The Lion in Autumn (36 page)

The salary that would be paid to the next Penn State's football coach also became a controversial topic two months after the season.
At a January 23 trustees meeting, Spanier was asked about the escalating salaries for college coaches.

“The free-enterprise, market-oriented side of me says the market's the market and we have to deal with that,” the president began. “On this issue, because Tim [Curley] doesn't have loose change sitting around in his budget and Penn State is not going to be able to get into an arms race in intercollegiate athletics, our philosophy is that our coaches should be paid a fair salary and we think we can pay a fair salary. But we can't go out and be offering one-million-, two-million-dollar salaries to coaches.”

That response, not surprisingly, drew enthusiastic applause from professors when it was referenced by Spanier at a subsequent Faculty Senate meeting. But to Penn State's football fans, the university president seemed to be implying that the school wasn't going to conduct a thorough national search to find a successor for Paterno. For those cynics, it appeared to be further evidence that, rather than seek a high-priced, high-profile replacement, they would stay in-house. And that probably meant Tom Bradley, the popular but low-key defensive coordinator whom some alumni felt lacked a big-time coach's presence and reputation.

Spanier was on vacation when an aide telephoned and read him a
Centre Daily Times
column in which Ron Bracken accused him and the school of trying to cheapen the Penn State brand. More criticism followed from other columnists around the state, from radio talk-show hosts and in Penn State chat rooms. Stunned by the reaction, Spanier would respond that his statement had been “a pretty reasonable answer.” He labeled his noisiest critics “crackpots who think that I'm here to undermine or ruin or dismantle intercollegiate athletics.”

But he did quickly backtrack.

“We're going to continue to go out and hire the best coaches we can,” he said, “and we will pay what we have to pay.”

When spring practice for the 2005 season began in March, player discipline was not nearly the topic it had been the previous year.

Either Paterno's no-tolerance message had left an imprint on his
team, or players were better at hiding their transgressions. There were no underage drinking citations, no assaults, no brawls at parties. In fact, the only embarrassing incident involved a bow and arrow.

Center E. Z. Smith and Mike Southern, a backup linebacker who already had quit the team, were accused of damaging a campus apartment by firing several arrows into its walls during a party there. Smith, who previously had been forced to sit out the 2003 season because of two underage drinking violations, was suspended from the team. He was barred from spring practice and all summer workouts.

Paterno said Smith's status would be reevaluated when he returned for the fall semester, providing he had made restitution for the damage. But once again, he blamed the media for inflating the incident's significance.

“I said to the alumni group this morning, ‘You know what, if I hadn't done a couple of things when I was in college, I might have been the first American Pope,' ” he noted at the press conference that preceded the April 23 Blue–White Game. “I would love to have every one of you guys and girls stand up and tell me that you haven't done anything that you would hate like the dickens to have put in the press. I am still dealing with twenty- and twenty-one-year-old kids.”

On the field, despite a cry among alumni and sports columnists to make Morelli his starting QB, and despite Paterno's insistence that the youngster was “too good to sit on the bench,” it seemed clear that Robinson was going to be Penn State's quarterback at the start of the 2005 season.

Robinson got the majority of the snaps in the storm-shortened Blue–White Game notable as a showcase for the speed of Williams and King. Morelli, meanwhile, continued to perform tentatively.

“I think Michael Robinson has made great progress,” Paterno said. “I think he has made really good progress. Jay has worked with him and I think you will see a kid that is a really much-improved passer in his form. You would expect that since that is the only thing he has done. He hasn't had to be playing wideout and running back. You would hope he improved at the one position that you groomed him for. I think he will certainly be a good quarterback. Anthony Morelli, eventually, is going to be a great quarterback. Morelli has a
tremendous arm. He has handled a lot of things much quicker than I thought he would. The rap on him was that maybe he wasn't the smartest kid in the world, which has really been unfortunate, because he has accepted things well and does some things well.”

On days when the weather prevented him from walking back and forth to his office, Paterno drove his new silver BMW—a much flashier car than he had ever owned previously. In preparation for his fortieth season as Penn State's head coach, he met daily with his assistants—all of whom had returned for ‘05—and began mapping out the practice routines. They would be much like they always had been:

SUNDAY:
Reviewing and breaking down game tapes. Coming up with a preliminary game plan for the next opponent.

MONDAY:
Going over the game plan at the various position meetings. Reviewing tapes of the opponents' games.

TUESDAY:
Installing the plan during a lengthy, full-pad workout.

WEDNESDAY:
Meetings and workouts for 1
¹
⁄
2
to 2 hours.

THURSDAY:
1–1
¹
⁄
4
hours of the same.

FRIDAY:
A quick meeting and walk-through.

SATURDAY:
Game.

He probably spent more time on recruiting trips than ever before, something he continued to enjoy. “As long as we can walk away from kids we don't like,” he said. He chuckled to himself whenever recruits told him “my dad went to Penn State or my grandmother was a cheerleader.” Penn State, under siege in its traditional recruiting areas, was in turn trying to extend its geographical reach. Oftentimes, Paterno would fly in a university jet to see three recruits in a single day, each of them hundreds of miles from the others.

Still, even now, at seventy-eight, there was little time for family or vacation. “I am really feeling the neglect of all my grandkids at this stage,” he said.

His only extended off-season break from football came when he and other coaches from colleges that had six-figure Nike contracts
traveled to Aruba for a combination excursion and meeting. Oddly, given his stance against commercialization, Paterno and Nike chairman Phil Knight had become unlikely friends. At Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, employees dropped their children off at the Joe Paterno Child Care Center. Knight spent the Blue–White weekend with the Paternos and was even made an honorary coach of the Blue team in that intrasquad game.

Paterno vowed again to alter his personal workload in ways that would make him a more effective coach. Just as in the year before, when he had delegated some of his nonfootball duties to Fran Ganter, Paterno now continued to shed those old responsibilities. At April's annual coaches' clinic, he was present for only a few onfield drills and he never even showed up for the session's evening social, something he always had attended in the past.

“There are a lot of things that I have gotten caught up in and things that are expected of me that take up a lot of time,” he said. “I've been trying to work my way out of [them]. . . . This is going to be a fun year for me. It is, obviously, a big challenge for me personally as well as for the whole program. I kind of thrive on those kinds of things. I have spent an awful lot of time on just trying to be a football coach.”

Fifty-five years, in fact. All of them in State College, where the spaghetti sauce has improved over the years, where the homes and the shops and the classroom buildings now spread out to once-unimaginable distances, where his new office is twice as large as his first residence, where his children had been born and had become parents themselves.

“Nobody could have had things go better for them than me,” Paterno said after the 2004 season. “I've got my health. . . . I've never missed a practice day in all the years, except when my son was hurt and when my dad died. I've got a great wife, great kids, a great university. I've got everything.”

Everything, perhaps, but time.

As another season neared, the old literature major had to be contemplating his morality. Age was a circumstance all his work, all his past glories couldn't change. “They told me I was everything,” King Lear had said. “ 'Tis a lie.”

He certainly seemed to recognize the urgency of his situation.
Asked during a fund-raiser in Pittsburgh how long he would continue to coach if Penn State did not produce victories, he was surprisingly blunt.

“If we don't win some games,” he said, “I've got to get my rear end out of here. Simple as that. We have a team that can go out there and do some things we haven't done in the last few years. I think if we do that, fine. If we don't, I think I have to back away and say, ‘Hey, I'm not doing the job.' And it would be easy for me to back away. Well, as far as financially and the whole bit. I'm not a forty-year-old guy trying to create a career for himself.”

He was a seventy-eight-year-old guy at the end of one.

Three days before his fifty-fifth Christmas in State College, on the morning that Williams revealed his college choice, Penn State officials said Paterno was relaxing at home. While he might have been at home, it was doubtful he was relaxing.

More likely, he was sitting in his den, watching football videos and drawing up plays, safe again within the crucifix's shadow.

WRITING AN UNAUTHORIZED BOOK
on Joe Paterno is a lot like being a linebacker defending against one of those sweeps his Nittany Lions love to run: You've got to keep your head up at all times, fight off wave after wave of interference, and never take your eyes off the target, no matter how well-protected and untouchable he might seem.

A culture of secrecy looms over Penn State. For decades, journalists, civic groups, and even its own faculty members have fought unsuccessfully to open up the university's budget and files. That mentality is reflected in Paterno's program. Much to the annoyance of generations of authors, sportswriters, fans, and NFL scouts, he has constructed a nearly impenetrable wall around Penn State football. He emerges from behind it only long enough to perform his weekly media and public-relations duties. His assistant coaches are off-limits during the season. His players are even harder to reach.

Though Paterno finally relented in the days just before and after the 2004 season ended—granting me a lengthy interview and access to his radio show, and allowing me to accompany him to his normally off-limits Quarterbacks Club appearance—I was forced to spend the previous months shadowing him and his team from a safe distance. Wherever the old coach went—to games in Minneapolis, Boston, or Bloomington, to banquets in Pittsburgh, Valley Forge, or State College,
to news conferences in Beaver Stadium's posh media room or a storage shed beneath Indiana University's Memorial Stadium—I was there, watching and listening.

As a result, many of the Paterno quotes in this book came from my being present at his weekly teleconferences, postgame press conferences, radio shows, and public appearances. Players were interviewed by phone or in chaotic postgame settings when a dozen or so were brought into a room and beset by scores of news-starved journalists. I often had to rely on my colleagues' published accounts of their interviews with players I could not reach in the precious few moments we were allotted.

Curiously, while Paterno rarely grants one-on-one interviews with reporters who regularly cover Penn State football during the season, he is more willing to find a few minutes for those from national newspapers, magazines, and Web sites. Consequently, I scoured daily as many of those as I could find for fresh Paterno tidbits. The most helpful newspapers in providing daily insights into Paterno, the 2004 season, and the culture of Penn State football were the
Centre Daily Times
in State College and the student-run
Daily Collegian
. In addition, in this age of new technology that Paterno has yet to grasp or acknowledge, several Web sites offered a look at how Penn State fans reacted from week to week. They included
BottleofBlog.com
,
GoPSUsports.com
,
PennLive.com
, and
PSUPlaybook.org
. Also, thanks to Paul Dyzak and his colleagues at the Penn State University Archives, I was able to review the university's massive collection of Joe Paterno–related material, including a newspaper clippings file that dates back to his arrival in State College in 1950.

Jeff Nelson, Penn State's assistant athletic director for communications, was as helpful as he was able to be in assisting me with credentials, directing me to the right ex-player or administrator, and answering all sorts of inane questions.

Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, retired vice president for finance Bob Patterson, and a host of ex-players, including Denny Onkotz, John Shaffer, John Capelletti, the late Bob Mitinger, and Lydell Mitchell were generous with their time.

Among the books on Paterno and Penn State that were extremely
helpful and provided glimpses into games, seasons and players long gone were Ken Denlinger's
For the Glory
(St. Martin's Press, 1989);
Joe Paterno: Football My Way
by Joe Paterno, Mervin D. Hyman, and Gordon White (Macmillan Co. 1971);
Joe Paterno: In Search of Excellence
by James A. Paterson and Dennis Booher (Leisure Press, 1983);
Joe Paterno: The Coach of Byzantium
by George Paterno (Sports Publishing, 1997);
Lion Country: Inside Penn State Football
by Frank Bilovsky (Leisure Press, 1982);
The Nittany Lions: A Story of Penn State Football
by Ken Rappoport (The Strode Publishers, 1980);
No Ordinary Joe: The Biography of Joe Paterno
by Michael O'Brien (Rutledge Hill Press, 1998);
Paterno: By the Book
by Joe Paterno with Bernard Asbell (Random House, 1987);
Penn State: An Illustrated History
by Michael Bezilla (Penn State University Press, 1985); and
Road to Number One: A Personal Chronicle of Penn State Football
by Ridge Riley (Doubleday & Co., 1977).

I'm also eternally grateful to Gene Foreman, my old managing editor at
The Philadelphia Inquirer
who now teaches journalism at Penn State. Gene generously allowed me the use of his State College apartment for several days a week throughout the football season.

Lastly, I'd like to thank the boys and girls on the bus—the Penn State beat writers whose minds I picked, whose media guides I borrowed, whose patience I tested, and whose complaints about access I shared. They include Mark Brennan of
Blue White Illustrated
, Jerry Kellar of the
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
, Rich Scarcella of the
Reading Eagle
, Ray Parrillo and Bill Lyon of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, Dave Jones and Bob Flounders of the
Harrisburg Patriot-News
, Neil Rudel of the
Altoona Mirror
, Heather Dinich of the
Centre Daily Times
, Jenny Vrentas and Wade Malcolm of the
Daily Collegian
, Neil Geoghegan of the
Daily Local News
, Chico Harlan of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, and Rob Biertempfel of the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
.

This book came about because of the energy and efforts of my agents, Venture Literary's Frank Scatoni and Greg Dinkins, and the massive and incredibly helpful insights of Gotham Books editor Brendan Cahill.

And, of course, nothing would have been possible without the love and patience of my dear wife, Charlotte, who wouldn't know a blitz from a blintz.