The Lion in Autumn Page 7

  “I think there’s got to be some kind of effort to make young people understand that some of the problems we have are alcohol related,” Paterno said. “It’s one thing to have a beer with your father . . . my father would bring out a bottle of wine. It’s another thing when these kids are going berserk.”

  Because Pennsylvania restricts the sale of liquor and wine to state-run stores, there are only three places to buy it in State College. That was not a deterrent. Since 1997, according to Graham Spanier, Penn State’s president and a longtime advocate for altering the collegiate binge-drinking mentality, sales at those three stores has increased by more than $5 million.

  Late on a Friday or Saturday night, on bar-pocked College or Beaver avenues, or along any of the cross streets filled with fraternity houses and subdivided homes, sleepy State College resembles Pottersville, the Sodomesque alternate version of Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life. Students, drinks in hand, pack the porches of apartment houses. Others line up outside popular bars like the Rathskeller, Mad Mex, or the Lion’s Den. The raucous din from within those establishments leaks out onto the sidewalks. There it melds into the menacing yowls of wandering packs of inebriated students careening loudly through the streets. Some scream “WE ARE . . .”—a cry that other packs immediately answer with “ . . . PENN STATE!” Often the verbal jousting has a harder edge. On homecoming weekend, ten days before the 2004 presidential election, tipsy Bush supporters’ nightlong chants of “Four More Years!” were met by their equally inebriated political rivals’ “Ten More Days!” On the November night before the unbeaten Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles met, the opposing cries were “E-A-G-L-E-S! EAGLES!” and “Phil-ly Sucks! Phil-ly Sucks!”.

  It is a recipe for trouble. Alcohol-related arrests marred countless football weekends. In 1998, during the town’s summer Arts Fest, thousands of students and other young people poured out of the bars and gathered on Beaver Avenue. Soon, the unruly crowd had blocked traffic. Some residents of the high-rise apartments along the street began throwing cups and cans at the revelers, who returned fire. Soon, three dozen streetlights had been ripped down, store windows had been smashed, and cars damaged. Two police officers were injured in the melee.

  “We all have a pretty good understanding of what the problem is,” said Spanier. “The solutions continue to elude us, at least at a level that would make a marked change in student behavior. We feel there is modest progress and we’ve had some successes, but all of the stars are not yet properly aligned. And it’s an interesting social question as to whether they ever can be, given the culture in our society and in university communities generally.”

  That culture had threatened to swallow Paterno’s team and reputation in 2003.

  The volume of player turmoil—everything from a purported bicycle theft to sexual assaults—was unprecedented at Penn State. As a result, Paterno found himself on the defensive most of the year, distracting him from his coaching duties and delighting those who saw him as unbearably self-righteous.

  The trouble actually began toward the end of 2002. That November 12, in the midst of the week between Penn State victories over Virginia and Indiana, a female student charged that Anwar Phillips, a redshirt freshman cornerback, had sexually assaulted her at an on-campus apartment.

  One month later, following a private Judicial Affairs hearing, the university suspended Phillips, who had played in every game that season, for two semesters. But the next semester was not scheduled to begin until mid-January, and three weeks later, on New Year’s Day, Phillips played in Penn State’s 13–9 Capital One Bowl loss to Auburn.

  When the arrest and suspension became public in March, Paterno and the entire athletic department came under heavy fire. While university officials contended the athletic department had been notified of Phillips’s punishment before the bowl game, no one has ever been certain if Paterno also knew.

  “Based on the information we had at that time, we felt it was approriate that he could participate in the game,” said athletic director Curley.

  The criticism and questions mounted until, on April 10, Spanier released a statement indicating students facing suspension would no longer be allowed to participate in university activities. The president insisted a miscommunication was to blame for the Phillips incident and noted the policy had subsequently been altered to make sure athletic directors learned immediately of any action against a Penn State athlete.

  For his part, Paterno refused to answer questions about Phillips. “What happened, happened,” Paterno said. “I have very little control over it.” When questions persisted at a subsequent news conference, he lost his temper. “That’s nobody’s business but mine,” he said. “It’s not the fans’ business, and it’s not yours.”

  Phillips eventually was acquitted of the charge and rejoined the team early in the 2003 season. But the questions for the coach continued. After the acquittal, he urged the media to apologize to the player for publicizing the incident, a suggestion that a Centre Daily Times editorial met with a resounding rejection.

  What also may have contributed to Paterno’s unusual behavior during the Phillips case was the criticism he had attracted four years earlier after jumping to another troubled player’s defense.

  In 1998, quarterback Rashard Casey and a friend were accused in an assault on an off-duty police officer in Hoboken, New Jersey. He, too, would later be acquitted. “I get crucified for [defending] Ahmad Collins,” Paterno said in ‘03, confusing Casey with Andre Collins, a Penn State star from that same era. “He sued the city of Hoboken and got a big award, and none of you guys ever published that.”

  Regardless, the handling of the matter, and what was seen as the use of a loophole to permit Phillips to play, struck many as an indication that Paterno and Penn State were no longer the bastion of ethics they claimed to be. When a bowl game was at stake, even they were willing to abandon the moral high ground. All the trouble involving players that followed the next season only helped reinforce that perception. What did the critics want Paterno to do? He insisted he tried to detach himself from the punishments.

  “I have nothing to do with what the university does,” Paterno said, claiming he would not intervene on behalf of any player. “I get notes. I’ve never wanted to be in a position where people thought as a football coach I had something to do with what decisions were made. [From] the university president right down through the RA [resident assistant]—they’ve never had a telephone call from me. I don’t believe in it.”

  In the summer of 2003, E. Z. Smith, the gregarious son of a North Carolina high school coach, was cited twice in one week for underage drinking. Paterno suspended him from the team for a year. McHugh was removed, too, after being cited for public drunkenness and harassment for allegedly hitting a woman. Kapinos was cited for underage drinking and disorderly conduct. And after the season, just weeks before the Blue-White Game, Robinson, Rice, and Johnson had been involved in the ice-rink brawl.

  Given the team’s shortcomings at wideout, the 2003 incident that may have had the most negative impact on Penn State football occurred when Humphrey, the team’s second-leading receiver in 2003, was expelled for assaulting two female students. A player with game-breaking potential, he was convicted but avoided a jail sentence by serving time in an alcohol-rehab center.

  “Losing Maurice Humphrey was a disaster for us,” Paterno said in 2004, when his offense again proved remarkably inept. “I don’t think people realize that.”

  Times had changed. Increasingly, it was clear that even the fortress of secrecy that was Penn State football had glass walls. The good-natured mischief of 1966 was now front-page notoriety.

  “Yeah, we have more distractions, but that doesn’t mean I have more misbehaved kids,” Paterno said. “I can go back to a couple guys in the seventies who drove me nuts. The cops would call me, and I used to put them in bed in my house and run their rear ends off the next day. Nobody knew about it. That’s the way we handled it.” />
  In 2002, State College police arrested 2,357 people for alcohol-related incidents, 559 for drunken driving. Among those, as their coach pointed out, only the football players were likely to turn up on the evening newscasts.

  Early on the morning of October 16, 2003, during Penn State’s bye week, campus police spotted Tony Johnson, a senior wide receiver who is the son of Penn State assistant Larry Johnson, driving erratically. A university police officer said the car twice swerved across a center line. Tests revealed Johnson’s blood-alcohol level to be 0.136, far above Pennsylvania’s legal limit of 0.08.

  Four days after Johnson’s arrest, during his weekly news conference, Paterno appeared to excuse the behavior.

  “It will get all blown out of proportion,” he said, “because he is a football player. But he didn’t do anything to anybody.”

  Asked if he planned to suspend the player, he stuck his foot farther into his mouth. Paterno said he would do so “just because I have to send a message to the squad that it is inappropriate to be out in the middle of the week having a couple of drinks.”

  Officials from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving were outraged, believing Paterno was trying to downplay the dangers of drunk driving. The coach quickly made a rare public retreat.

  “Being a friend of the family, I probably rationalized a little bit about Tony’s decision, but not in the sense I felt he was not guilty of what he did,” Paterno explained. “I apologize to anybody out there who thinks that I in any way have any misconceptions about the dangers of DUI.”

  There was a part of him that felt guilty. He had recruited these youngsters to his team and then, because of other demands on his time and efforts, removed himself from their day-to-day lives. They weren’t bad kids. Some of them just needed a little more guidance, a little more discipline.

  “I have a handful of kids that are immature jerks who have been spoiled by their families,” Paterno said. “They’re not bad kids, and they’re going to be all right, but sometimes you’d like to have a baseball bat to wake them up.”

  Paterno would get a wake-up call of his own in the summer before the 2004 season when Kevin Baugh, a receiver and kick returner on his 1982 national championship team, was murdered. Baugh was stabbed to death on August 22 in a Massachusetts park during what police there described as an argument over drugs. It was revealed that Baugh, forty-two, had struggled with addictions for years. He had died penniless and, according to some accounts, a crack addict.

  The news, coming so soon after their season of public sinning, stunned Penn State’s football family. In his new role, Ganter took dozens of calls from Baugh’s former teammates asking if they could help, looking for answers.

  “He was so well liked,” said Ganter, “so well thought of.”

  Baugh had been drafted by the Houston Oilers but never played in the NFL. He bounced around from job to job until he came back to Penn State in 1993 to work on a master’s and perhaps take a position as a graduate assistant on the football staff.

  Baugh told Paterno he’d had problems with drugs in the past but had overcome them. Nothing was immediately available, but with Paterno’s blessing, he accepted a similar position in Utah. Things didn’t work out there, and according to newspaper accounts, his instability and drug dependence mounted. Not long before his murder, desperately seeking a change, he and his wife had planned to return to Pennsylvania and look a for a coaching job.

  When Paterno heard the news of Baugh’s death and thought of all the problems his most recent team had encountered, he immediately wondered if he should have responded differently when the ex-player had come looking for a job a decade ago.

  “I’ll be very frank with you,” Paterno said. “To this day, I think I could have done something else. Now I knew he was getting involved in some things he shouldn’t have been getting involved in. . . . He and Kenny Jackson and Maurice Williams all came up here together and were three of the best skill people we ever had. It’s very difficult for people to understand that these guys don’t have it all made because they get a scholarship and are playing on a football team. They can’t imagine all the problems in their lives. Kevin had a broken family. He was trying to take care of his sister. He was trying to take care of a lot of things that he didn’t have the resources for. I think the NCAA has to realize that there are some kids who, when they decide to go to college and play football, they’re forsaking some responsibilities.”

  On May 13, 2004, Penn State stunned its alumni, its students, and much of the nation when it announced in a bland news release that Paterno had signed a four-year contract extension.

  All those who had calculated that Paterno would walk away when his contract expired after the 2004 season scratched their heads. The aging coach already was struggling mightily. He would be eighty-two when the extension expired. What were they thinking?

  The reaction nationally was split between those who thought it ridiculous (“Penn State president Graham Spanier doesn’t appear too far removed from the cuckoo’s nest,” Stephen A. Smith wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer) and those who thought it a noble way to permit Paterno to walk away when he wanted (“Penn State did the right thing. . . . [It] showed a resolve few schools possess these days, in the face of widespread disapproval,” said Brad Rock of the Deseret Morning News).

  “At Penn State,” Spanier later explained, “winning isn’t everything. . . . People are so proud of the academic achievements of our athletes and the integrity that our coaches bring to the program, there’s more tolerance here for having a bad season than you would find in most any other school.”

  When he finally commented publicly on his extension, Paterno insisted it wasn’t a big deal.

  “It’s not like the roof is ready to cave in. . . . We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but I’m not like the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] these days, where I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  As the summer continued, the old Paterno style began to surface more frequently. At a July 24 leadership conference in Harrisburg, he showed off his revived swagger to 650 people.

  “I’m talking to you after a 3–9 season,” he said, “and I’m just as cocky as I was after coming off a 12–0 season.”

  During an appearance at an August booster-club dinner in Valley Forge, just outside of Philadelphia, hundreds of Penn State grads and supporters lined up for his autograph. Normally autographs were an irritant to Paterno, but this time the coach accommodated everyone.

  “He had a great summer,” said Curley. “We traveled the state, did a lot of speaking engagements. And he was fired up. Everyplace we went there were great crowds and [autograph] lines that were like an hour long. If anything, hard as it mught be to believe, he did even more than normal. He seemed more energized and enthused and positive than any other year I can remember.”

  In fact, his off-season efforts, aimed at renewing himself and his program, had been so focused that his famed tunnel vision had intensified. Paterno’s cultural myopia was a running joke among those closest to him. His family recalled the night when the coach returned from a black-tie dinner in the Clinton White House. They asked him who he had seen there.

  “I sat beside this guy, Nick Cage.”

  The famous actor? he was asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Paterno, “he just said his name was Nick Cage.”

  In late August, during the final preseason news conference, Paterno was asked for his opinion on the previous day’s NCAA ruling concerning Southern California wide receiver Mike Williams. Williams, who had sought to enter the NFL draft, had just been barred from returning to USC, which was being ranked as the nation’s No. 1 team in preseason polls. The story led ESPN’s Sports Center and was on page one of sports sections everywhere.

  “I have no idea whom you are talking about or what you are talking about,” Paterno replied. “So I can’t answer that. I don’t know.”

  There just wasn’t time for ESPN, MTV, and movie stars. He, and ev
erybody else in the program, had work to do. Throughout spring practice and preseason camp, he had been concerned only with devising ways to best use Robinson’s talents, with finding a reliable tailback and a couple of wide receivers, with improving the special teams that had performed so poorly in 2003.

  He had declared his assistants off-limits to the media until after the season. He didn’t even want his players interviewed. Heather Dinich, the Centre Daily Times Penn State beat writer, had asked to talk to twelve players over the summer and had been granted interviews with two. And while Paterno hadn’t told anyone yet, once the season started, he planned to stop attending the traditional Friday-night media cocktail sessions that long had been a popular staple of his regime.

  The refocused Paterno was on display in August when Jim Moore, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, escorted a team of Little League baseball players to Penn State. The Washington youngsters, who were competing in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, fifty-three miles away, had asked to see where Paterno and his team were practicing.

  “There he was,” Moore later wrote of their encounter, “wearing those same big glasses I’d always seen on TV. Then all of a sudden, the man I was excited to meet turned into a raving lunatic. ‘Get them out of here! Get them out of here!’ he screamed to [Penn State sports information director Jeff] Nelson. ‘Get them the hell out of here! Next time I’ll . . . ‘I didn’t catch the end of his threat because the photographer and I were hurriedly whisked away, so as not to further disturb a disturbed icon, even though we did nothing to disturb the icon in the first place.”

  According to Moore, Paterno later apologized and visited with the Little Leaguers. But the episode was another indication of the emotional investment the coach was making in the 2004 season.

  As he flew around that summer—to supporters-only dinners in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Hershey, to speaking engagements, and to football banquets in talent-rich areas of South Carolina and Virginia—Paterno heard the same questions: Mills or Robinson? Can Penn State get back on top? Are you thinking of retiring?