The Lion in Autumn (24 page)

No one would be surprised when this updated version of the Friday night fights attracted 52 million viewers and a 25.1 rating—records for college sporting events that have survived till today.

Privately, the publicity-hungry bowl organizers must have been delighted when Miami showed up in just the right costume. Upon the team's arrival that week, a dozen players exited the plane in camouflage fatigues. While Irvin, Brown, and others seemed to relish their role as villains, they also appeared genuinely disturbed by their opponents' “goody-black-shoes” image. And whether it was some psychological ploy or not, they went out of their way that week to denigrate them.

“We played for the national championship on September 27
[against Oklahoma],” said defensive tackle Dan Sileo. “As far as I'm concerned, Friday's game is just the end of the season.”

Irvin said that if the all-American Conlan covered him, he'd “run right past him.”

And when Brown was asked what he thought of Dozier and Shaffer, he scoffed: “I think they're nothing.”

Meanwhile, Penn State's players, dressed in their traditional coats and ties, got through most of the week's interviews and banquets without reciprocating—until both squads attended a steak fry that, ironically, had been designed to bring them together in a spirit of sportsmanship. And, curiously, it was not Miami but Penn State—and, in particular, punter John Bruno—that precipitated The Tempest in a T-bone.

Each team had been asked to present a humorous skit after the meal. When it was Penn State's turn, Bruno joked first about Johnson's helmet of immovable hair. The Hurricanes didn't laugh. Next he and teammates performed some mocking Heisman Trophy poses, aimed at Miami's Heisman-winning QB Vinny Testaverde.

Then Bruno uttered a foolish joke that inadvertently pointed to the disparate racial makeup of the two teams. While Paterno's teams traditionally had been predominantly white, Bruno suggested there was harmony on this slightly more intergrated squad. “We even let the black guys eat with us once a week at the training table,” he said.

After Bruno's racial joke, the Miami players were furious and wanted to leave. Johnson insisted they stay, at least until the skits were finished. Some stood up and defiantly removed their sweatshirts to reveal more camouflage. When Penn State's skit concluded, Johnson said he “gave them the high sign and they left in unison.”

On his way out, Brown shouted, “Did the Japanese go and have dinner with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them? No. We're out of here.” The Hurricanes' mass exit and Brown's remark—though not any of Bruno's—were what filled the newspapers the following day.

Paterno probably would have blanched at the comments, but the coach, obsessively preparing for the game, had not been there to hear them. Later, in his autobiography, his only comment on the tawdry affair touched on Miami's “disgraceful walkout.”

“People trash us because we all left together,” Johnson said. “But Joe Paterno didn't even attend.”

John Junker, the Fiesta Bowl president, was there. And in an interview with
The Miami Herald
seventeen years later, he defended the Hurricanes' behavior at the dinner.

“One of my memories that is terribly underreported . . . the Penn State players were making fun of [Miami], doing Heisman poses and doing them in less than respectful ways,” he said. “That never got reported by anybody because of the level of rhetoric it got to. I always thought it was a little unfair. Miami definitely got the rough end of the deal. There were two sides to that coin, and the one side doesn't often get looked at.”

Eerily, that night's chief protagonists, Bruno and Brown, would be dead within six years. Bruno would succumb to cancer in April of 1992. Two months later, Brown was killed in a Florida car crash.

The antagonism continued through game day. Then, Miami clearly was the instigator.

When Penn State's buses pulled up outside Sun Devil Stadium a few hours before the game, some Hurricane players, hurling four-letter words, blocked their paths to the locker room. Paterno eventually had to step between them. Then, during warm-ups, several Miami receivers ran through a circle of stretching Nittany Lions defensive backs.

Paterno had held his tongue during the week. Not long afterward, though, he remarked that Johnson, who had occasionally complained about not getting enough respect, might win more praise if he'd address “the sideshow of bully tactics, thuggery, and goonery [that] stole the attention from his true skills.”

Throughout the pregame sideshow, Paterno remained convinced that his team, a 7-point underdog, could win. As was his habit before bowl appearances, he had thrown himself and his staff into preparing a game plan that would catch their opponents off-guard. And for all the talent they had on both sides of the ball, the key to beating Miami, he believed, was confusing Testaverde. For weeks, he and defensive
coordinator Jerry Sandusky had been devising schemes to accomplish that.

They came up with several new zone coverages, some of which dropped eight men back and relied on a three-man front to pressure the quarterback. By game time, Sandusky had so much confidence in his veteran unit that, when Penn State won the opening toss, he persuaded Paterno to kick off.

While Miami had brief bursts when it gobbled up big chunks of yardage in the game, it was clear that when Penn State went with their new zone packages Testaverde was baffled. After a few Miami first downs on the opening drive, Testaverde tossed an interception to safety Ray Isom. The Hurricanes eventually grabbed a 7–0 lead when fullback Melvin Bratton scored shortly after Shaffer's second-quarter turnover. Penn State responded immediately with a sustained drive, capping the 74-yard march with a 4-yard bootleg by Shaffer. Thanks in part to Bruno's outstanding punting (he averaged nearly 44 yards on nine kicks), the score remained 7–7 until the Hurricanes hit on a 38-yard field goal early in the final period.

Then Conlan, who would be named the game's MVP despite knee and ankle injuries, picked off Testaverde for a second time, returning the pass 39 yards to Miami's 5. Two plays later, Dozier, who ran for 99 of the 162 offensive yards Penn State accumulated on that night, put the Nittany Lions ahead with a 6-yard scamper into the end zone. With 8:13 to play, Penn State led by four points, 14–10.

On the night, Testaverde would throw for 285 yards and Miami would run for another 160. But he also threw five interceptions and the Hurricanes could manage just a single touchdown—and that was the result of a Shaffer fumble deep in Lions territory. In addition, Penn State defensive linemen Tim Johnson, Donnie Graham, and Mike Russo were able to penetrate constantly despite a Tempe desert heat that, as the game wore on, seemed to wilt Miami's offensive line.

The clock was down to 2:24 when, facing a fourth-and-6 at Miami's 27, Testaverde and receiver Bennie Blades combined on a 31-yard pass play. Paterno was impressed by Johnson's daring call. “In my experience, whenever I've taken a big gamble like that and made it, I've usually won. . . . I was scared,” he admitted afterward.

Testaverde at last appeared to have found his confidence. He hit Blades again, then Brett Perriman, then Irvin three times in succession to reach the Penn State six-yard line.
Oh, God, here they come,
thought Isom.

Paterno anticipated that Miami now would turn to its tailback. Fast and big (six-one, 235 pounds), Alonzo Highsmith had run for 111 yards in the game. But Testaverde was hot and he convinced Johnson that he could throw for the winning score.

A first-down pass failed. Tim Johnson then sacked the Heisman winner for a four-yard loss. Testaverde missed Warren Williams on his cross-field, third-down throw. There were eighteen seconds left and it was fourth down. A single play would now decide the national championship.

Eight Lions defenders dropped back to the goal line to defend what had to be another pass. Penn State's players had noticed that on long third- and fourth-down tries, Testaverde tended to fix on his intended receiver early. And this time he was looking at Perriman.

When the ball was released, linebacker Pete Giftopoulos stepped in front of the receiver and cradled the pass, Miami's seventh and final turnover.

With that play, Paterno and Penn State had a second national championship in four years.

And on that night, no one—not the players in the joyful locker room, or the record audience watching on TV, or the alumni celebrating at parties across the country, or the students and fans back in State College, or the writers heaping praise on the coach and his program—could have imagined that nearly twenty years later, there still would not be a third.

WHEN THE PURDUE BUBBLE BURST,
the impatience that even the most loyal Penn State fans had held in check began to spill out. The flow of discontent with Paterno and his program would widen over the course of the bye week and beyond until, by the end of the Nittany Lions' next game, an October 23 homecoming matchup with Iowa, it would be an angry torrent.

The continuing futility had dimmed even the homecoming spirit. Tickets for those games used to be impossible to find. Penn State's widely scattered alumni—an estimated 440,000—made sure that if they could attend only one game every season or two, it would be homecoming. This year, in the days before the game, more than five hundred tickets remained unsold.

Paterno wasn't surprised. He knew how the fans felt. How could anyone possibly be excited about this team? “Having lost three games in a row,” he said, “if anybody is optimistic, they are probably cuckoo.”

At this point, he certainly wasn't hopeful. The Purdue loss still stung him badly. Twelve days later, during his October 21 radio show, the coach's lingering disappointment remained transparent.

That Thursday night call-in show,
Nittany Lion Hotline,
was broadcast around the state weekly, between 6:00 and 7:00
P
.
M
. It emanated from a makeshift studio in a coaches' meeting room at the Lasch Building, just a few steps from Paterno's office.

Calls tended to come from a small circle of Penn State diehards. Though the show's producer, Jeff Tarman, the former AD's son, insisted he did not screen them, their questions invariably were polite and uncritical. This year, in fact, they had been so supportive of the troubled coach that the show frequently resembled an electronic get-well card.

In the State College area, that night's broadcast began just after an appeal for local residents to attend an 8:00
P
.
M
. “Believers for Bush” rally in Mount Nittany High School. Curiously, the autumn's supercharged presidential campaign, into which the coach would visibly thrust himself, had diverted some attention from the Paterno debate.

Like the rest of the nation, Penn State's campus was unusually engaged and bitterly split by the Bush–Kerry contest. And as the November 2 election neared, each candidate's supporters grew progressively louder, more strident, more confrontational. The two sides sniped constantly at each other—via posters, radio talk shows, and letters and oped pieces in the
Daily Collegian
.

The night following Paterno's radio show—after the homecoming floats had paraded down College Avenue—controversial filmmaker Michael Moore would speak at the Bryce Jordan Center, an event sponsored by the College Democrats. Outraged conservatives arranged a campus appearance by right-wing radio talker Michael Gallagher for that same night.

Paterno, the son of a rabid FDR supporter but now a prominent Pennsylvania Republican, managed to steer clear of the turmoil, though not from the presidential politics. The coach was scheduled to appear at an on-campus Bush rally on October 29, one at which he would share the stage with the current president's father and daughters, Barbara and Jenna. Paterno and the elder Bush had formed a friendship over the years, with the coach having seconded his nomination at the 1988 GOP convention.

The football coach's politics, though far more centrist than the younger Bush's, didn't win him any points with those Penn State fans who supported Kerry. Paterno, in fact, had received part of the blame when, a few months earlier, two prominently liberal Penn State professors, Henry and Susan Giroux, fled to a Canadian university, complaining about the stifling political climate in State College.

According to an article in the liberal journal
Axis of Logic
, “The fact that [the couple was] allowed to walk away from Penn State . . . ironically coincided with the school investing untold amounts of money to retain Joe Paterno, Penn State's football coach and apologist for the policies of George W. Bush.”

(In April, three days after the Blue-White Game, Paterno's youngest son, Scott, had won the Republican primary in Pennsylvania's Seventeenth Congressional District, an area south and east of State College. Despite the advantage of his famous name, he would be soundly defeated in the general election.)

In what was evidence of another altered tradition this season, the busy coach no longer arrived at his radio show at 6:00 sharp. It was 6:15 when he entered the room on this night. And as soon as he sat in a chair at the head of a conference table and slid on the headphones, it was clear the bye week had not been long enough.

He looked washed out, as pale and shaken as he had on the cover of the latest
Blue White Illustrated
. That post-Purdue photo of the downcast coach was accompanied by a headline that aptly described his dilemma: “Sick of Losing: Emotional Joe Paterno Searches for Answers.”

Before taking calls, Paterno told host Steve Jones he wanted to thank the fans who had been so enthusiastic at the Purdue game.

“They were fabulous,” he said. “And we had everything going for us. That's probably why I was so frustrated after the game. The crowd was into it. I thought we played hard. We didn't make a couple of plays you've got to make when you get in that league. It's been a frustrating year that way.”

The first few calls were from the Philadelpia area, somewhat surprising since Penn State's in-state appeal had always been stronger elsewhere. There was, in fact, only one station in the state's largest city that carried Nittany Lions games. There were three in State College alone, two each in tiny Wellsboro and Lewistown.

When the initial caller, Todd, from the Philadelphia suburb of Lansdale, greeted him with “Good evening, Coach, how are you?” Paterno couldn't let the innocent pleasantry pass without again revealing his frustrations.

“Well, I'll tell you, Todd, we'll find out. I'm getting to the point where I'm punching walls.”

Jerry, a sycophantic regular from Philadelphia, was next. Before the caller could pose one of his upbeat questions, Paterno interrupted.

“Hey, Jerry, you want to come up and you and I will cry together?”

Later, the coach candidly admitted how deeply the Purdue loss continued to impact his psyche. “I'm still having trouble,” he said.

No matter the question, Paterno's answers kept boomeranging back to the crushing loss. He couldn't understand it. At one point, he sounded as if he were blaming the officiating. In that regard, he hadn't been able to stay on the wagon, even though, with the advent of instant replay in the Big Ten this season, he had vowed to kick the habit.

“The holding penalties and the lining up offsides bothered me a little bit. . . . They called us for one of the tackles lining up in the backfield because he is in an up-stance and his helmet didn't break the ground,” said Paterno. “I was looking in there all day and I was trying to get them to call the same thing on Purdue because Purdue was doing the same thing. It was across the field that it was called and I couldn't get the guy on my side to call it. . . .

“I don't know how good a coach I am, to be frank with you, but the one thing anyone who ever played for us [will tell you], if they hold in practice, I'm all over their backs. I don't want to hold. But there are coaches who teach holding. And I'm naive if I tell you they're not. . . . There's nobody in position in the officiating crews that can call the tight end holding. The side judge can't see it. The referee's not looking at it. The umpire is looking at the inside guys. The guy who is twenty yards down the field is supposed to call it and he can't see it. So some guys teach holding. . . .

“One of these days all of us—the coaches in this league—are going to have to sit back and say, ‘Hey, what's going on with the officiating?' Because really it's not very consistent. . . . We turn in a tape every week to [Big Ten supervisor] Dave Perry. And in it there are six, seven blatant holding situations. What happens? [He says,] ‘You're right, Coach.' But the same guys show up every week.”

In all the autumns of Paterno's life, there hadn't been many when he had to endure two weeks without a football game. But after Penn State's addition a decade earlier, the Big Ten was left with an uneven eleven members. So each got a bye week during the conference schedule. The Nittany Lions were idle from October 9 to October 23.

His routine interrupted, his determination temporarily deflated, Paterno approached the downtime as if it were a spiritual retreat. There would be contemplative walks, inspirational films, and plenty of soul searching.

After meetings on Monday, October 11, he decided that for the first time in a long while he'd walk home from his office. For most of his career, the coach had made the trip on foot. This season, thanks to his renewed ardor, there just hadn't been time.

“It's the first time I've been able to really take a walk without worrying about having to look at my watch,” he said.

On this head-clearing jaunt on a sunny afternoon, he took a detour, ambling over to Eastview Terrace. Though the cluster of handsome new brick dormitories in the campus's southeast corner had opened that summer, the coach had not yet seen it. “Beautiful,” he now pronounced the project.

Arriving at home that afternoon, he went to his den. Instead of picking up a novel or watching an old movie, he decided to look at some videotapes—of both his team and of Iowa. His wife was right. He couldn't relax.

Paterno typically did not meet with reporters during bye weeks. However, the coach belatedly realized that, by keeping his players from talking and by answering questions for only seven minutes himself, he had imposed a hardship on writers who needed to produce several Penn State stories a week.

He told Nelson to let the media know he would be be available on Tuesday, October 12, to answer questions. He also wanted to use the occasion to apologize. But just as his radio-show answers would the following week, the apology quickly turned into a lament on the loss.

“I didn't feel very comfortable with the way I handled some things after the game on Saturday,” he began. “I know you folks have a job to do and something has to come out of the game, win or lose. It was
one of the most disappointing losses I have ever been around. That is one of the reasons I tried to keep the kids away from everybody.

“We really thought we were going to win that football game. We practiced well, prepared well, and the kids did what we asked them to do. . . . We did everything and we didn't win the football game. That is kind of frustrating to me. I don't feel any better. I would be dishonest if I told you I feel better.”

The rest of that first week proceeded like any other—practices Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons and a brief morning session on Friday. After the Friday workout, he dismissed the players for the weekend, urging those who could to go home and visit with family and friends.

Paterno then drove to State College's airport, where he was to board a university jet for a flight to Pittsburgh. A luncheon rally for that city's Penn State supporters was set for a downtown hotel. Paterno and Nittany Lions basketball coaches Ed DeChellis and Rene Portland were to speak.

At the last minute, the coach had second thoughts. Hort, his son-in-law, though improving, had just been released from the Altoona hospital and still had some rehabilitation issues to confront. (Hort would attend the Iowa game. “He looked great,” reported family friend Kay Kustanbauter.) Paterno felt that he ought not to abandon his family under those circumstances. He told DeChellis and Portland he wasn't going. Instead, he spent the afternoon with Hort's children.

That night Paterno took those players who stayed on campus to see
Friday Night Lights
, a film about a successful Texas high-school football program based on Buzz Bissinger's Pulitzer prize–winning book. The coach, who rarely employed such rah-rah methods, had been trying to boost his team's spirits all season and the film's ending, he had heard, was an inspirational one.

“This year I spent a lot more time trying to get these guys to believe in themselves and not to get discouraged,” he said later. “[Doing] those kinds of things that you don't do when you're winning. When you're winning, you try to keep them under control. I have a saying, ‘You're never as good as you think you are when you're winning and you're never as bad as you think you are when you're losing.' So when
you're winning it's easy to keep them under control. When you lose, it really almost comes to the point of ‘Here we go again.' It's an ongoing fight.”

Paterno rose early on the football-free Saturday, took another walk, and then morphed into a couch potato. He watched football all day, Ohio State versus Iowa, Michigan State versus Minnesota, flipping back and forth constantly. Then he wrote some letters to recruits.

Though he was a longtime member of the aptly named Our Lady of Victory parish, Paterno rarely attended Mass there on Sundays during football season. He spent most of this one at home with his family. On Monday, his familiar game-week routine resumed.

Paterno and his assistants had initially agreed to try and lighten the mood at the workouts the previous week. These young players had been devastated, and the three-game losing streak had put a lot of pressure on their padded shoulders.