenty of points against a Penn State offense that, if anything, looked even feebler than it had at Boston College and Wisconsin, even with Mills at the helm. Paterno had made some changes, substituting Scott Davis for the struggling Charles Rush on the offensive line and starting Rubin at wide receiver. At one point, Penn State played freshmen Rubin and Perretta at ends and freshman Matt Hahn at fullback.

Rubin's start was Paterno's latest effort to send a message to his veterans and to get something out of the position. What did it say when your quarterbacks were your best receivers? Mills's longest completion of this season was a 49-yarder to Robinson. Robinson's best was a 39-yarder to Mills.

“You can only play somebody that doesn't do the job for so long,” Paterno said. “We have kids that have worked really hard to get good. Sometimes in practice they look like they are just on the verge of becoming the kind of people you can win [with] . . . make a catch, make
a run, and the whole thing with it. Then they don't do it in the game. I think then you have to sit back and say, ‘Hey, is there somebody else that can do it?' ”

Even though Minnesota had allowed 394 yards a game, the Nittany Lions ran for a total of just 15 yards on fourteen first-half carries. Mills looked uncomfortable. The wideouts dropped passes—six by game's end. And the coaching staff again appeared indecisive.

With 1:08 left in the half, Penn State faced a fourth-and-5 at Minnesota's 34. On the Nittany Lions' sideline, an animated discussion ensued between Paterno and Hall. Should they go for it? Or try a field goal? When it was decided to attempt a 51-yard field goal, Penn State mistakenly sent out twelve players and was forced to call a time-out.

So instead of running down the clock before the kick, they gave Minnesota the ball with 1:03 remaining after Robbie Gould's miss. Thanks to the rapidly improving defense, it did not cost Penn State any points.

Then, for a third consecutive week, the Nittany Lions allowed their opponent to put together a long drive on its first second-half possession. The Gophers culminated an eleven-play, 78-yard march with a 19-yard Barber TD that extended their lead to 16–0.

Penn State finally scored, late in the period, on a 6-yard toss from Mills to Smolko. Then, for the second time in three weeks, Paterno made a bizarre strategic decision. Down 16–6, with an offense that hardly looked capable of multiple scoring drives, the coach declined to go for two points after the touchdown. Two two-point conversions and another TD could have tied the game. By kicking the extra point, the struggling Lions made sure that they'd have to score at least twice more to triumph.

“If it had been later, we would have gone [for two],” Paterno explained later. “I figured a touchdown and a field goal [were possible]. We were doing pretty well.”

Observers wondered what game he'd been watching. Penn State would finish with 21 rushing yards, and much of its 250 yards passing came after the outcome had been determined. Despite their coach's stated optimism, the Nittany Lions, to the surprise of no one, did not
score again. The 16–7 loss left them winless in the Big Ten and 2–3 on the season.

The Lions' frustration and shortcomings had been highlighted on a backbreaking fourth-quarter play. Penn State seemed ready to get the ball back in good field position when Minnesota lined up for another third-and-11 at its own 21. But Ernie Wheelwright, well covered by Zemaitis, made a great leaping, acrobatic sideline catch of a Bryan Cupito pass for a pivotal 33-yard gain.

Wheelwright was the kind of big, fast, sure-handed receiver Penn State lacked, and his athletic reception was the kind of clutch play Paterno had been craving, in vain, all season.

“That,” he said afterward, “is what we need to start doing.”

Soon Paterno, head down, hands in pockets, exited the field with his players, losers again. Walking down a Metrodome corridor, the only sound the beaten Lions made was the clap of their cleats on concrete. One by one, like monks on their way to prayer, they filed silently into a locker room that on NFL Sundays was occupied by the Minnesota Vikings.

The dim light of the Metrodome corridor seemed to sap Paterno's legendary vitality.

Leaning forward from the waist, rubbing a hand through hair that on this night suddenly appeared thinner and grayer than ever, he ambled toward a tiny table and a folding chair that workers had set up for his postgame interview.

“Ahhhh, that chair'll feel good,” he mumbled to himself as he fell into it.

All he really wanted to do was rest. A digital clock on a wall opposite him read 10:33
P
.
M
. Home was 832 miles away and it would be another six hours before he would get there. He was weary already.

He didn't want to answer the questions he knew were coming. What else could he possibly say? Everybody in the place could see the problem. His wideouts couldn't catch a cold. The defenses they faced could afford to concentrate solely on stopping the run. It was a
formula guaranteed to leave single digits in the slot beneath
PENN STATE
on Big Ten scoreboards.

“How many times can I say it?” Paterno whispered when the questions began. “We dropped passes. How many more ways can I say it? If we catch the ball and we hold them to sixteen, who knows? Rubin had a shot at one. Phillips had that one in the first half. Same way last week. We went into the ball game with the idea that we probably had to throw the ball. They played us to stop the run. But we had great chances to throw the ball. We just didn't catch it.”

Paterno answered a few more questions, shook hands with veteran Minnesota sportswriter Sid Hartman, one of the few remaining working journalists who had covered Paterno when he was a Penn State assistant, and, with a halfhearted reminder that “we're not as bad as some people think we are,” hurried off to the locker room.

By the time he emerged a few minutes later, Mills was still answering questions.

“Guys, hurry it up!” the coach barked at the reporters. “We've got a plane to catch and we're not going to get home until two or three in the morning as it is.”

It would be longer than that before Paterno could rest.

A VAST AND MENACING CLOT
of dark clouds, so dense that it instantly darkened the autumn-plaid Allegheny Mountain ridges surrounding State College, settled directly above Beaver Stadium late on the afternoon of October 9.

The storm soon brought wind and rain into the massive steel facility, animating many of the 108,183 fans gathered there for the Purdue–Penn State football game. Hoods were catapulted onto bare heads. See-through ponchos were extracted from bags. And wide-striped umbrellas, most of them Penn State blue and white, rose like toadstools on a damp forest floor. The rain and darkness had rolled in unexpectedly on what had been a sparkling fall day. For these loss-weary fans, its sudden appearance, from beyond the northwest corner of the stadium, was just one more unsettling omen.

Far below, at an unsheltered spot along the east sideline, Paterno momentarily paused from his pacing to sweep away the raindrops forming on his famously tinted glasses.

He had spent enormous physical and emotional capital preparing for the game. Throughout the week, he had appeared obsessed with instantly resurrecting the Nittany Lions' reputation and his own. A victory over undefeated Purdue and Kyle Orton, its Heisman Trophy–contending quarterback, would put the train back on track.

A week earlier, following the loss to Minnesota, Paterno had
looked weary, glum, and old. But between then and his regular Tuesday meeting with the media, he underwent a remarkable recuperation. He had identified this game as one that could catapult Penn State back into the headlines, a transforming opportunity that, though he did not say as much, might be the start of his last great grab for glory.

Discussing the upcoming game with reporters, he had been feisty and unusually confident.

“We are a pretty good football team,” Paterno said, ignoring all the contrary evidence. “We really are. We are not getting beaten. We are losing games because we are beating ourselves. . . . I think if [Michael] Robinson hadn't gotten hurt, we may have won the last two games.”

All week he had pushed his players, his staff, and himself harder than he had in years. In intensely grueling workouts, he challenged them all, particularly the wide receivers whose continuing ineptitude had become an obstacle to recovery.

“When you win the battle, when you get wide open, and you don't catch the football when the quarterback puts it there, who's beating who?” Paterno said. “You know the old [saying], ‘We've met the enemy and it's us.' That's basically what's happening. If we can't throw the football, we're not going to be able to run it.”

Always a nagger, he prodded his assistants more that week and worked them overtime to devise a game plan that would stifle Orton and unearth some offense from a wounded attack. But he retained veto power over the game plan, which would be devised in tandem by new offensive coordinator Galen Hall and Jay, the quarterbacks coach. And after they submitted it to him, he pared it down considerably, as usual.

Paterno had responded this way after losses in the past, not that there had been many. Only one of his first thirty-four Penn State teams had finished below .500. Then, he knew he could outrecruit and outwork most of his rivals. And even though he liked to say he had no ego, he was damn sure he could outcoach them. But now there was a palpable sense of desperation in his preparations for Purdue.

By this point in the season it was obvious that something profound had changed in Happy Valley. Penn State's problems were deep, systemic. They went beyond the inexperience, the questionable calls, bad breaks, and tough opponents Paterno constantly referenced.

Though the public might not have noticed, he had, in response, changed quite a bit this season. But so far those changes had produced nothing but more losses and more criticism.

So Paterno cranked up the intensity for Purdue.

To coincide with the coach's increased level of devotion, Guido D'Elia, the athletic department's main marketer, had planned another Friday-night campus pep rally—a “Rally in the Valley”—and, for the next day's game, a “White Out,” in which Penn State fans and students were urged to wear white shirts and jackets.

Just before the 9:00
P
.
M
. rally at Rec Hall, the Nittany Lion Inn's first-floor bar, Whiskers, was packed with alumni. Most were middle-aged men and many wore navy-blue blazers. Some of these alums had their names inscribed on brass plaques that hung on a nearby corridor wall in the hotel. “The Laurel Circle” signified those who had contributed $1 million or more and it included the names “Joseph V. and Suzanne Paterno.” Across the corridor were the plaques of “Mount Nittany Society” members (at least $100,000). Plenty of those contributions had been inspired, and even solicited, by Paterno.

Most of the drinkers had season tickets and had paid handsomely for that privilege. Like the rest of college football's superpowers, Penn State's best tickets were granted to those who had made sufficient donations. A few had made additional grants to athletics, enough to endow specific playing or coaching positions in much the same way that a chair in, say, the biology department would be endowed.

A scholarship for Penn State's starting quarterbacks was underwitten by a $250,000 donation from ex–PSU quarterback Kerry Collins. One elderly Pennsylvania couple contributed $500,000 to endow scholarships for both a football linebacker and a women's volleyball setter.

They all had invested heavily in Penn State football, and as much as they respected Paterno, they demanded a return. Clustered now in front of a behind-the-bar TV that was showing a college football game, these burly men talked—more loudly with each round—about old times, about their tailgating menus, and about tomorrow's matchup between the Lions and Purdue.

It was only when the subject turned to Paterno that their voices, perhaps in deference to the coach, descended into whispers. They didn't have answers. Only questions. Was he too old to adapt to the game's altered realities? Was the Big Ten too tough for a school that had feasted on weaker Eastern opposition through the coach's first quarter century? Were recruits turned off by the old coach's insistence on a colorless reserve rather than a bold swagger?

Their displeasure, freed now by the alcohol, was obvious. After twenty-nine defeats in fifty-three games since 2000, proud Penn State had become a Big Ten punching bag and they didn't like it.

They knew a coaching record such as Paterno had amassed in the last five years would have been unacceptable almost anywhere else. They also knew he was an exception, an anachronism. His splendid record over more than a half century had earned him a pass.

Firing Paterno, as some in the Whiskers crowd correctly noted, still remained an unimaginable option. And the coach was offering no indications that he planned to step down anytime soon.

So what could be done?

Gradually, without arriving at any possible solutions, the knot of alumni disassembled. A few decided to walk the short distance to Rec Hall for the pep rally.

At that moment, Paterno and his players were riding to the rally in a pair of large new touring buses. They had boarded them outside the Lasch Building, a five-year-old, $14 million, state-of-the-art football-support facility that was indicative of the power the sport had accumulated here. Paterno's spacious office, the size of a small restaurant, was inside. So were weight-training rooms, theaterlike film facilities, academic-support areas, and a plush players' lounge.

The nighttime journey across campus had turned into a procession as the team neared its destination, Rec Hall, the seventy-five-year-old brick gymnasium that once had been the home of Penn State basketball but now hosted its volleyball and gymnastic teams.

As a slow-moving university police car's spotlight illuminated the buses' way down Curtin Road, members of Penn State's Blue Band
marched ahead, snapping out a martial cadence on snare drums. Students and fans stood along tree-lined pathways to holler encouragement or simply to wave at Paterno and the passing players. There was something almost melancholy about the crowd, as if they were trying to forget the unpleasant realities of 2004 by acting out their parts in a tradition-thick Penn State football experience.

The buses rolled to a stop outside Rec Hall, where the soft light seeping out of its windows beckoned on the chilly night. As always, the two captains, Mills and Wake, exited first. Paterno followed them down the steps. Inside, several thousand fans who had been primed by cheerleaders and Steve Jones, the radio voice of Nittany Lions football, exploded when they came into view.

Paterno immediately imbibed the enthusiasm. His arms instinctively launched into the air. The band's rendition of the fight song reverberated loudly throughout the building as he and the players, after bouncing two by two down the center aisle, climbed up onstage and took their seats.

Just prior to their arrival, Larry Johnson, a record-setting running back at Penn State, Class of 2002, and now a Kansas City Chief in the NFL, had addressed the crowd. Johnson had grown up in State College. His father, Larry senior, is a longtime Paterno assistant.

Ironically, it was the younger Johnson who had touched off much of the current controversy swirling around Paterno when, following the disastrous season-opening home loss to Toledo in 2000, he suggested a coaching change might be beneficial. Now he counseled the fans to be patient and finished his brief talk by vowing that Penn State would “kick Purdue's ass.”

The Nittany Lions had been joined onstage by a student who had won a rally-related contest and, as his prize, now sat among the first row of players. He was wearing a baseball cap and Paterno, apparently thinking he was one of his players, kept gesturing at the puzzled youngster to remove the cap.

When it was his turn to grab the wireless microphone, Paterno slipped on the white dinner jacket that, in deference to the weekend's “White Out” theme, Jones had been wearing. The coach joked that, in the jacket, he might easily be mistaken for Frank Sinatra. A male fan screamed out, “I love you, Joe!”

“I love you too,” Paterno instantly shouted back. “And I love these guys!”

Paterno, who insists his players dress in suits and ties on road trips even though their chartered-jet itinerary rarely brings them in contact with the public, removed the dinner jacket and donned a wrinkled Penn State T-shirt, tugging it over his head in such a forceful manner that it appeared to be a defiant gesture. He didn't care that his hair, finally graying, was a mess, that the tight shirt accentuated his belly, or that his high-pitched speech to a crowd peppered with tiny children was sprinkled with
hell
s and
ain't
s.

He had even abandoned his infamous pregame caution. While veteran observers had long been amused by his tendency to ennoble even the weakest of Nittany Lions opponents, this time he boldly predicted Penn State was going “to beat the hell out of Purdue!” He urged the fans to yell so loudly tomorrow that they'd drown out Orton's signals and audible calls and the “next time Number—what's his number?—next time Number 18 goes back there in the huddle, he ain't gonna change any plays!”

It was odd to see Paterno like this, so out of character, sputtering and shouting like some beer-soaked undergraduate. Sure this was a pep rally where a certain level of hyperbole was expected, but did he really believe the very un-Paterno-like things he was saying?

“I don't really look at it in a sense of something I like to do or don't like to do,” Paterno explained later about his pep-rally persona. “But there just comes a time when a team needs to get a bunch of people to rally around them. That's what a rally is. To go there and say, ‘Well, I hope we can win. The other guys are good and we've had tough luck.' What's that gonna do? I think you've got to make yourself go into those things and say, ‘Hey, we're going into battle.' Not just the football team but the whole Penn State community.”

“We got, what, six games left?” he now asked the crowd. “We can win ‘em all. We're as good as anybody in America! . . . There's only one Heisman Trophy winner who's going to be on the field tomorrow and his name is Zack Mills.”

Players smiled, bemused by their coach's violation of one of the
rules he constantly harped about. He was guilty of an emotional outburst in public.

Now Paterno slammed his fist on the podium like some enraptured preacher and screeched at the top of his lungs to the delighted crowd:

“You know I'm frustrated. I really am. Because these guys are working their tails off. They're on the verge of being something, but they lick themselves. Tomorrow we ain't gonna lick ourselves,
all right!
Tomorrow we're gonna beat somebody! We're
tired
of losing! You're
tired.
I'm
tired.
And”—pointing to his players, who sat behind him—“they're more
tired!
”

Penn State's students, reminded by omnipresent advertisements and by D'Elia's designated dormitory criers, who roamed the halls early Saturday rousing them from sleep, responded heartily to Paterno's midseason pleadings. The following day, more than thirty thousand of them entered Beaver Stadium wearing the same kind of white T-shirts Paterno had put on at the rally, purifying large swatches of the east and south grandstands.