The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  In 1999, before the current struggles dawned, Penn State had beaten Akron, 70–24, in its opener. But the following season, another MAC team, Toledo, upset the Nittany Lions, 24–6, in their Beaver Stadium debut. While this Akron team appeared to be physically overmatched, no one anymore could safely predict a Penn State victory.

  Akron had gone 7–5 the previous season. They were small and shallow on both lines, but they did return senior quarterback Charlie Frye. Frye had thrown for 3,549 yards and 22 touchdowns last season, practically double the combined 2003 totals of Mills and Robinson. And since Brookhart had installed the West Coast offense, Frye figured to put the ball in the air even more this year.

  At 3:37 P.M., Robbie Gould kicked off. Akron couldn’t move the ball and quickly punted to Penn State, who had sent Robinson back in yet another role, punt returner. The Nittany Lions’ offense answered a lot of lingering questions merely by taking the field. Even though Tony Hunt had trouble with some preseason conditioning tests and had had difficulties in the classroom, he had beaten out Austin Scott for the starting tailback’s spot. Mills was the quarterback, and Robinson was lined up as a flanker.

  The two QBs connected immediately, Robinson picking up 2 yards to the 23 on a short first-down pass. Then, on second down, Hunt took a handoff and, after a spectacular full-body spin, scurried 77 yards for the season’s first touchdown.

  If the excited response of 98,866 fans—nearly 9,000 below capacity on this Labor Day Weekend—could have been translated, it would have spoken of a reawakened hope. Akron’s subsequent field goal did little to extinguish the enthusiasm, particularly because Penn State struck again quickly, with a 5-yard touchdown run by Mills for a 14–3 lead.

  As Paterno had hinted, Penn State frequently utilized Mills and Robinson simultaneously, alternating them at quarterback and, less often, flanker. And just before the end of the first quarter, they produced a moment that would have been unthinkable during most of Paterno’s career.

  On the first play after safety, Mike Guman recovered an Akron fumble at the Zips’ 18, Mills flanked right. On the snap, he deked his defender once and rumbled toward the right corner of the end zone. Just as he reached the back, a perfectly placed pass from Robinson settled into his arms.

  Few in the stadium—outside of the Paterno watchers in the press box—noticed that the touchdown play had been preceded by a heated sideline discussion between Paterno and new offensive coordinator Galen Hall. It appeared the head coach had won.

  Scott, who ripped off several long runs on the next drive, ran a yard for a second-quarter touchdown and soon afterward Terrance Phillips leaped in traffic and brought down a 17-yard TD pass from Mills that, after Gould’s missed extra point, left the score 34–3.

  That last drive was more evidence of Paterno’s revamped, freewheeling attack. It included a reverse, a deep throw, and a draw that Robinson ran out of the shotgun formation the coach had eschewed for decades. With under a minute left in the half, Mills would return the favor for Robinson, hitting the versatile junior on a 10-yard touchdown pass that made it 41–3.

  The outcome had long since been decided when Scott’s 5-yard run extended Penn State’s advantage to 48–3 in the third quarter. Akron finally scored against Penn State’s backups with under five minutes left in the game.

  In the final meaningless minutes, the mood in the stadium was boisterous and confident. Students began peppering Akrons’s indecipherable mascot, Zippy, with chants of “Zippy sucks! Zippy sucks!” Someone in the student section held up a sign that read, JOEPA FOR PREZ. For the fans, the easy victory was a sign that this might be a pleasant fall in Happy Valley. It certainly would temporarily quell the speculation about Paterno. But for the coach, who had been on the right side of many Beaver Stadium shellackings, the win proved little.

  Afterward, it was difficult to tell if he was just being his typically cautious self, or whether somewhere in that spectacular display he had sensed the trouble that lay ahead.

  “I can’t get excited about one win,” he told the press gathered afterward. “I don’t know whether we are good, bad, or average. We’ll see. We’ve got to get better. We’re certainly not good enough to handle some of the teams we’ve got on the schedule. The quality of our team isn’t good enough right now for us to figure that we’re good enough. So I think we’ve just got to keep practicing hard and working hard and see what happens.”

  The quarterbacks’ play had been efficient and, given that each had thrown and caught a TD pass, wildly entertaining. Mills, in fact, became the first player in the Paterno era to score touchdowns on a pass, a run, and a catch in the same game. He had completed nine of eleven passes for 108 yards and two touchdowns.

  Robinson completed three of four passes for 42 yards and a touchdown, caught three more passes for 35 yards and a touchdown, and ran the ball four times for 19 yards.

  “He and Zack Mills have got to carry this football team,” Paterno said again after the game. “I hope we can keep those two kids healthy. I mean, that’s the biggest concern I have. . . . Our potential to be a really good football team will depend on whether those two kids can stay healthy.”

  Hunt had rushed for 137 yards and a touchdown, averaging an astounding 17.1 yards a carry. His fellow sophomore tailback Scott picked up 116 yards on eleven rushes. It was the first game in eleven years since Ki-Jana Carter and Mike Archie had done it in 1993 that two Nittany Lions backs had run for 100 yards each.

  Most significantly from Paterno’s perspective, the receivers had been better than adequate. In addition to Robinson’s three catches, Gerald Smith caught four balls for 48 yards. Nine other Penn State receivers had one catch each.

  “I think they caught everything and they ran good, precise routes,” Paterno said. “I thought the timing of our passing game was good. At times, Akron rushed us with a couple tough stunts to handle. I think they did better and hopefully will continue to get better.”

  Defensively, Tom Bradley’s unit, with Guman and Wake the only senior starters, had been aggressively dominant and much more consistent than at any time in the 2003 season. They had allowed Frye the short stuff—he completed twenty-nine of thirty-six throws—but for only 223 yards and no touchdowns. They also sacked him twice and junior cornerback Anwar Phillips had intercepted two of his passes.

  Three junior defensive linemen, Tamba Hali, Ed Johnson, and Scott Paxson, looked bigger, stronger, and smarter. It was apparent that, as Paterno had mandated, each had spent considerably more time with John Thomas, the strength and conditioning coach.

  “All of those kids played last year and all of them have more years ahead of them. I think they will get better as they go along. They are stronger. Kids come into college and there are a lot of ways to get them stronger,” Paterno said without mentioning steroids. “We have avoided some ways that some other places have done and it takes us a little longer maybe to get them where they want to be. . . . I think our down guys are pretty good. They have a lot of potential ahead of them.”

  As for the new staff, everything worked so well in the blowout that there had been few occasions for disagreements, the most notable exception coming when Hall and Paterno had jawed at each other prior to Mills’s TD catch. His son Jay had been up in the coach’s box while Hall stayed on the sideline.

  More jarring for Paterno than any coaching malfunction may have been the absence of Fran Ganter, his assistant for the previous thirty seasons. Ganter watched the game from Penn State’s radio booth, no doubt amused that the offense had been souped up in ways that Paterno would not have allowed him to try.

  “A couple of times I looked around [and thought], where was he?” Paterno said of Ganter. “I am delighted with the way that Galen Hall and the staff handled the game. I thought they did an awfully good job. A lot of the things that we did, Fran probably would have fought me to try to get them done a couple of years ago. I miss Fran.”

  But perhaps the most significant aspect of the rout took place in the fourt
h quarter when Paterno inserted freshman Anthony Morelli at quarterback. With Mills, Robinson, and senior third-stringer Chris Ganter, the ex-coach’s son, ahead of him, it had been widely assumed that Morelli would redshirt his freshman season. That’s what Paterno had almost always done in the past.

  Sportswriters peppered the coach with questions about his decision to play Morelli at the tail end of a lopsided game. Their puzzlement was understandable. Their access to the coach having been extremely limited during the long off-season, they had not yet recognized this transformed Paterno.

  The Joe Paterno of 1982 might never have wasted a year of eligibility so cavalierly. The Joe Paterno of 2004 didn’t hesitate.

  “Morelli is a very good prospect, and playing Zack and Robinson the way we’re playing them I think we had to have someone [ready in reserve],” Paterno explained. “I like Chris Ganter. But I think Morelli has a little something special. A little stronger arm than Chris and I think he just needs to play so that if we got in some kind of jam he’d be ready. If our wideouts continue to come along and get better, then probably the move to play Morelli may not have been the smart thing. Right now Robinson and Mills have to be on the field. If something happened to Zack, I’m not sure what route I’d go. . . . We think we have some things we can do with two quarterbacks in there, one being Robinson, of course. And I’m not sure we want to give up on some of that stuff if something happened to Zack.”

  Overall, Paterno was pleased. He had been tough with this team. But he also had tried to pump them up, to lift them out of the doldrums into which his program had descended. Last season they frequently had been as lethargic as the Beaver Stadium crowds that watched them. Today, both displayed a passion that pleased him.

  At just after 7:30 P.M., after several hours spent pacing beneath a late-summer sun, after dealing with all the red-hot pressures that surrounded him and his program, after answering dozens of questions from still-skeptical reporters, Paterno looked fresh. His blue oxford shirt remained crisp and perspiration free. He was, Reading Eagle reporter Rich Scarcella remarked that evening, remarkably vigorous looking for a man of his age, especially one who had just spent an afternoon in the furnace of big-time college football.

  It would soon serve as a striking contrast to the beaten-down, slumped Paterno who would emerge on future Saturdays.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE EPISODE that transformed Joe Paterno into the most widely respected college football coach of the second half of the twentieth century began with a sideline meeting and six words that, for him, shimmered like the armor of an avenging knight:

  “A summer house on Cape Cod.”

  Even as Paterno led his 10–1 Penn State team onto the Tulane Stadium field before the start of the Sugar Bowl on the final day of 1972, he couldn’t get those six words out of his mind.

  It had been like that ever since Billy Sullivan, the smooth-talking owner of the New England Patriots, had approached him six weeks earlier.

  On that day, November 18, 1972, Penn State had just won its ninth consecutive game, 45–26, at Boston College. In the chilled twilight at Chestnut Hill’s Alumni Stadium, Sullivan asked Paterno if he’d have any interest in coaching his NFL team the following season.

  With the victory at BC, Paterno’s teams had won 49 of 54 games since the start of the 1968 season. That kind of success naturally attracted attention from the NFL. The Philadelphia Eagles, New York Jets, and Pittsburgh Steelers had all approached him at various times. The Steelers had made the most ardent attempt in 1969. Paterno eventually turned Pittsburgh down, in part because his wife, a small-town Pennsylvanian, had been reluctant to move, especially to become an NFL coach’s wife. Sue Paterno had been to one NFL game in her life—in Pittsburgh, as it turned out—and what stayed in her memory were the loudmouths and the rowdy drunks.

  Sullivan was a public-relations man and had long wanted to put a professional football team in his hometown, which had been without one since the Redskins abandoned Boston for Washington in 1936. The NFL, then a struggling league and wary of overexpansion, had continually rebuffed him. So in 1959, he put up $25,000 and become a charter member of the American Football League.

  Thirteen years later, with the AFL and NFL having recently merged, and his team’s surname now “New England,” his Patriots still had not won a title. Following a 6–8 season in 1971, Patriots GM Upton Bell had wanted to fire coach John Mazur and replace him with Paterno. Sullivan wasn’t yet ready to pull the trigger on Mazur. But a year later, in the midst of an even worse 3–11 season, the owner had no other choice. Mazur was fired and Phil Bengston, his top assistant, finished the ‘72 season as interim head coach. By that time Bell would be gone, too, but not before finally selling Sullivan on Paterno’s merits.

  A week after the owner and the Penn State coach talked briefly at Boston College, on the night before the Nittany Lions would defeat Pitt in their final regular-season game, Paterno was at home, in his bedroom slippers, when the phone rang.

  “Joe,” said Sullivan, “what if you not only coach my team but own a piece of it as well?”

  Immediately, in the forty-six-year-old coach’s head, the thought bobbed to the surface like some long-submerged dream.

  A summer house on Cape Cod.

  The prospect of owning a vacation home somewhere along that sixty-five-mile-long, hook-shaped sliver of sand where New England Brahmins had summered forever held a powerful allure. Paterno had been scarred by Yankee snobbery as an undergraduate at Brown. All those smooth, spoiled, rich sons of New England wealth and tradition had looked down their patrician noses at him, with his Italian name, his dark features, his working-class background, and Brooklyn accent.

  “There’s no question,” he recalled. “As a swarthy kid from Brooklyn, I was different. They just assumed I wasn’t as smart as them.”

  A half century later, Paterno could still recall a Brown fraternity party he had gone to as a freshman. He had walked into the frat house that night not really knowing what to expect. He had seen plenty of movies about college life, and while their plots were hopelessly juvenile, the films portrayed a certain atmosphere that he found appealing: thick books being cradled in thick arms; letter sweaters; a pipe-in-teeth intellectual confidence; casual sophistication. So he showed up for cocktails in a new white sweater, one that his mother had given him. Not that he had much of a wardrobe from which to choose. Paterno had just gotten out of the army. He had little money. His tuition was being paid for by a Brooklyn-born Brown alumnus who published comic books. “I still see and feel that room, those people,” he said.

  “I walked into a calm sea of blue blazers, sharkskin suits, and Harris Tweeds,” he later wrote. “I knew I had blown something when all those cool-eyed faces turned toward me and my sweater, slowly, so as not to tip and spill their stemmed glasses that seemed to hold nothing but clear water, except for an olive in each. I heard somebody whisper, ‘How did that dago get invited?’ My clothes scratched at my skin and a chill surged down my insides.”

  Paterno would go on to become the star quarterback at Brown. At Penn State, he would be praised by The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, and even by President Nixon for his coaching abilities. And all the time he remembered his old classmates, most of whom were by then entrenched in old Boston law firms or Wall Street investment banks.

  That’s why Sullivan had tempted him so. It wasn’t just the salary he knew he could demand. Or the piece of the team he’d been promised. It was all that being wealthy in New England implied. Paterno had grown up living in rented homes. Now he could own not just a home, but the Cape Cod retreat that “every rich Yankee kid I’d met at Brown assumed was coming to him, the same as inheriting his dad’s club membership.”

  Not long afterward, Paterno and Sullivan met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, halfway between their respective homes. The numbers Sullivan mentioned floored the coach, who had started at Penn State twenty-two years earlier as a $3,600-a-year assistant and was now earning
$30,000 a season. Now he was offered a four-year deal, with a starting salary of $200,000 that would increase $25,000 in each year, up to $275,000 in the fourth. He’d get a $200,000 home, two cars, and, eventually, a three- to five-percent share of the franchise. The package’s total worth, excluding the ownership portion, was a staggering $1.4 million.

  In addition, Paterno was enamored of the cultural life that Boston offered and believed the city would be a stimulating place to raise a family. He told Sullivan he’d talk it over with his wife and that he’d give him a decision soon after his fifth-ranked Nittany Lions faced No. 2 Oklahoma in the December 31 Sugar Bowl.

  “But I really wanted it,” he would say later.

  The coach kept mum about the proposal as he readied his team for the scary Sooners, a 13 1/2-point favorite. But someone on the Patriots’ board of directors objected to the size of the salary offer Sullivan had made and leaked the story to the press. By the time Penn State arrived in New Orleans on the day after Christmas, there were whispers. The Boston Globe even sent a young reporter, Bob Ryan, just to trail Paterno.

  That week Penn State alumni stayed near the French Quarter in the Royal Sonesta Hotel, where the coach and Sullivan would hold one of their private meetings. Nittany Lions fans who had spotted the two men began buzzing about Paterno’s talk with the white-haired stranger. The rumors reached back to State College. Robert Patterson, the university’s vice president for finance and operations, was dispatched to New Orleans. His mission was to keep Paterno at Penn State by getting him to agree to a long-term contract.