Every Friday night in football season, home or away, Paterno and the sportswriters who regularly covered his team—three or four in the early years, dozens now—assembled informally for drinks, snacks, and off-the-record conversation. The receptions had been a significant ritual for as long as Paterno had coached at Penn State. When Paterno first got the head-coaching job, he and Jim Tarman, the future Penn State AD who was then the sports-information director, had traveled around the East with a suitcase full of liquor, selling Penn State football. The format worked. The happily lubricated newsmen wrote glowingly of the bright young coach and his Grand Experiment.
Soon the traveling shows morphed into the Friday-night affairs. The first of those were held at Tarman’s State College home, where Paterno and several writers would drink and talk for hours. Eventually, they moved to Paterno’s house, then graduated to the Toftrees Hotel and Resort and later the Nittany Lion Inn. On the road, they always took place at the team hotel.
Nelson, a slight, bespectacled and extremely efficient forty-three-year-old who had been at the university for eleven years, was familiar with the road routine. Arriving at their destination on Friday night, the coach, his assistants, and players would collect their room keys and gather in a ballroom or conference room for a quick meeting. Then, usually before 10:00, Paterno would head for the reception.
The Jack Daniel’s was for the coach. A glass or two of the Tennessee sippin’ whiskey whittled away some of his harder edges. It also loosened his tongue. No subject was off limits during these informal sessions. He’d discuss with the writers freshmen redshirts, Republican politics, the literature of ancient Rome.
Occasionally, Paterno, who could be unusually glib even without whiskey, got burned by the format. In the late 1970s, when asked, not for the first or last time, if he were interested in entering politics, the coach said, “What, and leave college coaching to the [Barry] Switzers and [Jackie] Sherrills?”
The remark, disparaging the prominent Oklahoma and Pittsburgh coaches for suspect academic and ethical practices in their programs, turned up in The New York Times and elsewhere. Though the response actually served to further set him apart from the run-of-the-mill renegades in college coaching, it upset and embarrassed Paterno enough that he briefly boycotted the Friday-night receptions.
Typically, though, both sides benefited. The sportswriters got some valuable insights, saw and heard another side of the coach. And Paterno clearly enjoyed the give-and-take. He liked the Jack Daniel’s too. For decades, one of the bags that Tarman and his successors brought on road trips contained a bottle of the coach’s preferred sour-mash whiskey.
On this night, a few of the early arriving writers in 1217 nibbled on peanuts or popcorn. They wandered over to the bar, ordering beer, water, or diet soda. No one dared ask for a Jack Daniel’s.
Several of them had come from a dinner hosted by Boston College in a Legal Sea Foods restaurant at a nearby mall. The conversation there had focused on Paterno and his future. Boston writers remarked on how impressed they had been with the seventy-seven-year-old Paterno’s recall during their teleconference with the coach earlier in the week.
Whenever the suite’s door opened, they all turned their heads, thinking it might be the coach. Paterno, who rarely missed one of the receptions, had been absent the week before, but that was only because of a conflict with the season-opening Beaver Stadium pep rally. The writers, who hadn’t had an off-the-record crack at him in more than nine months, were eager to talk.
Maybe he’d clear up some of the lingering uncertainty about his future. That seemed to be the only Penn State topic their editors were interested in these days anyway. Despite their surface cynicism, as much a necessity of their trade as tape recorders and laptops, these dozen or so sportswriters relished the intimate sessions—for personal and professional reasons. The privilege of one-on-one conversations with a coaching legend lent them and their jobs a little cachet. And because Paterno increasingly limited access, they were essential for keeping informed. On the record, Paterno answered questions for only about fifteen minutes after games and thirty minutes during Tuesday teleconferences, one question for each reporter. That was it. You couldn’t even try to catch him at the locker-room door after games without being shooed away by the sports-information staff.
Asked about Paterno’s ever-more-restrictive rules and his diminishing availability, a Penn State marketing official hinted that the coach had lost trust. He compared the media to “attack dogs” and said “it only takes a few [bites] to make the fence go up.”
Most of Penn State’s beat writers fell into two categories: young and ambitious, or old and crusty. With very few exceptions, they were—and always had been—white men. Penn State was, for many of them, their only connection to big-time sports. The rest of the year most of them covered high school games for papers in small- and mid-size towns like Lewistown, Carlisle, or York. They derived a large measure of pride from their association with Penn State, from writing articles their readers craved about the Nittany Lions’ exploits, from having a drink with Paterno on football Friday nights. A few years on the beat and some began to feel they had a stake in Penn State football.
But with all the recent losses, their jobs had become more unpleasant. Paterno frequently was disagreeable and difficult, making himself and his players unavailable, increasingly snapping at their questions. Asked earlier in the week to explain his decision to start Robinson as a wideout against Akron, he said simply, “I thought it would help the team.”
Readers and editors badgered the writers constantly, wanting to know what was going to happen to the coach. Would he stay even after another disastrous season? Were Penn State administrators pondering ways to push him aside? Were powerful alumni calling for his head? What the hell was going on?
As the relaxed writers continued to grouse and graze, they traded a variety of speculations, some half-baked, some plausible. The opening-week’s victory over Akron had done little to quiet the buzz about Paterno.
Did you hear, said one, that the coach’s four-year contract extension had been a reward for his agreeing to replace Ganter and take some authority away from Jay?
Another had been told that if this season turned sour, administrators were prepared to urge Paterno’s wife to try to persuade her husband to step down.
“Big Penn State donors” among his readership informed another writer that Paterno planned to bow out at season’s end if the Nittany Lions were at all successful.
At 9:55, the coach still had not shown up and the writers began checking their watches.
“Is he coming tonight?” asked Jerry Kellar, an ex–offensive lineman at Temple and now a Wilkes-Barre Times Leader columnist.
“Sue’s on this trip with him,” said Nelson. “But as far as I know he’s coming.”
By 10:30, the room was more crowded. A few writers who had been to dinner in downtown Boston arrived, and were surprised to learn that the coach had not. For a while, the Florida State–Miami game was interesting enough to distract their attention from his absence.
“If he’s not here by now, he’s probably not coming,” Nelson finally offered during a commercial.
That led to more questions. Why would he not show up two weeks in a row? Was he ticked off by all the criticism he and his trouble-prone players had taken in the media the previous season, all the calls for him to resign? Or was this a further indication that he wasn’t going to be bound by the old routines anymore?
“Maybe Sue won’t let him come,” said one writer.
Finally, at around 11:00, one by one, the sportswriters began to depart.
Nelson scurried around the room, collecting empty glasses, brushing popcorn crumbs off the sofa. The bartender, his still idle hands folded behind his back, remained at his post.
The bottle of Jack Daniel’s remained untouched.
Earlier that day, gray and bald heads had populated every window of the King Coal tour bus that sped north on Route 84,
along the stretch of Connecticut River that runs between Hartford and Springfield. They were Nittany Lions fans on a weekend trip, en route to the next night’s game. Most were retirees who had come from used-up towns in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, places like Shamokin, Mount Carmel, and Ashland.
Paterno, for generations, had mined the rich vein of scholastic talent found in the state’s gritty blue-collar towns. In particular, the close-knit communities in northeast Pennsylvania’s coal country and those in the hills and valleys surrounding Pittsburgh had yielded him a mother lode of talent. The sons of hard-nosed coal miners, and rail and steelworkers, were as tough as their names implied—Mike Munchak (Scranton), Jack Ham (Johnstown), Ted Kwalick (McKees Rocks), Denny Onkotz (Northampton). But when the industries that employed their parents began to disappear or relocate, the jobs vanished. The population aged. The small-town high schools consolidated. The state’s economy stagnated.
Homestead, an old steel town southeast of Pittsburgh, was a good example. In 1950, the town had twenty thousand residents and its huge steel mill employed fourteen thousand workers. The mill closed in 1982. In 2004, Homestead’s population was about four thousand, many of them elderly.
Only the retirement haven of Florida had a greater percentage of elderly residents than weary Pennsylvania. That demographic shift, triggered by a changing economy, had begun to affect Paterno’s program. There simply weren’t as many quality players in the state. And those there were were nearly as likely to go to a Big Ten rival or a Florida school as to Penn State.
On Saturday night, Boston College would dress twelve Pennsylvanians.
“It’s not the hotbed it used to be,” Paterno explained. “You take the Johnstown area. . . . When I came here, there would be six or seven players that we would like to have. There might be three or four Notre Dame or Pitt or Michigan or Ohio State would want. There won’t be two or three there anymore. What happened was a lot of the little coal towns joined together as one school. Where you used to have five schools with maybe sixty kids each out for football—three hundred kids—now you might have one joint school with fifty kids out.”
In 2004, you could, in fact, argue that Paterno had much in common with his adopted home state. Each had a glorious past, a depressing present, and an uncertain future. A rapidly changing world seemed intent on making both irrelevant.
Penn State did not reveal any statistical data about its fan base. But if the weekly Beaver Stadium crowds provided an accurate reading, it, too, was graying rapidly. “If you were thirty or forty when that bond occurred [with Penn State football in the late 1960s and early 1970s], you’re seventy-plus,” marketer Guido D’Elia noted. “We have a very high attrition rate we have to deal with.” Those on the tour bus certainly were Paterno’s contemporaries. They continued to appreciate the man who had brought so much glory to their sons, their hometowns, their state. As such, they were less inclined to criticize the coach than the school’s students, or the more casual Penn State fans in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
They longed to be impressed and the previous week’s victory over Akron had encouraged them as much as the bookies. Las Vegas had upgraded the Nittany Lions into a two-point favorite over Boston College, even though they had not won a nonconference road game since beating Miami in 1999.
Many of the old-timers on the bus had been at Beaver Stadium the week before. That big victory had felt reassuringly familiar—particularly the explosive offense. Two 100-yard-plus tailbacks brought back memories of Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris. Tony Hunt’s 77-yard TD gallop on the season’s second play recalled Curt Warner. And not one but two quarterbacks had great days—Mills and Robinson running, catching, and throwing for touchdowns.
That couldn’t possibly have been a mirage, could it?
Paterno had pinpointed the last Boston College game as the beginning of the end for his 2003 Penn State team. He had mentioned it so often in the spring and summer and now during this week of preparation that his players had begun to talk about exacting some revenge.
A year ago, after an opening-game victory over Temple, Penn State hosted BC, the two Eastern teams’ first meeting since 1992. The Eagles exploded for three first-quarter touchdowns in a physically dominating 27–14 victory. What would become the worst season in Paterno’s career was off and crawling.
“They laughed at us last year, basically,” Michael Robinson said. “[With a 21–0 lead] the game started to seem like it was a joke to them. They really handed it to us. I’m not going to say they relaxed, but they were like the game was over. We all remember. We’ve got to go up there and play Penn State football and see what happens.”
Sophomore linebacker Tim Shaw said, “[This week’s game] is a little bit of a payback.”
Paterno and his assistants had used the game as motivation. When players erred in practice, he told them they obviously didn’t recall the butt-whipping BC had administered a year ago. It may have been as thorough a physical and psychological beating, he reminded them, as any Penn State team had endured in their lifetimes.
“There is no question, as I look back on last year’s game with Boston College, that we didn’t measure up physically in a tough football game,” Paterno told reporters that week. “We have . . . to get that out of our craw.”
All that strong talk struck BC coach Tom O’Brien as a little odd. Hadn’t Penn State lost nine times in ‘03? What about the other eight defeats? Were they somehow more acceptable? It wasn’t like his Eagles had been pathetic. Their 8–5 season concluded with a victory over Colorado State in the San Francisco Bowl, making them the only school in the nation to have won bowl games in each of the last four years.
“It sounds like they blamed their loss against us for their whole year last year,” said O’Brien. “Reading all the stuff, it seems like Boston College is the whole reason they went three-and-nine.”
The desire to make a statement against BC may also have served to divert the players from two deaths that hit the Penn State football family. That week sophomore cornerback Darian Hardy’s father had died of cancer. And the fourteen-year-old nephew of tight end Isaac Smolko was killed in a bicycle accident in Alabama.
In the past two years, Paterno and his team had seemed to suffer a near nonstop run of death. He had lost his brother, George, who had been the color analyst on Penn State radio broadcasts for years, to a heart attack in 2002; that same year, Ganter’s wife, Karen, fifty-three, had died of a sudden brain aneurysm, falling dead in her kitchen as she and her husband talked; Kevin Dare, the brother of cornerback Eric and a fellow Penn State student, had died in a pole-vaulting accident during track practice; and just a few months earlier, Kevin Baugh had been murdered.
Time on the football field became their respite from tragedy. And another victory would heal them further.
The Eagles had opened this season with a 19–11 road victory, but because it came against a Ball State team that went 4–8 in 2003, no one was quite sure what it signified. As Paterno prepared for the game, the matchup that most concerned him was BC’s athletic defensive line against his still-inconsistent offensive front. Boston College had registered five sacks in its opener, led by the large and talented Mathias Kiwanuka’s two. Junior tackle Andrew Richardson would be matched up with Kiwanuka.
“I think Andrew will do a good job,” Paterno predicted. “I thought he did a good job last week and I think he will get better. He and Levi Brown are a little bit in the same category as some of the defensive linemen were last year. A lot of them were young, new, and had to play themselves into being a little bit better. I think Andrew will get better. He has a tough job this week. Obviously, we’re going to try to help him in the schemes we’re going to use. We’re not going to hang him out there and say, ‘Hey, if you don’t get it done, we don’t get it done.’ We’re going to, obviously, change up on things. . . . He’s a smart kid and a good athlete. He’s a tough kid. Playing against somebody as good as this kid is will make him even better eventu
ally.”
In private, though, Paterno and his staff looked for ways to get the more elusive Robinson more snaps at quarterback, something they hoped might counter BC’s anticipated pass-rush. Robinson had had four carries, four passes, and three receptions against Akron. Penn State had to get the ball more often to its only game-breaker.
“If you get the ball in his hands, he can run over you, run around you, you can throw it to him short and you can throw it to him downfield,” said Paterno. “You can put him in the backfield and he can be a tailback. You can put him in at quarterback and take Mills and put him outside. Michael Robinson gives you a lot of options.”
Penn State got some good news when they learned that freshman BC tailback L. V. Whitworth, who had accumulated 129 yards on twenty-one carries versus Ball State, would miss the game with a knee injury. But quarterback Paul Peterson, a twenty-four-year-old ex–Mormon missionary who had transferred from BYU, worried Paterno with his poise, his mobility, and his ability to throw on the run.
After what he termed “a good week of practice,” Paterno and his team flew to Boston Friday night. Trips there were always bittersweet for him. He remembered the good times he’d had in that city as a postwar student at Brown, “chasing the girls,” or going to Fenway Park to watch Ted Williams hit.
But it also brought to mind what might have been. He could have owned a piece of the New England Patriots—perhaps as much five percent—had he accepted Billy Sullivan’s coaching offer in 1972. The Patriots were now valued at $756 million by Forbes. Five percent of that would be more than $37.5 million.
Paterno’s past was peppered with Boston connections. After high school, the future coach nearly had gone to Jesuit-run Boston College. “I went to a Jesuit high school. My dad wanted me to go to a Catholic college and the Jesuits all wanted me to go to Boston College, Fordham, or maybe Georgetown,” he said. “I decided that I just didn’t want to go up there.” He had also been accepted into Boston University’s law school and had planned to attend until Engle offered him the job as a Penn State assistant in 1950.
The Lion in Autumn Page 13