“And then I got to the point where I don’t trust some of them,” he explained. “I just literally don’t trust them. I used to trust them. I didn’t care if they said something and we had a couple beers and wanted to clown around. I don’t trust a lot of these guys right now. That’s maybe my fault but I just don’t trust them. They’re just looking for a controversy. . . . The environment has changed so much. It isn’t what it used to be for me. Friday nights were a waste of my time because I didn’t enjoy it. And it was a waste of their time because I wasn’t about to tell them anything.”
What seemed to really get under his skin was the fact that many of the most critical writers on the Penn State beat were so young and inexperienced. Heather Dinich, the Centre Daily Times’s beat reporter, seemed to bother him more than the others, probably because Paterno subscribed to her paper and because she was twenty-seven, a half century younger than himself. Dinich frequently questioned the coach’s methods in print, and whether he read it or not, word got back to him.
“I sit there and I’ve got to answer questions from a young lady who’s never played football,” he said, without naming Dinich. “She’s got all the answers. She’s twenty-seven years old and she’s quizzing me. ‘Why did you this? Why did you do that?’ Challenging this and that. Fine, she wants to make a reputation. She wants to do a job. But I’m not going to pay attention to her.
“I don’t want to be bothered by that. If Bobby Bowden wrote me a letter, and said, ‘Joe, I watched your game and you ought to do this, this, and this,’ well, then I’d listen. Because every once in a while some coach will write me and say, ‘Hang in there. Do this.’ Try to give me something helpful.”
The more Penn State lost, of course, the more necessary it became for the writers to ask the questions that irritated him most. Generally, they were smart enough and respectful enough to drape them in a polite tone.
At one of Paterno’s late-season weekly teleconferences, for example, Bob Flounders of the Harrisburg Patriot-News phrased his one allotted query like this:
“Coach, what is your definition of progress for this team in the final two games, and if the team doesn’t meet it, do you deserve to be back?”
Paterno had been playing this game a long time. As he frequently told friends, he was adept at avoiding questions he really didn’t want to answer. This clearly was one of those.
The coach said he hadn’t heard the second part of the question, then began answering the first. Flounders, ninety miles away in Harrisburg and limited to one question, interrupted and started to ask it again.
Paterno cut him off. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “you were asking me about progress.” He then started talking about the Nittany Lions’ strong defense and how his team had hung together despite the adversity.
“So,” Flounders recalled later, “I finally decided I needed to be a little blunt because either he was trying to pretend like he didn’t hear my question or he simply didn’t want to answer it. So I said, ‘Do you deserve to be back next year?’
“Knowing he would turn seventy-eight in December, it was a legitimate question. . . . I tried to ask the question delicately, tying it to improvement over the final two games, but it was clear to me Joe was intent on avoiding it. So I took the direct approach after two failed tries because I believed Joe had some explaining to do regarding the decline of his program.”
The directness of the question caught Paterno off guard. There was a slight delay, a moment of collective disbelief among those in the hushed media room with the coach. The emperor had been asked if he were wearing any clothes. Paterno appeared to mentally sift through his options before, in a tone that combined hurt, disappointment, and anger, he spat out a most uncharacteristic reply.
“You write your own story,” he said. “I really don’t appreciate that question, to be honest with you. After fifty-five years to have somebody tell me that, I don’t appreciate that.”
The online transcript of the interview session posted on Penn State’s Web site later that afternoon omitted that exchange. But it made it into newspapers all across the state the next day.
Flounders, whose paper circulates in the heart of Nittany Lions country, calculated that he received nearly a hundred responses.
“I would say roughly ninety-five percent of the people were glad the question was asked,” he said. “I was surprised. I expected a lot of hate mail, but it was just the opposite.”
When an attorney in York, Pennsylvania, read about the question, Paterno’s reaction, and the Web site’s censoring, he decided the time had come to act. Joseph Korsak, a 1971 Penn State graduate and longtime football season-ticket holder, contacted the Daily Collegian. He paid $350 for a half-page ad that appeared the day before the Northwestern game.
“He had his little hissy fit and they just erased it,” Korsak explained. “He’s treated like a dictator in a banana republic.”
In large, bold type, the advertisement proclaimed, TIME FOR JOE TO GO. Above that phrase, in smaller print, were nine stinging words: “The talent is there. The coaching is an abomination.”
“I’ve been going to Penn State games for years,” Korsak later said. “The people I sit with have been complaining about the coaching for a long time. But nothing happened and it dawned on me that Paterno was being treated like the uncle with cancer. We weren’t addressing the issue, we were talking around it. So I wanted to bring focus to the discussion.”
And though he didn’t read the papers, the coach had somehow spotted Korsak’s ad too.
“The hardest thing about anything you do in life is you can get overcome with a lot of people who really don’t know what the situation is,” Paterno would say. “Some guy puts an ad in the paper that says ‘Fire Joe Paterno’ and pays three hundred and fifty dollars and now everybody knows who he is. I mean, the guy’s a celebrity.”
If nothing else, the ad seemed to give voice to those last few in the Penn State community who had been holding their tongues on the subject.
On a student-run radio station in State College, The Lion 90.7–FM, two young men were talking about music the day the ad appeared. When asked a question, one of them hesitated.
“Sorry,” he said, “I had an Alzheimer’s moment.”
The other interrupted. “You mean a Paterno moment.”
The chatter on sports talk shows became overheated, “More venomous,” said Jed Donahue, the host of one in State College. “It’s the toughest coaching situation I’ve ever seen, pro, college, or high school.”
On ESPN Radio’s nationally syndicated Dan Patrick Show, which was heard in State College, the subject had been discussed so thoroughly that week that by Friday it was all played out.
“I’d have some more former Penn State players on if I thought they’d say anything about Joe other than ‘He deserves to get out when he wants to,’ ” Patrick said that day. Then he played an audio clip from Washington Redskins defensive tackle Brandon Noble, who said exactly that.
Paterno said he was touched by such shows of support.
“I know there’s been a lot of media that’s been critical of me and the coaching staff and the team and certain players,” Paterno said that week, “but I’ve just had so much mail and people who stopped me on the street and say, ‘Hey, hang in there a little bit.’ It’s been very encouraging.”
His friends and neighbors in State College displayed compassion on those increasingly rare occasions when they encountered the workaholic coach. It was, he said, “people from out of town that hassle me.”
“Once in a while alumni come back and bring kids that want their pictures taken with me,” he said. “That’s flattering. In fact, I go around looking for people to take pictures with me these days.”
The day he was insulted by Flounders’s question was also Election Day. Paterno had been to the College Heights polling station earlier that morning. There he was able to vote, presumably, for George W. Bush, but not for his own son, Scott, whose Seventeenth Congressional
District did not include State College.
Politically, Paterno’s moderate Republicanism was probably more in line with Nelson Rockefeller’s than George W. Bush’s. “Joe is a liberal person who has conservative values,” his brother George told biographer Michael O’Brien. President Ford and others had tried to convince him to run for office over the years, but he had always declined. His close affiliation with the GOP, however, had earned him criticism from those who felt it was inappropriate behavior for a coach at a public university.
“I won’t get into politics,” he said to the press that day, “but I just hope we pick the right guy. . . . I woke up this morning on Election Day thinking about my dad. My dad was a diehard liberal Democrat. I had a younger brother who died in infancy who was named Franklin after Franklin Roosevelt. If he knew he had a grandson running in the Republican Party for Congress, he would jump out of that grave, call me up, and give me every dirty Italian word you could ever think of.”
Scott Paterno, as his father had anticipated, lost to Holden. He got 112,242 votes (thirty-nine percent) to the victor’s 170,449 (fifty-nine percent). Bush, meanwhile, won Centre County but lost Pennsylvania by a wide margin.
That week a caller to his radio show jokingly suggested that perhaps the Paterno name had hurt Scott. If Penn State had been 6–2 instead of 2–6, he said, maybe the thirty-one-year-old candidate would have fared better.
“Thanks a lot, buddy,” Paterno replied in good humor. “No, he had a tough opponent. I think it was a good experience for him and he gave it a good fight and I’m proud of him. I’ve got five great kids and all of them have got a little moxie. . . . I used to tell them all the time that a turtle can’t cross the road unless they stick their head out. So they’re all willing to stick their heads out.
“The guy he ran against is a good guy. He’s a good congressman even for . . .” His voice trailed off, apparently before he could say “a Democrat.” “He’s a five- or six-term incumbent. He knew it was going to be tough. . . . I called him and told him when Abraham Lincoln lost his first election somebody said to him, ‘How do you feel?’ And he said, ‘I’m too big to cry and it hurts too much to laugh.’ ”
Lincoln’s words, curiously, could have been applied just as easily to Joe Paterno’s situation.
For Paterno, one of the most difficult defeats of the 2003 season had come at Northwestern.
The coach believed many Big Ten schools took liberties—in recruiting or with academics—that he would not permit at Penn State. To friends, he frequently pointed to the Maurice Clarett mess at Ohio State as an example of doing things the wrong way. Clarett, a sensational freshman running back on Ohio State’s national 2002 national-championship team, had been suspended after accusations that he received preferential academic treatment and no-work jobs. He also pleaded guilty to lying to police about an alleged theft of $10,000 in merchandise from his car.
But Northwestern, in his view, was a program very much like his own. Three times since 1998 the Evanston, Illinois, school had been awarded the American Football Coaches Association’s academic achievement award for a hundred-percent graduaton rate. Maybe Penn State wasn’t always going to play at the level of an Ohio State or Michigan, but Northwestern ought to be a different story.
“Northwestern is a school that does it the way we do,” Paterno said. “We have to be able to compete against that. There are some schools that you can step back and say, ‘Well, that’s a whole different program than what we have.’ You can’t do that with [Northwestern].”
That challenge provided him some motivation for what was otherwise a meaningless game.
In what was becoming a weekly ritual, Paterno on Monday again sought to lift his players’ heads. He told them to ignore all the negativity swirling around State College. He said they ought to approach their final three games the way the Irish, and not the Italians, approached a wake.
“At the Irish wake, at least you have a little fun,” he said. “At Italian wakes, all of the women are crying all day. We’re playing football in the fall. The leaves are out. Everything is great. It’s such a beautiful day and you’re young. Let’s go out and play a football game. Have some fun and forget about what the media is saying.”
Paterno had been encouraged that week when the father of a recruit visiting campus told him he still “had something special here.” He also knew by then that he had a good shot at landing Justin King and Derrick Williams. While he couldn’t tell his team the recruiting specifics, he let them know help was on the way and urged them to keep the faith. The program’s difficulties were overblown. Penn State, he told them, was this close to a turnaround. And it could start with the Lions’ final three games, against Northwestern, Indiana, and Michigan State, all of them winnable.
Outside Beaver Stadium on Saturday, fans hawked unused tickets right up until the noon kickoff. The crowd would be announced at 100,353, the smallest attendance for a Big Ten game since the latest stadium expansion. That total reflected tickets sold. In reality there were far fewer fans there.
In the face of the program’s steep decline, Penn State continued to make every effort to maintain its base of support. Just that week, Greg Myford, an executive with the Palace at Auburn Hills, the Detroit Pistons’ arena, had been hired for a new athletic-department position, associate AD for marketing and communications. And D’Elia, seeking to generate some excitement in the midst of another lost season, had declared a “Code Blue.”
Despite their disappointment over the season, most of the students arrived wearing that color, though some also brought beach balls, apparently as insurance against boredom. A few of them also had bags to place over their heads as a silent protest. And at least one female student, with sunshine and temperatures in the fifties, had written MORELLI across her bare midriff, a naked plea to see the youngster in action.
The game was being televised at noon by ESPN Plus on a regional basis. Penn State’s record had made them unappealing for national audiences. As a result, as the season progressed, smaller regional telecasts and noon starts became the norm. While noon was somewhat early for college students’ tastes, it was a boon to university police.
“We love the noon starts,” said Spanier. “Who’s going to start drinking at nine A.M.? Games that start later, at, say, eight P.M., are far more challenging. With an eight P.M. kickoff, there’s a lot more time to drink before the game and then afterwards everybody heads downtown to the bars.”
Even so, every campus police officer, as well as scores of state troopers and law-enforcement officers from the borough of State College and surrounding communities, were in or outside the stadium that day. With more than a hundred thousand fans on football Saturdays, the area surrounding Beaver Stadium became Pennsylvania’s third largest city.
Also surveying that population from perches high atop the multilevel press box and the new suites on the stadium’s east side were several plainclothes policemen.
“[Their] job, while everyone else is watching the game, is to look out at the parking lots, checking around to see if there are any problems,” said Spanier.
Northwestern, at 4–4, 3–2 in the Big Ten, was no juggernaut, but the Wildcats didn’t have to be to beat this Penn State team.
Randy Walker’s team ran the kind of vanilla offense Paterno once had—a big offensive line opening holes for a talented running back. Senior Noah Herron was third in the Big Ten, averaging 111.6 yards a game, nearly as many as the Nittany Lions managed as a team.
Penn State would be without safety Andrew Guman, whose chest and rib injuries against Ohio State kept him out. That meant ten of the eleven defensive starters were underclassmen, an encouraging sign for a unit that already was one of just four Division I-A teams—Texas, Auburn, and Wisconsin were the others—to have limited all of their opponents to 21 or fewer points.
On offense, Mills was back at quarterback. That meant Robinson would be shifted all around again, a strategy that by this stage of the season appeared t
o be doing little but diminishing his effectiveness.
Paterno had upset all the Morelli backers further by implying earlier that Robinson would most likely be his quarterback in 2005. What was the use of recruiting high-school superstars, the thinking went, if they were going to languish on the bench? But this week the coach appeared to waver on his commitment.
“That [finding Robinson a permanent position] is a legitimate decision I’m probably going to have to make down the road,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it is right now.”
Morelli was on the sideline as Robinson lined up as a flanker on Penn State’s first play. For an offense that was under such fierce attack, things could not have started less encouragingly. On a pass play set up by a double reverse, Robinson, a right-hander, got the ball running to his left. Stopped by the defense, he reversed field and, while trying to elude a defender, heaved a weak floater toward Tony Hunt. Northwestern’s Dominique Price easily picked it off. It was Robinson’s fifth interception in just over one and a half games, and it was the Lions’ twenty-fourth turnover in nine games.
This time there was no hesitation. Loud boos immediately rolled through the stadium even though the Lions had run just a single play. What kind of atmosphere would there be if they were trailing in the fourth quarter?
Northwestern responded immediately after the interception. A 51-yard pass from Brett Basanez to Jonathan Fields set up Terrell Jordan’s 1-yard touchdown run and the Wildcats led, 7–0.
Penn State’s next drive provoked more catcalls when fullback Paul Jefferson dropped a catchable third-down pass to end it. The game became a punters’ battle until Paul Cronin, subbing for Guman, intercepted a Basanez pass and returned it 14 yards to the Wildcats’ 22. Six plays later, with thirty-seven seconds remaining in the half, Mills found Smolko on a game-tying 2-yard scoring toss.
The Lion in Autumn Page 29