The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  Don Ferrell, Penn State football’s academic adviser for decades before his recent retirement, said Paterno’s reputation was the residue of the reality the coach has created around his program. While he might ask from time to time that a certain number of academic exceptions be admitted, he demands those players devote themselves to classwork.

  “I always told Joe when kids were having trouble, and he always backed me,” Ferrell said. “When kids weren’t performing academically, he’d look at me and say, ‘Did they flunk?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and he’d take care of them. I never had to go out on a limb and do something against my character or integrity.”

  Paterno, better than any other coach, has managed to walk the narrow line between football and academic performance. By 2004, when Penn State victories were rare, graduations were not.

  “I told the squad the other day,” he would say after that season, “ ‘You know, I look at you, every one of you guys is going to graduate unless you transfer.’ I feel good about that. I also said, ‘Goddammit, I wish you’d win a couple more games.’ ”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SEASON’S FIRST MONTH was complete and if Paterno’s new approach had made a difference, the change wasn’t visible.

  In the days leading up to the Minnesota game, the coach’s age and troubles had become even more solidly entrenched as punch lines on sports-radio shows and Web sites around the country. Much of the irreverent snickering came from fans of other college powerhouses, some of whom had chafed over the years whenever Paterno leveled criticism at their coaches or programs for ethical or academic lapses.

  Those visiting Oklahoma’s Soonerfans.com that week were treated to a clever photo exhibit starring Penn State’s coach. Some enterprising critic superimposed onto a variety of other images a photo of Paterno leading his team out of the Beaver Stadium tunnel. In the original, the wild look in the old coach’s eyes suggests a frothy breakdown. His arms are raised at arthritic angles above his surprisingly gray head. And his mouth is wide open in the midst of what appears to be a terrifying scream.

  That frightening waist-up image of Paterno was then overlaid onto other bodies in photographs that depicted him running with the bulls in Pamplona, finishing a Special Olympics race ahead of smiling competitors, drumming with a heavy-metal band, screaming at a family of ducks as they cross a busy highway, or angrily confronting Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi.

  Thus inspired, another Oklahama supporter altered the Wheaties box that contained Paterno’s profile. In his new version, Wheaties had been replaced by Geritol and the caption beneath the coach’s likeness read “Joe Paterno: Old Man.”

  Meanwhile, on a Notre Dame fans Web site, NDNation.com, a recent discussion about the coach led someone to post a David Letterman–like list—Top Ten Undisclosed Terms of Joe Paterno’s Contract Extension. They included: “No. 7: Paterno bowed to pressure to modernize his offense; agreed to install the single wing. . . . No. 4: Instead of a cooler of Gatorade, victorious players may only douse coach with a cup of warm soup. . . . and No. 1: Penn State agreed to move its campus to Naples, Florida.”

  Paterno claimed he didn’t hear the jokes or the criticism, and that even if he had, it wouldn’t bother him. These attacks on a legend did, however, offend some of his colleagues.

  “If they can criticize Joe Paterno like that, the rest of us have no chance,” said Glen Mason, whose Minnesota team would face Paterno’s that Saturday night. “It bothers me. I only say that because we are so hypocritical at the collegiate level. I’ve always said I’m not a pro coach, I’m a college coach. I’m held responsible for a lot of other things than just winning games, like graduation rates, grade point averages, the conduct of my players. Those things are really important in the job description, but if you don’t win enough games, they’re going to say you are a bad coach.”

  Mason, a New Jersey native who first got to know the Penn State coach when he was an Ohio State assistant, admired Paterno so much that he began wearing a tie on the sideline in silent tribute. In defending this idol, Mason recalled a 1997 game he coached at State College. The No. 1–ranked Nittany Lions won, 16–15, thanks to a missed call late in the fourth quarter. When the two men met at midfield for the postgame handshake, Paterno asked if Mason would permit him to visit the Gophers’ locker room so that he could apologize for the officials’ mistake.

  “I could only imagine my reaction in that situation,” Mason said. “I’d be so excited that we didn’t lose and were still number one, with national-championship hopes still alive. . . . The first thing he says to me is, ‘You got robbed; the worst call I’ve ever seen in coaching. It’s a shame your team didn’t win. Your kids outplayed mine. Your coaches outcoached us.’ I couldn’t believe it. The guy never ceases to amaze me.”

  The week of the Minnesota game, Paterno again had impressed—or irritated—his coaching colleagues by speaking out against a proposal most of them were forced to support. It came when he was asked for an opinion on the likely addition of a twelfth game for Division I football programs, something money-hungry programs everywhere had been pushing.

  “We always brag on the kid who’s an engineer or the kid who graduates in four years and so forth,” he began. “But we don’t take a good look at the majority of our squads who are kids who really need exposure to a college life. If I were a kid today and someone said to me, ‘You’re good enough to play big-time college football,’ I’m not sure I’d do it. You’ve got to be at weight training. You work all winter. You work all summer. And now we’re going to give them a twelfth game? And we’re only giving them the twelfth game so we can take care of the other sports. . . . I’m for the football player. Twelve games in a league like the Big Ten, I think that’s tough. It’s not necessary and it’s not fair to the football kids.”

  Still, his aging voice continued to be drowned out. By the jokes. By the criticism. By the losses. In his mind, there was only one remedy: victories. They weren’t going to come easily. “This stretch of games that we are going through is probably the toughest stretch in all of the years I’ve been here,” he said. He admitted that he needed to keep reinforcing his team with one of his favorite bits of philosophy.

  “If you’re knocked down,” he told them over and over, “you can’t lose your guts. You need to play with supreme confidence or you’ll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.”

  An air of desperation had begun to circulate through the Penn State locker room like a spirit-sapping disease. It would grow in strength over the next several weeks, infusing every game with an enormous importance. Time and patience always seemed to be in short supply.

  “I’m sick of losing,” junior cornerback Alan Zemaitis said. “I’m just so starving to win. I want to get back to the days when we had [tailback Larry Johnson] and those guys. I was just a young buck. We weren’t going out there thinking we were going to lose back then.”

  As he heard the latest bad news, Paterno thought that sooner or later life was going to have to be penalized for piling on.

  On that previous Saturday afternoon at Mount Nittany Medical Center, as his team was losing in Madison and his badly injured son-in-law was being examined in the emergency room a few floors below, another of Paterno’s friends and former players died. Bob Mitinger, an all-American defensive end at Penn State in 1961, a prominent State College lawyer, an influential Nittany Lions supporter, succumbed to cancer at sixty-four.

  “We’ve had a tough year,” Paterno said. “Bob was one of the toughest, fiercest competitors that we have ever had at Penn State. He was a real strong person in the community. I can still see him when I was an assistant coach. . . . There are a lot of good people who have gone through this program and Bob was one of them, one of the better ones.”

  Off the field, life seemed to be imitating the Lions’ experiences on it: bad news heaped atop bad news. There was nothing the coach could do but try to turn these ceaseless tragedies into motivation. If nothing else, he hoped, maybe they would brin
g his players closer together. He had lectured them on that very topic the previous spring.

  “Take a look around, because the best friends you are ever going to have in your life are sitting around you,” Paterno had told his team. “Thirty years from now you guys will be friends. Football is important and we want to do well, but we want to respect each other and hang in there together regardless of what happens.”

  Meanwhile, as the coach held his weekly Tuesday news conference, Hort remained in critical conditon at the Altoona hospital.

  “I would rather not get into my situation personally,” he said to the reporters, declining to provide any details. “We are going through some tough things and I don’t want to get into that. . . . I appreciate everybody’s concern. . . . There are young kids involved in this, so I would appreciate if there were not a lot written about it. We are trying to protect them.”

  Athletic department employees, careful not to violate the coach’s wishes or breach the university’s secretive policies, indicated privately that Hort remained in a coma. It now appeared, they said, that the coach’s son-in-law would survive but that he might suffer some minor paralysis. No one knew what had caused the accident.

  For a floundering 2–2 team in the teeth of its Big Ten schedule, the injuries to Hort and the two quarterbacks generated more distraction and doubt. Paterno’s fabled focus had been so diffused that he had considered canceling Monday’s workout. His players and assistants persuaded him to change his mind. According to tight end Isaac Smolko, after the loss at Wisconsin none of his teammates “thought it would be a good idea to take a day off. We need to get better.”

  Paterno worked them for about an hour on Monday. Then he delivered yet another message of hope. Sometimes he felt like he’d been encouraging them almost nonstop since the spring.

  “I’m proud of how you handled it,” Paterno said of their performance in Madison. “Nobody got down. Nobody gave up.”

  As for the rest of the practice week, the sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were of normal length and intensity. Many fans didn’t realize how little time college players had to prepare together on the field. And when they traveled to their weekend destination, Fridays were pretty much wasted too. “We do a little more on Friday than we used to, but not much,” he explained. “We don’t even put helmets on. We wear shorts and walk through substitution procedures and things like that.” Paterno found that the most beneficial thing he could do on those travel days was to make time for a long, head-clearing walk.

  Even with his team in desperate need of help, he rarely sought to alter his practice routines. They had served him well, with very few significant changes, for a long, long time.

  “You have to be careful,” he said. “Sometimes things just don’t go your way. If you start changing just for the sake of changing, you end up going backwards. We just have to hang in there and get better. It is as simple as that.”

  Besides, for all the importance he placed on the workouts, he understood longer or tougher practices weren’t the answer. His Nittany Lions, nearly every one of whom was fearful that 2004 might easily deteriorate into another 2003, weren’t going to improve until they tasted success.

  That would be more difficult now. Even if a banged-up Mills were able to play Saturday, the absence of Robinson left an enormous void. Defensive coordinators had very few reasons to respect this Penn State’s offense. That week, for the first, but certainly not the last, time, Paterno played up his team’s youth. Critics called it an excuse. To Paterno, it was simply a logical explanation for his team’s inconsistency.

  “This is the youngest football team I have ever coached, against the toughest schedule we have ever played,” he said. “We are playing undefeated football teams—big, strong football teams that are good football teams and well coached,” he said. “We are playing them with a lot of young kids. There are not a lot of guys that I think are comfortable [enough] yet to make the big plays. You would hope that after they get into a couple of games they’d start to do that.”

  The clamor was building. Early in the week, a few more national columnists had urged Paterno to step down. In various Internet chat rooms, his suggested successors included Mason, Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz, Utah’s Urban Meyer, the unemployed Steve Spurrier, Terry Bowden and Jackie Sherrill, New York Jets head coach Herman Edwards, New York Giants offensive coordinator John Hufnagle, and a couple of Pennsylvania high school coaches.

  On Friday, Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune telephoned Penn State alums in the Twin Cities to gauge their feelings about the coach before he arrived in Minnesota. For the record, all of them said Paterno had earned the right to stay as long as he wanted. But Reusse’s editor told him he had been hearing nothing but complaints from the Penn State grads who were in town for Saturday’s game. When the sportswriter called some of them, they indeed voiced their displeasure with Paterno, but refused to be quoted.

  “It was like they were afraid maurauding gangs would be dispatched to their homes,” Reusse said.

  In addition, Las Vegas oddsmakers had made Minnesota a 14 1/2-point favorite. No one associated with the Nittany Lions could remember a Paterno team ever being such a sizable underdog. Part of the reason the spread was that large, of course, was that Mills, his non-throwing left shoulder still extremely sore, remained questionable for Saturday. And Robinson would definitely be out.

  Robinson had spent Saturday night in the Madison hospital before returning to State College on Sunday. Back in his dorm room, he got a call from Taliaferro. He told Robinson that he understood what he was going through.

  “Thank God that you’re able to go back on the field,” Taliaferro said, “because I wish I could go back every day.”

  “It was an emotional conversation, but we got through it,” Robinson recalled.

  He continued to suffer from headaches throughout the week as doctors performed a series of complicated cognitive tests. “Some of the things they were asking me, I don’t think I would have been able to get a lot of it right even if I didn’t have a concussion.”

  The tests, the doctors told Paterno, revealed the quarterback’s concussion had been so severe that he might be out three or four weeks. “Our medical people tend to be conservative,” Paterno said. With a bye week coming up on October 16, the coach hoped his most versatile performer might be able to return October 23, for the homecoming game against Iowa.

  If Mills couldn’t play, Paterno said, Ganter would start, with Morelli backing him up. The coach instructed his son Jay and Hall to prepare a game plan that stressed a controlled attack—lots of runs and short passes. How they could make that work, when he knew Minnesota would be jamming the line of scrimmage, was something they’d worry about later.

  He had few worries about Penn State’s improving defense—even if Minnesota’s 542.8 total yards and 332 rushing yards were, respectively, third and fourth in the nation. Tailback Laurence Maroney was averaging 131.5 yards a game for the eighteenth ranked, 4–0 Gophers. Running mate Marion Barber III was not far behind, at 128.5.

  “Minnesota is the best team we will have played so far,” said Paterno, “and that is not to take anything away from Wisconsin. This is a very, very explosive offensive football team that has had a lot of success. . . . They do a great job with the play-action pass off the running game so you can’t gang up on the run.”

  Penn State flew into Minneapolis on Friday night. As they did, back at the Rathskeller bar in State College, suspended wideout Maurice Humphrey, who was not yet twenty-one, was caught with a fake ID. It was a violation of his parole. He eventually would be sentenced to nine months in jail. Then a student at Penn State–Altoona, he had hoped to reenroll at the main campus next fall. Now, any hopes that the gifted receiver and Paterno had of his return to the team in 2005 were dead.

  Back in Minneapolis, the Nittany Lions held their night-before meeting in a ballroom at the downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel. It had to be delayed when assistant coach Larry J
ohnson and a dozen or so of his players got stuck in a hotel elevator for fifteen minutes.

  A scaled-down media reception was held in a nondescript room a few floors below. The sportswriters were getting the message. Only a few people showed up this week. Paterno was not among them.

  The declining attendance had caused sports-information director Jeff Nelson to greatly reduce the menu and bar fare. Chips and salsa. Pretzels. Beer and water.

  And an untouched bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis was a strange place for a team used to performing in the sunny glow of Happy Valley. The multipurpose stadium was dark and soulless, its ambience as unappealing as the fried cheese curds sold by vendors just outside its gates.

  In the hectic hours before that night’s 7:00 P.M. CDT game, workers hustled around the domed facility painting lines on the field, frantically storing sections of unused bleachers, and hanging maroon-and-gold banners that contained numbers the Gophers had retired and names from a distant past, like Bronco Nagurski and Paul Giel.

  For a time it looked as if the Big Ten game might have to be delayed. At 2:30 P.M., a baseball game was still being played on the Dome’s turf field. The Cleveland Indians and the American League Central champion Minnesota Twins were tied at 5–5 in the eleventh inning of a game that would determine next week’s AL playoff matchups.

  The baseball game had begun unusually early, at 11:10 A.M., to ensure that workers would have plenty of time to convert the field and stadium to their football configurations. But the conversion would take at least four hours and, when the game rolled into extra innings, Minnesota officials got nervous. Penn State–Minnesota was being televised regionally by ESPN so its starting time was inviolable.

  Finally, baseball fans were informed by the public-address announcer that if the game were not concluded in the bottom of the eleventh, it would have to be suspended, then resumed and finished the following afternoon. When the home team failed to score, fans booed as they reluctantly departed. And the Twins, who had been lobbying hard for a baseball-only stadium and who still had a shot at gaining homefield advantage in their opening postseason series, felt like doing the same.