The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  “We all felt like we could’ve beaten Notre Dame that year,” said O’Neil, who, along with his teammates, had watched the Irish’s victory in the Sugar Bowl, played on December 31 that year, the night before the Lions beat LSU in the Orange Bowl. “But we never got a chance. What could we do?”

  What Penn State could do was upgrade the schedule. And as a result of his 1973 disappointment, Paterno decided to do just that. There would be home-and-home dates with Ohio State in 1975–76 and with Miami in 1976–77. Before the decade was over, Penn State would play SWC teams like Texas A & M, SMU, and TCU, and Big Eight foes like Nebraska and Missouri. And eastern football, thanks to Pitt’s recruitment of Tony Dorsett, a player Paterno didn’t land because he wouldn’t guarantee him that he’d start as a freshman, soon took a big step forward.

  As frustrating as 1973 was, the year did provide Penn State with an enormous amount of positive publicity—and victory in at least one national poll.

  Tailback John Cappelletti became the school’s first and only Heisman Trophy winner. Even though voters in the Southwest had Cappelletti fifth on their collective ballots, his election proved Penn State could win a nationwide vote.

  As impressive as Cappelletti’s 1973 numbers were (1,522 yards, 17 touchdowns), it wasn’t a banner year for Heisman candidates. His vote total was more than double that of runner-up John Hicks, an offensive lineman from Ohio State, and the third-place finisher, running back Roosevelt Leaks of Texas. Kansas QB David Jaynes was fourth. (The best-known name among the top ten that year was Ohio State’s sophomore running back Archie Griffin, who would capture the Heisman the next two seasons.)

  In the long run, though, what may have helped Penn State’s program as much as the Heisman was Cappelletti’s acceptance of it.

  A tough but tender-hearted running back from suburban Philadelphia, he received the award on December 13, 1973, at a banquet in the New York Hilton. His touching speech not only moved the nation and precipitated both a book and a television movie, it also added to Paterno’s growing mystique.

  Cappelletti’s speech made the front page of every sports section in America and was featured on the three networks’ weekend newscasts. That was the nation’s first up-close glimpse of a Penn State player, and it only confirmed the positive image of Paterno that had arisen two years earlier when he rejected the Patriots’ lucrative offer.

  The night of the award presentation, Paterno was sitting just to the right of Cappelletti when the tailback tearfully dedicated the trophy to his younger brother, Joey, who was dying from leukemia. Speaking from a text he had composed with his older brother, Marty, a Temple journalism graduate, and which had been reviewed by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Bill Lyon, Cappelletti began his memorable talk by thanking his parents and his coach at Monsignor Bonner High School. Then he turned to Paterno, telling the large audience of his family’s first encounter with the coach.

  “When he came in the door, he looked over, and on the couch was my brother, Joseph, lying there,” said Cappelletti. “He was very ill at the time, more so than usual . . . and coach Paterno was more concerned and talked more about what he could do for my brother than what he could do to get me at Penn State. . . .

  “I think everyone here knows mostly about his coaching accomplishments at Penn State. His record is a great one, probably the greatest in the country. . . . [But] he’s more concerned with young people after they get out of school than when they are in school—what he can do for them to make better lives for them. . . . I don’t think there is a more dedicated man anywhere concerned with young people and a better teacher of life on and off the field.”

  After mentioning his Penn State teammates and backfield coach Bob Phillips, Cappelletti commenced the paragraph that would cement his place in both Heisman lore and popular culture.

  “The youngest member of my family, Joseph, is very ill,” he began, sobs halting his words, tears rolling from his eyes as he tried not to look at the table where his family, including Joey, sat. “He has leukemia. If I can dedicate this trophy to him tonight and give him a couple of days of happiness, this is worth everything. I think a lot of people think that I go through a lot on Saturdays and during the week as most athletes do, and you get your bumps and bruises and it is a terrific battle out there on the field. Only, for me, it is on Saturdays and it’s only in the fall. For Joseph, it is all year round, and it is a battle that is unending with him, and he puts up with much more than I’ll ever put up with, and I think that this trophy is more his than mine because he has been a great inspiration to me.”

  The nation first had learned about eleven-year-old Joey Cappelletti and his illness a few months earlier. At that time, the Penn State tailback had promised his ailing brother four touchdowns in the game closest to his birthday, against West Virginia on October 27. He had scored three times before Paterno, always reluctant to pile it on an opponent, pulled his star in the second half of what would be a 62–14 rout. Teammates who knew of Cappelletti’s pledge informed the coach. Paterno reinserted him. Cappelletti soon had his fourth touchdown and Joey his birthday gift.

  When the Heisman winner’s speech was complete, sobs were audible in the Hilton ballroom. Vice President Gerald Ford, who during his stumbling talk had called the Heisman winner “Joe Cappelletti” and his coach “my good friend John Fraterno,” was crying. O’Neil, his hard-nosed teammate and closest friend, said he “couldn’t find the strength in my legs to stand up” for the ovation that followed. Paterno, for one of the rare times in public, removed his glasses and dabbed at his eyes.

  Finally, Bishop Fulton Sheen, the charismatic Catholic prelate whose TV show had been a nationwide phenomenon in the 1950s, rose to deliver a blessing.

  “Maybe for the first time in your lives you have heard a speech from the heart and not from the lips,” he said. “Part of John’s triumph was made by Joseph’s sorrow. You don’t need a blessing. God has already blessed you in John Cappelletti.”

  Less than three years later, with his big brother at his bedside, Joey Cappelletti died.

  Later on the night of the banquet, at a Penn State reception in a Hilton penthouse, Paterno and Patriots owner Billy Sullivan met again.

  “Do you see now why I couldn’t leave?” Paterno asked him.

  “Yes,” said Sullivan, “I think I do.”

  No one would have wanted it that way, of course, but when the book Something for Joey appeared and later was transformed into the highest-rated TV movie of 1977, Paterno’s reputation expanded again.

  Suddenly, this coach who already was reputed to be the embodiment of all that was good about college sports was a central figure in a story that ranked with Brian’s Song and Pride of the Yankees among the most memorably inspirational sports films ever.

  The Cappelletti episode became part of the growing Paterno mythology, along with his Grand Experiment, his principled stands against football corruption, his attachment to Penn State, and, of course, his simple values, perhaps best exemplified by the uniforms his players wore.

  In fact, perhaps more than any single element of his career, it was Penn State’s plain blue-and-white uniforms that came to define Paterno in the decades that would follow.

  Oddly enough for a school that has become renowned for its ultraconservative attire, Penn State’s original colors—as selected by a three-student panel in 1887—were pink and black. The first cheer for a Penn State football team went:

  Yah! Yah! (Pause) Yah! Yah! Yah!

  Wish. Wack. Pink. Black.

  P-S-C.

  But perspiration, repeated washings, and sun exposure quickly faded the pink to white. Soon blue and white replaced pink and black, and in 1890, the school’s new colors were officially born.

  Penn State’s uniforms were colorless even before Paterno took over. Photos from the 1948 Cotton Bowl reveal that the Nittany Lions wore all-white in their 13–13 tie with Doak Walker’s SMU Mustangs. There were brief glimpses of flair afterward—striped pants and socks wer
e worn occasionally into the 1970s. And in at least one 1950s photo, Lenny Moore is wearing a white jersey with two blue stripes wrapping around the sleeves.

  Paterno’s belief in the power of a simple, unchanging trademark dated back to October of 1943, when his Brooklyn Prep coach, Earl “Zev” Graham, a former Fordham all-American, took him to Yankee Stadium for a World Series game between the Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. A Dodgers fan by birth and inclination, Paterno was nonetheless drawn to the image of professionalism projected by the Yankees, a tailored uniformity that included pressed pinstripes and polished shoes. The impression that winning and appearance were somehow linked was born that day.

  “[Coach Graham] said, ‘Now watch how the Yankees walk.’ And sure enough, DiMaggio and those guys walked with a little swagger,” Paterno recalled. “He said, ‘Look at their shoes.’ I said they were nice—I didn’t know what he was talking about. The Cardinals come out. He said, ‘Now take a look at the Cardinals’ shoes.’ Every Yankee had polished shoes. They were all polished. The Cardinals had scuffed-up shoes, some of them didn’t have the same length in their pants, the whole bit. He said, ‘The Yankees are different.’ You know, they had the pinstripes and the whole bit. And I think that’s something that we try to do.”

  Paterno’s continued insistence on unadorned uniforms was the coach’s way of establishing both an espirit de corps and a unique identity for his program. Football is a team game. Players who understood that and were willing to submit their individuality to it were, he believed, more likely to be successful and unified.

  “Whatever you do, you do trying to create a tradition,” he would say. “We talk to people about the fact that we’re conservative and we like team people. We’re not looking for flashy people. I think people every once in a while need symbols to reinforce those sentiments.”

  Paterno’s fashion sense turned out to be as shrewd as his football instincts. By dressing his teams in anonymity, he managed, just as he had hoped, to both pull them together and grant them a unique image. When players complained, he quoted Napoleon, who had said that part of what made a distinctive leader was a distinctive appearance.

  During an era when America was conspicuously shedding the conformity of the 1950s in dress and most everything else, the Nittany Lions’ uniforms were seen as drab eyesores.

  “My friends used to tell me that when Penn State wore its plain white uniforms, they used to try to adjust their TVs because it seemed like there was too much snow on the screen,” said Shuman.

  As other schools experimented with wild helmet insignias and every possible color combination short of pink and black, Penn State stuck to its blue-white blandness: plain pants; black shoes; short white socks; nameless blue jerseys with white numbers, or, on the road, the opposite; and white helmets that, once the numbers were removed in the late 1970s, were adorned only with a thin blue strip down the middle.

  “A lot of people ask me about the lousy-looking uniforms that we have,” Paterno said. “But . . . you see us on TV and you say, ‘Hey, Penn State is playing.’ And your wife says, ‘How do you know it’s Penn State?’ And you say, ‘Look at the lousy uniforms.’ ”

  More recently, however, as a retro craze has overtaken sports fashion, those uniforms have become hip again, and a point of pride for Penn State players and supporters—even if they do now include a Nike swoosh, a tiny reminder of the tide of commercialism that has washed over even Paterno’s program.

  “I’ve had guys who played on that team tell me that before the 1986 Orange Bowl, Penn State players voted not to wear the little bowl insignia on their uniforms,” said Shuman. “They said that even that little orange was too flashy.”

  While complaints about the uniforms—once common in the locker room—have virtually vanished in recent seasons, Paterno still fights with players about their off-the-field attire. No hats indoors. No facial hair. No earrings. Coats and ties on the road. He occasionally has relented, as on his edict that players wear socks to class even in warm weather.

  “Why? Well, you’re sitting in the front row, the professor looks down, the girl next to you and the guy next to you have lousy-looking, dirty feet, and you’ve got socks on,” he said in explaining why he had instituted the ban in the first place. “[It might make] the difference between a B and a C, so don’t be stupid.”

  The rule against hats is such a pet peeve with Paterno that he has had a sign placed in the locker room—“Nobody in this room comes in with a hat.” Paterno likes to tell the story of his pregame meeting with Alabama’s Bear Bryant before their 1979 Sugar Bowl confrontation. Bryant was not wearing his trademark houndstooth hat. The Penn State coach asked him why.

  “He said, ‘I don’t wear a hat indoors.’ Can you imagine that?” Paterno said. “We’re playing in the Superdome and he said, ‘If I wore a hat, my mother would get upset.’ They’re all symbols. In and of themselves they mean nothing. If I tell a kid I don’t want his earring on, it doesn’t mean a thing [other than you’re] a Penn State football player. You’re something . . . different. I want you to be different.”

  That 1979 Superdome conversation with Bryant came before a game that would keep the Nittany Lions from a fourth unbeaten season and the national championship Paterno coveted. After years of griping about a lack of respect in the polls, Paterno finally had a chance to win a title on the field.

  In 1978, Penn State was 11–0 and No. 1 going into the Sugar Bowl. But Alabama prevailed, 14–7, twice stopping Penn State on fourth-quarter goal-line plunges. Those two up-the-middle running plays provoked criticism about Paterno’s conservative nature that would linger for the next quarter century. The close defeat, he later said, was the most gut-wrenching of his career. It precipitated an off-season of deep reflection. “I just got outcoached,” he said. “I didn’t prepare well enough.”

  With a little more than seven minutes left in that New Year’s Day game, Alabama led, 14–7. But Matt Millen forced a fumble and Joe Lally fell on the ball at the Crimson Tide 19. Penn State had a second-and-goal at the six when quarterback Chuck Fusina hit Scott Fitzkee near the goal line. But as the receiver turned toward the end zone, he was struck hard and stopped two feet short.

  It was third-and-goal. Paterno called for bruising fullback Matt Suhey, the son of the couple with whom he had lived nearly thirty years earlier, to take it up the middle. Suhey had been the team’s leading rusher, and this time his power dive brought to mind a powerful magnet. As he hit the line, the entire Alabama team was sucked toward him like so many iron filings. Paterno thought—still believes—Suhey got in. The officials disagreed. The ball would be marked six inches short of the end zone.

  Now there was one play remaining. Paterno assumed that Bryant would have his defense ready to stop another Suhey plunge or a quarterback sneak by Fusina. He called a time-out and summoned Fusina to the sideline. According to his 1989 autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, as the quarterback approached, he decided he wanted him to fake a run and pass to the tight end.

  “A couple of my soundest assistant coaches insisted I play the percentages—just crash through the couple feet for the touchdown,” he wrote. “ . . . That moment was one of the few in my life when I backed off from a strong instinct and let myself worry about what people might say if the decision was wrong.”

  Instead, he told Fusina to give the ball to tailback Mike Guman and have him run behind all-American tackle Keith Dorney.

  “It was the only play to go with,” he rationalized immediately after the game. “If you’ve got less than a foot to go, you’ve got to figure you can take the ball and go up over the pile.”

  Before the referee could spot the ball, Fusina asked him how far the Nittany Lions had to go. “About a foot,” he was told. Alabama defensive end Marty Lyons, hearing the conversation, shouted, “You’d better pass for it!”

  Guman took the handoff and left his feet. Lineman Don McNeal hit him low and linebacker Barry Krauss high, the latter striking with such force that
he cracked his red helmet right along its seam. In the muscle-bound geology of football, the force of all that impact raised a red-and-white peak in the center of the pile.

  But the play’s result was clear this time. Guman had not scored. Alabama took over. Paterno’s national-title hopes had been snuffed out again.

  “Alabama just beat us at the line of scrimmage,” said Paterno. “We should have been able to bang it in from there.”

  By then, Paterno had earned a reputation as a persistent critic of college football’s excesses. It was widely believed that the teams in Alabama’s SEC were among the worst perpetrators. Some said the SEC stood for “Surely Everybody Cheats.” Many of that conference’s coaches took exception to Paterno’s moralizing. And according to his brother, that resentment contributed to the Alabama defeat.

  “It was rumored every coach in the conference was offering information to Bear Bryant about how to beat Penn State,” George Paterno wrote. “It was the South, coached by the kingfish of the ‘good old boys,’ against the extremely confident, annoying, skinny ‘Wop’ leader from the East.”

  The loss to Bear Bryant severely stung Paterno’s ego. He second-guessed himself for months, taking out his frustration on his staff and players.

  “I couldn’t tolerate all that self-blame,” he wrote.

  CHAPTER 9

  THOUGH THE PENN STATE PROGRAM had little firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon, a 3–9 season can transform the attitudes of malleable young players. The football careers of most of these Nittany Lions had been filled with winning—games, championships, accolades, and personal awards. When that suddenly and unexpectedly stopped, characters were tested. Some players sulked. Some blamed coaches or teammates. Some retreated into themselves, while others pushed harder.

  Paterno understood that until the winning resumed, they all were extremely vulnerable. So heading into a new season with the 2004 Nittany Lions he had constantly sought to prop them up with positive reinforcement. Every forward step they took became a signpost on their journey back to prominence. The haircuts, extra work in the weight room, the willingness of seniors to step forward, the encouraging rout of Akron, all were, in their minds, displays of a renewed spirit and a football rebirth.