The Lion in Autumn Read online

  Throughout this late-life ordeal, Paterno could still laugh at himself. He liked to say that was because he had no ego. One of his favorite stories on that topic concerned his father, Angelo, a lawyer who had died of a heart attack in 1955.

  “I have not been an ego guy. I never had an ego,” he said. “When I was a kid, a junior in high school, I got my picture in the Brooklyn Eagle. I’m sitting there in my room looking at my picture and my dad said, ‘Keep looking at that picture and that’s the last time you’ll ever have your picture in the paper.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

  It was a nice story. But no one gets to be as successful as Paterno without an ego. It was true he didn’t live in a big house, or drive a Mercedes or buy expensive Italian suits. But wasn’t it egotistical to demand so much from players and himself? And to get it? Paterno might not be self-conscious, but he certainly is self-aware.

  “Joe’s ego is like Dean Smith’s,” said Patrick Reusse, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist. “It’s not an in-your-face kind of ego. It’s more a sideways ego. But in the end it’s still a huge ego.”

  Now that ego was badly bruised.

  A few years earlier, he had seemed ready to wean himself gradually from the daily grind of his job. Maybe he’d cut back in this area or that, have one last great season and then walk away to become a kind of coach emeritus, one who, upon request, injected himself into recruiting, fund raising, or public relations for the university. Instead, the embarrassments of 2003 persuaded him he needed more, not less, involvement. So Paterno began to reimagine himself.

  “I felt we weren’t very good and I hadn’t done a very good job,” he said. “So I had to sit back and say, ‘Hey, do you want to stay in this thing? If you want to stay in it, you’d better get off your backside and get to work again.’ ”

  Before the 2004 season, he shuffled his coaching staff, bumping longtime offensive coordinator Fran Ganter into an administrative post and replacing him with Galen Hall. He altered lifetime routines. He more closely monitored his players’ performances and academic progress. He got more involved in the play calling. At times, he frantically—maybe even desperately—pushed his players, his staff, and himself. He nagged and challenged them all in practices that were more physically grueling than any Penn State senior could recall.

  It was all quite taxing for a man of seventy-seven, even one so unusually fit and energetic. But that’s how he always handled adversity, with a hitch-up-your-pants, plant-your-feet-in-the-ground determination. That was the Brooklyn street swagger in Paterno, the cocky self-assurance that toughened, and sometimes obscured, his more familiar intellectual side.

  “Over the years, every time things started getting a little rough, he’d always be one of those guys who thrived on it,” said Tim Curley, Penn State’s athletic director. “The rest of us would get gray hair and go crazy and he’s not like that. He’s so competitive he seems to welcome the challenge.”

  He had watched Bear Bryant die in 1983, just a month after that legendary coach quit at Alabama, and it frightened him. So, in the words of Centre Daily Times sports editor Ron Bracken, who has known and covered Paterno for decades, he kept “hitting the reset button on his retirement clock.”

  Every five years or so, he’d look around at his wife and children, or his wife and grandchildren, at the growing costs and commercialization of college sports, at the increased recruiting competition and media demands, and he’d talk about retirement.

  “I don’t want to hang around too long,” he said. “I’ll probably coach another four or five years.” That was in 1973.

  He forecast his imminent departure again in 1978, in 1982, in 1986, in 1989, in 1997, and in 1999. In 1990, he had predicted that by 2000, he’d be sitting in the Beaver Stadium stands, “second-guessing a coach who doesn’t throw the ball enough.”

  He was rightfully proud of the record he had amassed, the lives he had changed, the acclaimed program he had constructed. Still, he had regrets.

  “I can remember things that happened twenty years ago in football games,” he said once, “but I can’t remember what my kids did.”

  Maybe he also thought about the books he hadn’t read, the places he’d never seen, how nice it would be to sit on the beach near his summer home in Avalon, New Jersey, with a Jack Daniel’s and a New York Times and not have anything to worry about.

  And yet he couldn’t walk away. He couldn’t even settle on a scenario in which that might be possible.

  Tommy Bowden, the son of Bobby Bowden, the seventy-five-year-old Florida State coach who had passed Paterno’s record-setting victory total, recognized the symptoms. He grimly predicted that either his father or Paterno “will die on the field, I’m sure.”

  But for all his game-day miseries, when practice resumed each Monday, he would be miraculously revived. Standing out there on those skinny legs, wearing a plain gray sweatshirt, khaki pants, and black football cleats, Paterno was as energetic, as cranky, as meticulous, as vocal, as involved as ever.

  Sometimes, despite increasing evidence that it would be unlikely for this diminished Penn State program, he mused about having one last unbeaten team. There had been at least one in every other decade he had been head coach. Sometimes he hinted that he’d like to name an assistant head coach and then gradually hand the reins to him, just as Rip Engle had done for Paterno. Sometimes he suggested that before departing he just wanted to get Penn State football back on track.

  His lifelong passion to succeed—“a maniacal need to be first,” his brother termed it—long ago trumped his other interests. Now it was too late and he was too proud to admit it. He had invested so much in Penn State football that to leave it in this state, despite all he had accomplished, would be a tacit acknowledgement of failure.

  “If you think that I am going to back out of it because I am intimidated, you are wrong,” he said as the season began in 2004. “If you think I am going to stay when I think I am not doing a good job, you are wrong. Those things have to develop and have to evolve. Right now, I think we can get this thing done and do a good job. We obviously have to recruit some people. We have to recruit some skilled people. I have said that before. I don’t want to hang around here and pull Penn State down. . . . I could walk out of this thing. I could call and tell you today I am going. What does it mean to me? It doesn’t mean a thing to me. What impact does it have on the program, the coaches, and is it the best thing for Penn State? They are the things that I think about all the time. It has nothing to do with Joe Paterno.”

  No, even with a battered ego, a fraying historical reputation, and a bloodied head, Joe Paterno couldn’t leave.

  “I know of several old friends who have called Joe and said, ‘Look, nobody is going to make you leave. But for God’s sake, why not get things lined up for when you do decide to do it?’ ” said one longtime Penn State insider. “Joe doesn’t want to hear it. He just cuts those people out of his life.”

  Matt Millen, the former Penn State star who now is the Detroit Lions general manager, experienced that very thing. “Two years ago, I called him and said, ‘You know, Joe, it really isn’t my business, but you should name a successor,’ ” said Millen in 2003. “ ‘It doesn’t mean you have to retire.’

  “He told me, ‘Millen, you’re right—it isn’t any of your business.’ ”

  He was going to turn his program around—even if it killed him.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE WHISTLE that officially began the 2004 season blew at precisely 10:00 A.M on March 27, its shrill cry careening around cavernous Holuba Hall like the shriek of a wounded bird. From the outside, the enormous corrugated-steel practice facility, just a short distance from Beaver Stadium, resembled a warehouse. Inside, its 118,000-square-foot vastness was dark and drafty, the dreariness enlivened only by the garish green Astroturf that carpeted its floor.

  On this first day of spring practice, Joe Paterno prowled up and down that artificial surface. Hunched at the hips, head constantly tilted
forward, dark eyes focused on the exercising players stretched out at his feet, he resembled a hawk waiting to swoop down on unsuspecting prey.

  Wearing his usual practice uniform—gray sweatshirt, khakis, black football cleats over white tube socks—the coach frequently barked and snapped in a manner that, depending on the player, could irritate, intimidate, infuriate, or amuse.

  But as familiar as this agitated figure might have appeared to his team that morning, the old man was not the same coach who just four months earlier had been humiliated by Penn State’s season-ending 41–10 loss at Michigan State. The seventy-seven-year-old Paterno had, out of desperation, reinvented himself.

  Bruised and battered during that nine-loss season, he had spent the last few months deconstructing Penn State football. He was going to demand more, inspire more, discipline more. He was going to discard some philosophies that no longer worked and adopt a few new ones.

  “You forget to do the things that got you there,” he would explain. “You stop paying attention to the tiny details. Now I’ve got to get back to those things. It’s like starting over. I’ve got to prove a couple of things and I think it’s going to be interesting to see if I can do it.”

  His team had gotten its first glimpse of the changes a month earlier.

  The 2003 Nittany Lions had been as bad off the field as on it. Inside the program, there was a hope that with the end of that dreadful season might come an end to the extracurricular trouble as well. Paterno certainly intended that to be the case.

  Then, sometime around 4:00 A.M. on February 7, near the end of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity’s “Black Ice” dance and skate party at Penn State’s Greenburg Ice Pavilion, a fight broke out. Like a sprawling barroom brawl from an old Western, it went on for more than ten minutes and eventually involved fifteen to twenty people. Among them were three key players, defensive linemen Matthew Rice and Ed Johnson and quarterback/wide receiver Michael Robinson.

  Robinson, the central ingredient in Paterno’s football plans for the upcoming season, had been knocked into the rink’s glass trophy case during the fight. The junior was cut so badly behind his left ear that he needed twenty-four stitches to close the wound. No charges were ever filed, but Paterno suspended Johnson and Rice for summer practice. Robinson, whose role in the melee the coach deemed “not as aggressive,” was put on probation.

  “They were wrong. They were in a fight,” Paterno told reporters. “We’ve taken care of it.”

  That sentiment was for public consumption. Privately, Paterno fumed. He quickly summoned his team to a meeting. He told them he wouldn’t put up with that kind of thing this season. They were going to discover a lot of changes when they returned to the field the following month. Either they’d work harder and behave better or they wouldn’t be running out of the Beaver Stadium tunnel with him next September 4 for the season-opening game with Akron.

  “He told us, ‘That’s it,’ ” said senior quarterback Zack Mills. “ ‘Next incident, you’re gone.’ He was tired of it happening every other week. He’s serious. . . . The margin for error is gone.”

  All rules would be strictly enforced. No long hair, cornrows, beards, or mustaches. Players struggling in class or late for meetings would jeopardize their playing time.

  The athletes, many of whom had been so dismayed by the 3–9 season that they were considering transfers, welcomed the new spark they saw in their old coach.

  “We needed Joe to put us in our place,” said tight end Isaac Smolko.

  So even though, at this first spring workout, the players’ outfits were relatively casual—navy-blue shorts, white T-shirts, spikes, and helmets—the atmosphere was surprisingly intense for March.

  “He wants to coach like he coached in the past, when people were scared of him,” said Levi Brown, an offensive tackle. “I don’t think people have been scared of him lately.”

  Players had been accustomed to Paterno’s whiny complaints and his obsession with details. Many of them, though, had begun to tune him out. While they respected his accomplishments, and were in awe of his reputation, they couldn’t help but occasionally see him as a grandfatherly figure, a hopelessly outdated old man who sputtered furiously—comically sometimes to them—at their mistakes and constantly referenced long-gone players and coaches.

  Now, with his postbrawl crackdown and his vow of zero tolerance, their views began to change. Almost immediately, defensive linemen Johnson, Lavon Chisley, and Tamba Hali got rid of their cornrows.

  “[After] a three-and-nine season, a lot of people might say, ‘It’s over. We should leave. Some people should get out of here,’ ” explained Hali. “But if you have guys still here, trying to work . . . showing our dedication, that’s more togetherness right there. . . . If anything is going to help us get back on track, we want to do that.”

  Paterno’s message came through so loud and so clear that it even filtered down to some of the Pennsylvania high school players Penn State was recruiting.

  “Paterno is cracking down on everything now, he wants his program run his way,” Dan Lawlor, a fullback from Mechanicsburg who signed with the Nittany Lions, told a reporter. “He’s doing everything he can to help it recover.”

  A. Q. Shipley, a defensive tackle from Coraopolis who also wound up at Penn State, said that in his talks with Paterno, the coach had “come across real strict. You can just tell it’s his way or no way.”

  Paterno needed more than discipline. He needed a new Penn State paradigm.

  While college football was getting faster and flashier all the time, Paterno’s teams often appeared as out of fashion as their famously stark navy-and-white uniforms. Right or wrong, the perception was that the Nittany Lions were mired in the past. Was it any wonder so many hip-hop-generation recruits, even in Pennsylvania, were looking elsewhere?

  “The teams that play us know what we’re going to run,” star running back Larry Johnson had said after a 2000 loss to lightly regarded Toledo, a bitter postgame analysis that inflamed the “Joe Must Go” movement. “They can pull out the tapes from ‘92 or ‘93, and we run the same offense. Same plays, same offense. . . . Sometimes, I don’t even know the play and I can guess what’s coming. The system is too predictable. It’s been around too long.”

  If Paterno couldn’t produce evidence of positive change in 2004—on and off the field—the tumult surrounding his age and abilities would ratchet up considerably. That was why a near-palpable sense of urgency surrounded him.

  He had always been fanatical in his devotion to his job. “He goes and goes and goes until it’s time to go to bed,” his brother George once said. As he aged, that passion grew uncontrollably, like kudzu, until it choked out almost everything else.

  “There isn’t anything in my life anymore except for my family and football,” Paterno said. His wife of forty-two years offered a similar assessment, though adding “walking” to his short list of passions.

  A year ago, however, he had hinted that he was nearing a point when he might begin to relinquish some duties to assistants. While he remained remarkably involved in every detail of football and recruiting, Paterno, mentally at least, had seemed ready to relax his grip.

  But sometime during those long winter walks around town or on Sunset Park’s bicycle and jogging paths, Paterno convinced himself that what was required was more, not less, dedication. At his age, with his detractors howling, he didn’t have time for long-range solutions. So changes, drastic changes, had to be tried. And they had to be tried fast.

  Extracurricular demands had long been a burden and a drain on the time he could devote to the players and coaching. Now he began to think of ways to ease that load, perhaps by creating a new position in the athletic department for someone who could handle the requests, the phone calls, and the paperwork.

  “One of the problems that you get the longer you’re in it: The more friends and kids, and people who count on you,” Paterno had said earlier, “and your time away from coaching gets more and more sig
nificant. People have funerals, [former] players have kids who need a hand, the whole band of people you’re involved with stretches. Every year it stretches a little bit more. That’s when you start to get swamped. You keep thinking it won’t hurt here, it won’t hurt there. You wake up one morning and you have a crappy organization.”

  By the time spring practice began, there were whispers around State College about Paterno’s “Grand Experiment II.” This master plan allegedly was not at all like its famous predecessor, in which Paterno outlined his plans to marry academics and athletics. This experiment was all about restoring the luster to his program.

  “We had to get the whole program back into a little different mode,” Paterno said of his off-season contemplations. “You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to get this thing done so you can protect the coaches and make sure the university has the ability to continue the kind of tradition we’ve had. You have an obligation to make sure the kids you recruited have some success. All of that was in my mind when I decided I was going to give it a shot. And once I made that decision, I wasn’t going to go about it halfhearted. I was going to bust my butt.”

  Continued football difficulties could be devastating to Penn State. Too much losing could adversely affect more than the school’s athletic reputation. Alumni contributions, political support, and student applications all rode on the back of football success.

  So in the run-up to spring drills, he further limited his access—and that of his assistants and players—to fans and reporters. He stopped walking to his office each morning and evening to save time. His wife told interviewers that he was “preoccupied, distracted.”

  “There’s more getting up in the middle of the night and writing ideas down,” Sue Paterno said of her husband. “More going to work at one or two in the morning. If something goes through his mind, he can’t sleep.”

  Had outsiders been able to observe him they would have seen a man who, despite having a contract about to expire, was not ready to quit. Quit? Hell, he was so excited he could hardly sleep. He made mental lists of problems that needed addressing. And given his 2003 team’s rap sheet and woeful statistics, they were lengthy. Eleven Penn State players had been cited or arrested. On the field, the Lions’ lone victories had come at home, against three perennial weak sisters, Temple, Kent State, and Indiana. Those teams’ combined win–loss record was 8–28.