The Lion in Autumn Read online

  He wished all those worried fans could see how well things were going, how excited he was on the eve of another season, how even the weather had been cooperating with his grand plan.

  “I think overall we had a good preseason,” Paterno said on August 27. “I’m a little disappointed in a couple of kids, but I think overall we did about as well as we can expect. The weather has been good. We’ve had fairly hot weather, but not that oppressive humidity or hot weather where you can’t get a lot of work done because kids just run out of steam. . . . We were able to get outside more often than we have in other years because when it rained, it rained at night and we didn’t get a lot of rain during the day.”

  For Paterno at least, the sun was shining again in Happy Valley. Even if all those critics and sportswriters were too blind to see it.

  Among all the extraneous happenings in the world he had missed that summer were Sports Illustrated’s preseason rankings. The magazine, whose worshipful writers over the years had been greatly responsible for Paterno’s deification, had Penn State an almost unthinkable No. 50. That sobering news might have concerned the naysayers. But not Paterno. He was feeling fresh again. The kids were buying into the changes. The new staff was working out well. The Nittany Lions would surprise some people this season. And then watch out in 2005.

  All that talk he had heard about fans threatening to give up their season tickets unless Paterno was replaced was nonsense. Someday soon they were going to be the hottest tickets in college football again.

  Didn’t they realize it was Penn State football, not Paterno, that was going places?

  CHAPTER 4

  WHAT YOU NOTICE FIRST about Joe Paterno is how out of place he appears in central Pennsylvania. After more than a half century in the picket-fence borough of State College, he still resembles a New Yorker who can’t find his way home.

  Penn State’s head coach is the area’s single most significant and revered resident. Centre County citizens adore him and are proud that he has settled and succeeded in their midst. Yet in many ways Paterno has never been fully assimilated into their community. In attitude, demeanor, and spirit, he remains an outsider. The thick New York accent, with its constant contractions, its dropped g’s, and whiny assuredness, is far too clipped and urban for him ever to be mistaken as a native. A Washington Post profile a quarter century earlier decribed his voice as “full of hero sandwiches and screeching El trains.”

  Paterno’s taste in clothes—blazers, oxford shirts, understated plaids, ties on the sideline—also identify him as an interloper in a section of Pennsylvania where many consider hunting jackets fashion statements.

  His slightly hunched, corner-boy swagger further betrays his city roots. So do his interests: Literature, the opera, and Italian food are not attractions indigenous to the region. Occasionally, he’ll take note of the green, rolling hills that surround State College and remark, as if observing the landscape for a first time, “Geez, isn’t it beautiful up here?” But the long walks he likes are opportunities for contemplation, not nature loving.

  To the friendly, accommodating, slow-moving Pennsylvania German natives, the coach’s impatient, direct, argumentative nature—“excessively focused and serious” is how his late brother once described it—often seems grating, excessive, foreign.

  Paterno, as generations of players will tell you, is extremely verbal. Watch him on the sideline. As he roams nervously throughout games, his mouth rarely stops. He talks with and yells at whomever he happens to be near—assistant coaches, players, officials. Away from the field, he flatters and jokes with waitresses, fans, cops, neighbors, and parents. And he’s accumulated a sizable collection of stories that he’ll retell at the slightest provocation.

  One of the few times when anyone can recall the coach being silent for an extended period also marked the moment when he might have come closest to abandoning his profession.

  On a September 23, 1967, bus ride back from Annapolis, Maryland, Paterno arrived at a psychological crossroads. After just eleven games as the Nittany Lions’ head coach, all the plans and dreams he had formulated in sixteen seasons as Rip Engle’s assistant were evaporating in a haze of mediocrity. His best coaching attributes—competitiveness, a fierce drive, a need to excel—had turned inward and were devouring him.

  Normally, during long postgame journeys, he would rehash the game with the other coaches. That day, his hair disheveled, his mood sour, Paterno stared aimlessly out a window near the front of the bus for most of the 150-mile trip. What provoked the gloomy silence was the team’s 23–22 loss to Navy earlier that Saturday. Paterno had been embarrassed. “The shabbiest game I’d ever been a part of,” he later called it.

  With fifty-seven seconds left in the Nittany Lions’ season opener at Navy–Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, Midshipman Rob Taylor had caught a 16-yard touchdown pass. Taylor’s catch was his school-record tenth of the game. Penn State’s defense had surrendered 489 yards to smaller, less-talented opponents.

  Paterno’s record as head coach was 5–6. Maybe he had made a mistake. Maybe he should have listened to his parents and gone to law school. Maybe he didn’t belong at Penn State.

  “I was having my doubts,” said Paterno of that trip. “We were terrible.”

  Back in Pennsylvania, there had been some grumbling. Fans moaned about Paterno, questioned his credentials. He had never been a head coach before and it showed. He had come in with a bunch of big ideas and lots of talk. But where were the results? Look at what happened when the Nittany Lions played the big boys in 1966. They had lost to Michigan State, 42–8; to UCLA, 49–11; and to Georgia Tech, 21–0. Now 1967 had begun with a loss to Navy. Maybe he wasn’t the right man for the job. Maybe he was meant to be an assistant.

  His players weren’t thrilled either. Dennis Onkotz, one of a talented group of sophomores Paterno had recruited before his first year, wondered why he and the rest of the outstandng defenders from the previous season’s freshmen team stayed on the bench while Navy rolled up close to 500 yards. Cocaptain Bill Lenkaitis said those early players “weren’t real crazy” about Paterno’s perfectionist demands. “If he didn’t like the way we were practicing,” said Lenkaitis, “he’d make us start practice over.”

  The practices that followed the loss at Navy were painful—particularly for some of the upperclassmen. Paterno, it turned out, was thinking like Onkotz. In the silence of that bus ride from Annapolis, he had rejected the thought of quitting and instead formulated a strategy. He was going to put aside his penchant for playing upperclassmen and turn to his younger, more talented players.

  “We had some really good young players. We had some sophomores—in those days, freshmen were not eligible—that were good players,” he recalled later. “And I said to myself, ‘You’d better find out [about them], Paterno.’ ”

  So he gave youngsters like Onkotz, linebacker Jim Kates, defensive tackle Steve Smear, and defensive back Neal Smith more repetitions that week, much to the annoyance of the junior and senior starters. His reasoning that week was as much practical as philosophical. He knew he’d need more depth Friday night in Miami, where the forecast for the game against a University of Miami team, ranked No. 1 in the preseason by Playboy, called for hot and muggy conditions.

  “Because I was worried about the heat . . . we went to Pittsburgh and stayed at a hotel,” he said. “We worked out at the Moon Township High School, got on the plane . . . went to the hotel in Miami the day of the game. We stayed in the hotel, got on an air-conditioned bus, went out on the field, and nobody knew how hot it was.”

  As the game in the steamy Orange Bowl wore on, Paterno began inserting more and more sophomores. Midway through the second quarter, there were six of them on the Nittany Lions’ defense. And they played spectacularly, limiting Miami to just 69 yards rushing in a 17–8 triumph. It was a reprieve for Paterno and a major turning point for his program.

  “If we lost that game, I probably would have told some people here that they needed t
o start looking around for a new coach,” he said. “I was thinking about law school.”

  Despite the victory, more difficulties with his team followed the Miami game. That night two Penn State players were having a beer in the airport bar—a violation of the coach’s guidelines—when Paterno spotted them. He booted one off the team and suspended the other. Later, Lenkaitis and quarterback Tom Sherman met with the coach and suggested he might have overreacted to their teammates’ indiscretion. They warned of a brewing players’ revolt unless he relented.

  Paterno stood his ground. Eventually, the players’ hard feelings eased as victories helped them gain a new respect for their coach. After a blocked punt cost Penn State a 17–15 loss to UCLA a week later, the Nittany Lions would go unbeaten the remainder of the season.

  “There comes a time when you know that things have got to change,” Paterno would say of the Miami game and its aftermath, “that something has got to be done differently. And you’ve got to have the guts to do it or you’re just another guy.”

  The seven straight victories to conclude the 1967 season earned 8–2 Penn State a Gator Bowl matchup with Florida State. Paterno was revved up for his first postseason game as head coach. During the five weeks between the final regular-season game and the December 30 contest in Jacksonville, he made major changes in his offense and defense and pushed his players relentlessly.

  Glenn Killinger, a former Penn State all-American and himself a college coach, attended a Paterno practice that week.

  “I was real proud of myself and asked Killy what he thought,” said Paterno. “He said, ‘Joe, you’re working them too hard.’ He had watched fifteen minutes and he could see that. And he was right.”

  Penn State led 17–0 at the half but tired badly after intermission. But it was a controversial coaching decision, as much as his players’ weariness, that sparked the Seminoles’ comeback.

  Spurning a field goal, Paterno had his team go for it on a fourth- and-1 at his own 15-yard line early in the third quarter. The Lions’ failure to make that first down revived the Seminoles. They scored two touchdowns before the quarter ended and tied the game on a 26-yard field goal with fifteen seconds left.

  Curiously, given the label he would later acquire as being too conservative, Paterno tried to portray his unusual fourth-down decision as a harbinger of the bold moves that Nittany Lions fans could expect in the future. “That may be the best thing I ever did for Penn State football,” he said.

  It was difficult to disagree. Penn State would win its next twenty-three games, a remarkable streak that firmly planted the program in the national consciousness.

  Confidence and heart, Paterno believed, were as important to success as talent. And whenever a team loses a game it ought to have won, it sheds some of the bravado winners require. Suddenly, an unseen vulnerability works its way through a losing locker room like a virus. The only known cure is victory.

  That’s why 1967’s season-ending success was so important to the futures of both Paterno and Penn State football. The winning streak, the bowl invitation, the No. 10 ranking in the final polls, had instilled and hardened in them a confidence they’d been lacking. Once he felt it, and once he got his team to feel it, Paterno knew this gifted Penn State football team was headed for glory.

  “Football basically is a morale game,” he told fellow coaches in a speech in 2002. “You play with your heart. You play with your mind. If you’ve got morale, then you’ve got a chance to win. If you’ve got the right kind of people, then you’ve got a chance to win. . . . At least, if you’ve got morale, then you have a chance to play as well as you can.”

  Joined in 1968 by legendary linebacker Jack Ham and tackle Mike Reid, who was recovered from a knee injury that had sidelined him in ‘67, Penn State’s defense would become overpowering, yielding just 106 points in ten regular-season games. And its offense, led by tailbacks Charlie Pittman and Bob Campbell, tight end Ted Kwalick, and quarterback Chuck Burkhart, would average 34 points a game. These ‘68 Nittany Lions would be Paterno’s first great team, their perfect season—the first of five he would experience. They would win ten straight regular-season games and beat Kansas, 15–14, in a wildly exciting Orange Bowl. It was Penn State’s first season without a tie or loss since 1912.

  It also marked the beginning of something else: the legend of Linebacker U.

  Ham, a quiet sophomore from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, joined juniors Onkotz and Kates in what would be a spectacular unit. Ham had been an unremarkable lineman at Bishop McCort High School until, before his senior year, the six-foot 165-pounder was shifted to linebacker. He played well that year but was still too small to attract much major-college attention. Virginia Military Institute indicated it might be interested if Ham went for a year’s toughening-up at Massanutten Military Academy, a Virginia prep school.

  “It was a good experience, football-wise,” said Ham of his year in Virginia. “But I realized pretty quickly the military life wasn’t for me and ruled out going to VMI.”

  Smear had been his high school teammate and he recommended Ham to Penn State’s coaches and the university to Ham. Paterno and assistant George Welsh were impressed by a film from one of Massanutten’s games—they liked Ham’s quickness, his toughness, and particularly his football instincts. Fortunately, because one high school senior had changed his mind at the last minute about coming to State College, there was a scholarship still available.

  “Even then, though, none of us had any idea what a tremendous player we were getting,” Paterno would say.

  It didn’t take them long to find out. When Ham showed up at spring practice after the 1967 season, Paterno immediately started him at outside linebacker in his 4–4–3 defense.

  There had been other great Nittany Lions linebackers before Ham, Kates, and Onkotz—in particular, W. T. “Mother” Dunn, a turn-of-the-century star with an unfortunate nickname; Bob Mitinger, an all-American from the Engle era; and Dave Robinson, who played mostly end at Penn State before becoming an all-NFL linebacker with Vince Lombardi’s Packers. But Ham and Onkotz were at the head of what would become a virtually nonstop assembly line of superb Penn State linebackers turned out by Paterno and Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky, a former Penn State player, would be hired as a defensive assistant in 1969 and remain on Paterno’s staff until his retirement in 1999.

  Among those who went on to play in the NFL were Kurt Allerman, LaVar Arrington, Ralph Baker, Bruce Bannon, Greg Buttle, Andre Collins, Shane Conlan, Ron Crosby, John Ebersole, Keith Goganious, Jim Laslavic, Lance Mehl, Matt Millen, Rich Milot, Ed O’Neil, Scott Radecic, Brandon Short, and John Skorupan.

  Sandusky, who became the defensive coordinator in 1977, eventually wrote a book on the subject, Developing Linebackers: The Penn State Way.

  The linebackers, Sandusky said, “had to be outstanding athletes in the defensive scheme we played.”

  But football judgment was equally as important. Penn State wanted those who played the position to process instantly what they saw developing in front of them. Opposing coaches liked to say that while any good linebacker would read a play, then react, Penn State’s would read and react instantaneously.

  “Coach Radakovich [Dan Radakovich, who was in charge of the linebackers until departing after the 1969 season] and the other coaches had a saying back then,” said Onkotz. “They said, ‘If you’re going to make a mistake, make it at full speed.’ Basically, in the four-four we played, it was the job of the defensive linemen to keep people off us. We had people like Reid and Smear who did that very well, so we just had to run around and hit people.”

  Uncovering outstanding linebackers was, as Sandusky noted, merely a matter of identifying strong, quick, and mentally agile players. And neither he nor Paterno hesitated in moving gifted players to the position. Former quarterbacks, in particular, made good linebackers. Both Onkotz and O’Neil played the position in high school. (Both also would return punts at Penn State.) Arrington had been a high school running back, Buttle a ti
ght end. And Charlie Zapiec was a star offensive lineman for the Nittany Lions before Paterno switched him to linebacker, where he became an all-American.

  Paterno would achieve a measure of historical infamy, though, while recruiting Jim Kelly, the future NFL Hall of Fame QB, by suggesting the western-Pennsylvania schoolboy should be a linebacker. Kelly, headstrong even then, decided to go to Miami instead.

  “I’d probably be a bartender in East Brady, Pennsylvania,” Kelly said while recalling the incident before his Hall induction in 2002. “I would have been a good linebacker, but not a Hall of Fame candidate. I wasn’t fast enough.”

  Paterno would explain that the criticism he’s taken ever since for making that suggestion might be unfair. It came, he said, during a year when Penn State also was recruiting Dan Marino, Todd Blackledge, and Jeff Hostetler, all of whom, along with Kelly, would be part of the greatest quarterback draft in NFL history in 1984.

  “I had an assistant named J. T. White who was recruiting Kelly,” Paterno recalled. “He knew we were close with Blackledge and Hostetler and he asked me what he ought to tell Kelly if we signed both those other quarterbacks. I said to tell him if he came here and couldn’t beat out those guys, he could play linebacker.”

  Penn State’s arrival as a national power occurred midway through the 1968 season when it avenged the previous year’s loss to UCLA with a 21–6 victory. Like so many other games that season, this one turned on the play of the linebackers. Ham blocked a punt and Kates returned it 36 yards for the game’s first touchdown.

  That nationally televised win ignited something in Penn State and its fans. Students back in State College poured into the streets that night in a spontaneous celebration. And the next two weeks, for victories over Boston College and Army, near-record crowds packed every corner of Beaver Stadium.