The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  The parking-lot encounter reminded Paterno of a moment from 1967, his second year as Penn State’s head coach. A few days following a 17–15 loss to Rose Bowl–bound UCLA, whose quarterback was Heisman Trophy–winner Gary Beban, the Quarterback Club welcomed the coach with a standing ovation. An embarrassed Paterno upbraided the State College supporters.

  “I said, ‘If you are going to give me a standing ovation because we got licked, I’m in the wrong place. If you think I’m gonna jump with joy because we lost some games and it’s not going to affect me, I’m in the wrong place and you’re [supporting] the wrong team. I’m not going to be satisfied until we win those games. That is where I’m going to go.’

  “People say to me, ‘Well, you’re getting beaten down.’ I’m not getting beaten down. I’m getting PO’d.”

  CHAPTER 14

  JOE PATERNO IS NOT EASILY INTIMIDATED.

  Just ask the six Penn State presidents he has won over and overshadowed. Or the wealthy donors he has talked into multimillion-dollar gifts. Or the star players and assistants who have battled and argued with him through the years—and lost. Or the opposing coaches who have tried to get the best of him in recruiting or game planning—and lost. Intensely competitive, Paterno relishes any sort of challenge. The bigger the better. He’s self-confident, maddeningly cocky, and unconcerned by the opinions of others.

  But if ever there was a fellow coach who could make Paterno sweat and doubt himself, it was Paul “Bear” Bryant. “Even his peers in the coaching business felt in awe of him,” said Paterno. “He had such charisma. Whatever it is that makes great generals, he had it. Tons of it. He was just a giant figure.”

  Paterno was a young Penn State assistant in the mid-1950s when, at a coaches’ convention, he first encountered the drawling legend. Returning to the hotel one night, he boarded an elevator and pushed the button for his fourth-floor room. Before the doors closed, a quartet of very familiar faces entered—Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson, Notre Dame’s recently retired Frank Leahy, Georgia’s Wally Butts, and Bryant, then at Texas A & M.

  The eager young coach was awestruck. He rode past his floor and went all the way to the twelfth with his elders, hoping they might invite him to tag along. Though they never acknowledged his puppy-dog presence, he had been impressed by the powerful physical aura that surrounded the men, particularly Bryant. “Self-confidence,” he later said of him, “hung in the air around him like a fine mist.” Later in the week, Paterno attended a lecture where Bryant was the speaker.

  “Bryant got up and gave one of the best clinic speeches I had ever heard,” Paterno recalled a half century later. “He didn’t have a lot to say, but he said a couple of things. Talking about game plans—’Keep your plan small. Have a plan for everything.’ ” The latter would always come naturally to the details-obsessed Paterno. He constantly refers to notes he makes for himself and others, a trait he traces back to Bryant’s advice.

  Their paths would cross again. In 1959, when Paterno was still an assistant to Rip Engle, Penn State defeated Bryant’s second Alabama team, 7–0, in the inaugural Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia. Between 1975 and 1982, Bryant and Paterno faced off four times as head coaches. Alabama won all four games. He called Bryant “the greatest defensive coach of all time” and was convinced the older man had his number. The feeling intensified after he was outfoxed by Bryant in the heartbreaking 1979 Sugar Bowl loss. Even in Penn State’s championship season of 1982, Bryant could not be bested. The Nittany Lions’ lone loss that year came to Alabama.

  When that 1982 Crimson Tide season concluded with a December 29 Liberty Bowl victory over Illinois, Bryant retired at sixty-nine. Four weeks later, a day after chest pains sent him to to DCH Regional Medical Center, he died of a heart atack.

  Paterno was sobered by the news of his coaching idol’s death. While less-involved observers might have looked at Bryant’s demise as a warning against the stresses of the profession, Paterno got another message. For him, the old coach had died because he’d walked away from the occupation that had given meaning to both their lives.

  Penn State’s coach was fifty-six at the time of Bryant’s death and though he occasionally had forecast his departure at some undetermined future date, Paterno hadn’t seriously contemplated retirement. After that, always citing Bryant’s demise as the reason, he never really would.

  Four years after his death, Bryant still loomed large in Paterno’s mind. The 1986 Nittany Lions had opened their season with six wins against unranked opponents, including Temple and Rutgers. On October 25 in Tuscaloosa, they met second-ranked Alabama, now coached by Ray Perkins. But all that week, and especially once his team arrived in Alabama, Paterno’s head was filled with thoughts of the late coach. They were so potent that, on game day, he could almost see that craggy face beneath a houndstooth hat on the opposite sideline.

  Penn State won easily that day, 23–3, its first victory ever on Alabama’s home field. It was as spiritual a triumph as Paterno had experienced. For him, the vibes about Bryant and the flawless play of his team against a quality opponent in a hostile environment had served as an omen: Another national championship, he now believed, was not merely possible in 1986. It was likely.

  After more than two decades as a head coach, Paterno had begun to recognize college football’s cyclical nature. Unless a program was willing to cheat, by covering for academically underperforming athletes, or cut corners by recruiting polished junior-college or transfer players, it was impossible to contend for a national championship every year. There was a seasoning process that had to take place for all but the most exceptional high-schoool players. His best players on his best teams often were seniors. Seniors graduated. And their places were subsequently taken by underclassmen who hadn’t played enough to have developed.

  Paterno believed he ought to be able to produce two or three strong contenders a decade, maybe one great team every eight or ten years. By understanding that and remaining patient, he could avoid taking transfers or playing freshmen, whose minds, he believed, were better focused on adjusting to college life and whose bodies needed to adapt to the rigors of the college game.

  “Every four or five years we end up with a pretty good football team,” he said. “I’ve always tried to put us in a position where we’re building toward a team that could be a contender for a national championship. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It takes a while. We don’t get rich quick. We don’t take junior-college kids. We try not to take kids that don’t belong here. . . . I just have felt, Let’s do it right. Let’s be solid. Let’s build. And if we’re not good this year, at least we’re not making sacrifices on the future in order to win X number of games this year.”

  That timetable played out perfectly after the 1982 championship. Penn State went 8–4–1 in 1983 and 6–5 in ‘84 (ending a streak of thirteen straight bowl seasons). The 1985 Nittany Lions were a surprising 11–0 and ranked No. 1 until their quest for another national title ended in a 25–10 Orange Bowl loss to Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma, a program that did not put the same emphasis on Paterno’s standards, to say the least.

  The 1986 season—the one hundredth for Penn State football—looked both promising and puzzling to Paterno. Two thirds of Penn State’s letter winners would return. Fifteen of them were fifth-year seniors. The defense, led by linebackers Shane Conlan and Trey Bauer and a hard-hitting secondary, was as good as any he coached.

  But he had questions about the offense, particularly the passing game. Quarterback John Shaffer was an outstanding leader who had lost only one start since junior high. But he was not shifty in the pocket and was, at best, only an adequate passer. The roster also was devoid of any standout wide receivers. Penn State’s top pass-catcher in 1985 had been Ray Roundtree, with a paltry fifteen receptions for 285 yards.

  Paterno had by then retreated to a more comfortable coaching staff. He had turned 1982’s winning formula on its head. The ‘86 Lions weren’t going to play wide-open football. They were goin
g to have to get points the old-fashioned Penn State way—relying on tailback D. J. Dozier and an offensive line anchored by all-American Chris Conlin.

  The jokes and complaints about Paterno’s conservative nature resurfaced. This Penn State offense, the critics scoffed, was just like the popular new golf balls that, branded with the coach’s face, were being sold all over State College that fall: It was guaranteed to go right up the middle three times out of four.

  The schedule had worked in Penn State’s favor that year. After playing the nation’s toughest schedule in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Nittany Lions’ lineup was, for various reasons, much less formidable. In fact, it looked an awful lot like those that had once earned Penn State national scorn. It included Temple, East Carolina, Rutgers, Cincinnati, Syracuse, West Virginia, and Maryland.

  In fact, the only ranked team Penn State would meet before its Fiesta Bowl showdown with Miami was Alabama, No. 2 at the time. But just four years removed from a national title, the Lions’ reputation had grown substantial enough that poll voters were conditioned to rate them highly, regardless of the opponent. Penn State began the ‘86 season ranked sixth, moved into the No. 2 slot in early November after the win in Tuscaloosa, and clung to it until the Fiesta Bowl.

  The 1986 bowl season marked the last great splash of college football’s independents. The growth of cable TV and television-rights fees was leading to the formation of many new conferences and the expansion of older ones. Between 1978 and 1994, the Pac Ten added Arizona and Arizona State; the Big Eight became the Big Twelve with the addition of Texas, Texas A & M, Texas Tech, and Baylor; South Carolina and Arkansas joined the SEC; the Mountain West and Big East began play, and the venerable Southwest Conference folded.

  When Miami and Penn State finished unbeaten and ranked Nos. 1 and 2 in 1986, they became the first two independent teams to occupy the polls’ top spots at a regular season’s end since 1946 (Army and Notre Dame).

  With no bowl commitments, the two schools found themselves in an enviable position. They could sit back and wait for the best offer from all those eager to televise a true national-championship game. By landing them both, a midlevel bowl could instantly become a major.

  The most ambitious of those second-level bowls was the sixteen-year-old Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona. To get Miami and Penn State, its organizers, backed by NBC, agreed to double the game’s payout (guaranteeing each school $2.4 million), move the game away from the New Year’s Day football traffic to January 2, and schedule it in prime time.

  The appeal of a Penn State–Miami game was unmistakable. Viewers, whether watching TV sitcoms, movies, or sporting events, were drawn instinctively to conflict. And in the media’s shorthand profiles of these two programs, conflict seemed inevitable. The contrasts couldn’t have been clearer.

  The Hurricanes had risen to national prominence in the early 1980s under coach Howard Schellenberger with a flashy, pass-dominated attack led by quarterbacks like Jim Kelly and Bernie Kosar. On the field, Miami was characterized by speed, big plays, and trash talk. Thirty-four members of this team, including Kosar, defensive tackle Jerome Brown, and wide receiver Michael Irvin, eventually would be drafted by the NFL and twenty-eight would play in the league. Off the field, Miami possessed an outlaw image that befit the 1980s’ Miami Vice reputation of its hometown, the capital of cocaine and Uzis. The Hurricanes, as Irvin noted, were ranked No. 1 “by the AP, UPI, and FBI.” Among the various legal difficulties that surrounded the program that season were incidents involving drugs, handguns, questionably leased automobiles, shoplifting, fradulent phone calls, and physical battles with campus police.

  Penn State, with its vanilla offense, dull uniforms, Boy Scout image, and the lofty ideals inherent in its head coach’s philosophies, provided the perfect foil for these bad boys. It didn’t take long for the media to cast the showdown as college football’s version of a morality play. Here was Good versus Evil for the highest stakes possible. And it would all play out in prime time.

  The contrasts extended to Paterno and Miami coach Jimmy Johnson. Johnson, slick and shifty, was a coaching maverick with a restless ambition. Though he was just forty-three, the former Arkansas lineman already had worked at Louisiana Tech, Picayune, Wichita State, Iowa State, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Pitt, and Oklahoma State.

  That was eight more schools than appeared on the sixty-year-old Paterno’s resume. And Johnson was among those coaches—many of them clustered in the South and Southwest—who saw Penn State’s coach as annoyingly self-righteous. When asked during Fiesta Bowl week if he would recommend that the NCAA adopt overtime, that dislike surfaced. “I could do it,” Johnson said, “but I think that it would have more clout if St. Joe proposed it.”

  Johnson by then had seen that week’s Sports Illustrated, with Paterno on its cover. The magazine had named Penn State’s coach its Sportsman of the Year for 1986. In a glowing article by Rick Reilly that served as St. Joe’s formal canonization, he was portrayed as the game’s last white knight.

  “In an era of college football in which it seems everybody’s hand is either in the till or balled up in a fist, Paterno sticks out like a clean thumb,” Reilly wrote. “His standard of excellence is so season-in, season-out consistent it borders on the monotonous: win ten, eleven games; send off another bunch of future doctors, lawyers, and accountants. In the heyday of the Bosworth Ethic, when talking trash is hot and shaking hands before the coin toss is not; when the Texas coach gets fired for winning just seventy-five percent of his games, the Maryland coach runs a 9.9 100 to chat with a referee, and the Cal coach lets his Fruit of the Looms do his talking; when it takes a paralegal just to make out the sports page, we need the guy in the PhotoGray trifocals more than ever.”

  For his part, Paterno could be equally dismissive of Johnson. In his autobiography, published two years later, he criticized the Miami coach in unusually harsh terms for failing to rein in his players’ controversial behavior that week. After all, Paterno wrote, “[Johnson’s players] were representing the University of Miami and supposedly higher education.”

  No one would be surprised when this updated version of the Friday night fights attracted 52 million viewers and a 25.1 rating—records for college sporting events that have survived till today.

  Privately, the publicity-hungry bowl organizers must have been delighted when Miami showed up in just the right costume. Upon the team’s arrival that week, a dozen players exited the plane in camouflage fatigues. While Irvin, Brown, and others seemed to relish their role as villains, they also appeared genuinely disturbed by their opponents’ “goody-black-shoes” image. And whether it was some psychological ploy or not, they went out of their way that week to denigrate them.

  “We played for the national championship on September 27 [against Oklahoma],” said defensive tackle Dan Sileo. “As far as I’m concerned, Friday’s game is just the end of the season.”

  Irvin said that if the all-American Conlan covered him, he’d “run right past him.”

  And when Brown was asked what he thought of Dozier and Shaffer, he scoffed: “I think they’re nothing.”

  Meanwhile, Penn State’s players, dressed in their traditional coats and ties, got through most of the week’s interviews and banquets without reciprocating—until both squads attended a steak fry that, ironically, had been designed to bring them together in a spirit of sportsmanship. And, curiously, it was not Miami but Penn State—and, in particular, punter John Bruno—that precipitated The Tempest in a T-bone.

  Each team had been asked to present a humorous skit after the meal. When it was Penn State’s turn, Bruno joked first about Johnson’s helmet of immovable hair. The Hurricanes didn’t laugh. Next he and teammates performed some mocking Heisman Trophy poses, aimed at Miami’s Heisman-winning QB Vinny Testaverde.

  Then Bruno uttered a foolish joke that inadvertently pointed to the disparate racial makeup of the two teams. While Paterno’s teams traditionally had been predominantly white, Bruno suggested t
here was harmony on this slightly more intergrated squad. “We even let the black guys eat with us once a week at the training table,” he said.

  After Bruno’s racial joke, the Miami players were furious and wanted to leave. Johnson insisted they stay, at least until the skits were finished. Some stood up and defiantly removed their sweatshirts to reveal more camouflage. When Penn State’s skit concluded, Johnson said he “gave them the high sign and they left in unison.”

  On his way out, Brown shouted, “Did the Japanese go and have dinner with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them? No. We’re out of here.” The Hurricanes’ mass exit and Brown’s remark—though not any of Bruno’s—were what filled the newspapers the following day.

  Paterno probably would have blanched at the comments, but the coach, obsessively preparing for the game, had not been there to hear them. Later, in his autobiography, his only comment on the tawdry affair touched on Miami’s “disgraceful walkout.”

  “People trash us because we all left together,” Johnson said. “But Joe Paterno didn’t even attend.”

  John Junker, the Fiesta Bowl president, was there. And in an interview with The Miami Herald seventeen years later, he defended the Hurricanes’ behavior at the dinner.

  “One of my memories that is terribly underreported . . . the Penn State players were making fun of [Miami], doing Heisman poses and doing them in less than respectful ways,” he said. “That never got reported by anybody because of the level of rhetoric it got to. I always thought it was a little unfair. Miami definitely got the rough end of the deal. There were two sides to that coin, and the one side doesn’t often get looked at.”

  Eerily, that night’s chief protagonists, Bruno and Brown, would be dead within six years. Bruno would succumb to cancer in April of 1992. Two months later, Brown was killed in a Florida car crash.