The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  Early in the second half, in what had become another recurring theme, there was more confusion and anger visible on Penn State’s sideline. Following cornerback Gio Vendemia’s recovery of a fumbled punt at the Wildcats’ 14, the offense huddled around McQueary and Kenny. Meanwhile, the twenty-five-second clock continued to run. Finally, Paterno rushed in to break up the gathering, but the Lions had to spend a time-out. In the chaotic aftermath, McQueary and Kenny screamed loudly at each other.

  “The torture of watching this team is exceeded only by [the torture of watching the] players carrying out the marching orders—when they get them on time,” Rudel would write in Blue White Illustrated.

  Herron, who would finish with 175 yards on thirty carries, and the Wildcats’ offensive line began to weary the Nittany Lions’ defenders. On the third play of the fourth quarter, Herron capped an 83-yard drive with a 1-yard plunge that put Northwestern in front, 14–7.

  Penn State’s last drive started at its own 20 midway through the final period. Mills’s passing moved them downfield and, on a 24-yard strike to Robinson, got them a first down at Northwestern’s 18. But there the pass-catching problems that had wounded the Lions all season resurfaced.

  Kinta Palmer missed a pass on first down. Then, on third down, Robinson broke free near the Wildcats’ goal line. Mills’s pass hit him in stride but the receiver could not hold on, squandering what would have been a game-knotting TD. On fourth-and-10, Mills inexplicably threw a short pass to a well-covered Hunt. It gained only four yards.

  Spectators booed, screamed, and fled to the exits.

  Northwestern took over with 3:27 left and Penn State out of time-outs. The Nittany Lions would not get the ball back.

  Morelli had warmed up a few times on the sideline and fans, spotting him, began yelling that he be inserted. He never was.

  “I was very close,” said Paterno. “It just didn’t seem like the right time.”

  Mills completed twenty-one of thirty-four passes for 183 yards, but could produce only seven points.

  On the sideline, Adam Taliaferro, in street clothes and able to walk now with only a slight limp, shook his head in dismay. He joined his former teammates as they trudged into the stadium tunnel, heading for the locker room.

  Many of the fans leaning over the tunnel walkway, even those regulars who generally did nothing more provocative than ask for a wristband, barked angrily at the players, particularly when Mills passed.

  “You suck, Zack!” screamed one.

  In the stands, just yards away from where he walked, a few students started a chant of “Joe Must Go! Joe Must Go!”

  “As far as we know, he’s staying,” said Smolko. “There’s no reason for him to be leaving. I don’t see it happening. And even if it is, we don’t know. . . . He’s about the same way we are. He just doesn’t know what to think and what to expect and what the reasons for the outcomes of our games are.”

  The person to whom many of Paterno’s detractors continued to gripe was Graham Spanier.

  Penn State’s fifty-six-year-old president, as his university biography noted, was an unconventional administrator. A magician, musician, and pilot, Spanier believed in hands-on involvement. He had performed with the school’s marching band, its musical-theater group, and glee club. He even once made an appearance as the Nittany Lion mascot.

  Spanier, the husband of a Hemingway scholar, also had run with the bulls in Pamplona. He had approached that 2001 adventure with an academic’s precision. By studying the bulls’ tendencies, identifying the safest route, and familiarizing himself with the event’s history, he managed to dodge the rampaging bovines and the swarms of red-scarfed revelers who surged through the Spanish city’s cobblestoned streets every year on the Feast of San Fermín.

  Paterno’s game-plan alterations earlier that morning hadn’t helped. Penn State was minutes away from a sixth consecutive loss. Now, on the Northwestern possession that would conclude Penn State’s 14–7 loss, Spanier again found himself scurrying from danger. Only this time, there was no way he could have prepared.

  As he hurried along the Beaver Stadium sideline, directly in front of sections jammed with Penn State students in blue T-shirts, he was moving with considerably more dread than on his Spanish dash. And the horns of the dilemma that confronted him were every bit as threatening as those on a fifteen-hundred-pound bull.

  “Hey, Spanier, get rid of Paterno!” yelled one student in Section EB. “It’s over.”

  As more among the disgruntled crowd recognized the Penn State president, they began bellowing their own complaints. Spanier, accelerating his unathletic stride, moved uncomfortably past the shouts, past the straggly back row of Nittany Lions reserves, past security guards and the ex-players and hangers-on who had wangled field passes for the game.

  “Make a change, Spanier!” came a loud cry from the front of Section EC. “Make a change!”

  His late-game jaunt through this gauntlet of frustration had been a mistake, like waving a red flag in front of thousands of irritated bulls. Spanier should have known better. For weeks, wherever he went, he had heard the same thing. He couldn’t outrun all the negative buzz about Paterno.

  Nine games into another disappointing season, Spanier still had no easy answers. That’s why he had stopped discussing the issue in public.

  At that moment, on his rapid sideline walk, Spanier found himself flanked, both figuratively and literally, by two Joe Paternos.

  To the president’s left was the seventy-seven-year-old coach, his body tilted sharply forward in a posture of surrender as Penn State neared its sixteenth defeat in twenty-one games. This Paterno appeared tired, confused, vulnerable. As his Lions’ last-gasp drive died with a pair of dropped passes, he lowered his gaze, dejectedly planted his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, and leaned his graying head into an intensifying wind.

  Not far off to Spanier’s right, however, in a stone grotto just outside the stadium’s student section, stood a much sturdier version. Smiling, upbeat, vigorous, this bronzed Paterno was vibrantly middle aged, his index finger was thrust skyward in a permanent reminder that he had made Penn State No. 1. The Paterno sculpture, in fact, was such a fetching representation of the iconic coach that even in these dark days fans regularly lined up to pose for photos alongside it.

  This was the uncomfortable geography Spanier occupied. Marooned between the puzzled old man and the bronze legend. Two Paternos inextricably linked. Attempting to push the coach aside after fifty-four years and 341 wins would be no less difficult for him than lifting the seven-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound statue.

  Not that he wanted to push him aside. Paterno’s departure, no matter when and how it came, was going to be a costly one. No one could raise money like the old coach.

  The silver-haired Spanier, wearing an expensive gray suit and a practiced smile, moved quicker now. As he did, more students and fans targeted him. Somewhere around Section EF a few faint chants of “Joe Must Go! Joe Must Go!” arose.

  Since 1995, when Spanier, a former University of Nebraska chancellor, first assumed the presidency, Paterno’s age and status had been an issue. By 2001, a 5–6 season that began with four consecutive losses, he had felt the need to address the topic in his annual letter to alumni. Though not referring specifically to Paterno, Spanier noted that age was rarely an impediment to achievement. Michelangelo, he pointed out, was seventy-one when he painted the Sistine Chapel.

  The discontent ebbed a bit when Penn State went 9–4 and appeared in a New Year’s Day bowl in 2002. But the 3–9 mark in 2003 and six consecutive losses this season had resurrected it with a vengeance. Alums who were proud of Paterno’s principles were weary of his teams’ football failings. And with each new disappointment, the questions and the questioners had become more intensely unpleasant. Hundreds of letters and e-mails calling for a coaching change arrived in Spanier’s office each week.

  “You know you’ve got an outstanding human being, there’s no question about wh
at he’s done for Penn State,” Spanier said later. “But then you’ve got people complaining about ‘We lost the game.’ Or ‘He made a bad call.’ Or whatever. . . . When you’re winning, everybody is happy about everything. But when you’re losing some games, we find out that there are some fair-weather fans out there. And there are some people who have never been friends and it gives them more of a case to get on them. So you have to be able to sort through that and see the big picture.

  “It’s very hard, how you answer letters like that and how you deal with it. As president I don’t have the luxury of not answering them. And in that respect, it was a little different this season because we did get more mail than we’ve ever gotten.”

  Spanier and Steve MacCarthy, vice president for university relations, had a fairly pat answer for most of the anti-Paterno correspondents.

  “We usually said something like ‘We’re very sorry you feel this way. We’ll certainly keep your thoughts in mind, but we’re going to make our decisions in terms of what’s in the best interest of the university.’

  “That’s the main message I send to people,” said Spanier. “That my job as president is to see the big picture and to make decisions in terms of what’s in the best interest of Penn State. Once I start making decisions on some basis other than that, the university is not going to be run well.”

  Finally, Spanier reached his destination, clear of the grandstands and safely inside a stadium tunnel. There he greeted several potential football recruits, including highly prized cornerback Justin King from Monroeville, Pennsylvania, who were attending the Northwestern game with their families. When Penn State’s 14–7 loss was officially complete, he escorted them all to Paterno’s postgame news conference.

  From a balcony that overlooked the interview room, Spanier, the athletes, and their parents watched as a gloomy Paterno—a bandage covering the cut he had suffered in his den early that morning—entered and slumped behind the podium to face another barrage of questions about a loss, his team, his future.

  Spanier pressed against a balcony railing. He was listening carefully, leaning forward to absorb each question and answer, looming over the old coach like a concerned deity.

  Among the spectators inside the stadium that day, though virtually no one recognized him, was Jackie Sherrill. The former Pitt and Texas A & M coach had once been Paterno’s principal antagonist, the epitome of all that the Penn State coach believed was wrong with the sport. Once, when asked if he would pursue a career in politics, Paterno famously responded, “What . . . and leave college coaching to the Switzers and Sherrills?”

  But Sue Paterno, a peacemaker by nature, sought to mend that fence. She invited Sherrill and his wife, Peggy, to that weekend’s game and to a postgame dinner at their house.

  Sherrill told a Pittsburgh newspaper that week that despite Paterno’s jibes a few decades earlier, he was not looking for an apology.

  “That’s not an issue,” Sherrill explained. “That has no bearing on my feelings for Joe. A lot of things were said. . . . When two people compete, things happen.”

  Sherrill, who knew he’d be spending a lot of time talking football that night, took notes during the game. He condensed them into a message on a yellow legal pad that he gave to Paterno that night after dinner.

  “[It said], ‘You guys are doing a good job and are getting the most out of your kids. Your scheme is good, the play calling is good, but your skill people have to rise up and get better.’ ”

  When Paterno agreed with him, Sherrill imediately mentioned a few junior-college players he thought would help. The Penn State coach balked.

  “We don’t get rich quick,” Paterno said later. “We don’t take junior college kids. We try not to take kids that don’t belong here. . . . And I’ve felt it was not fair to bring junior-college kids in and put them ahead of kids you’ve had.

  “That’s not to say junior-college kids aren’t good kids. You always have to be careful when you say things like that. But I just have felt let’s do it right, let’s be solid, let’s build. And if you’re not good this year, at least you’re not making sacrifices on the future in order to win X number of games this year. 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.”

  As friendly as the two men now claimed to be, getting advice from his onetime bitter rival had to be one more mortifying experience for Paterno in a season filled with them. After all, the last time Sherrill had been in State College, he was coaching Pitt. His Panthers had won that day in 1980, 14–9, ending the Nittany Lions’ dreams of a New Year’s Day bowl appearance.

  Now Paterno would have to endure another indignity.

  When he and Jay got back to the McKee Street house hours after the loss, the elder Paterno asked where Sherrill was. The ex-coach, he was told, was down in the basement watching another college football game.

  Paterno descended the stairs and, sure enough, there was the sixty-year-old Sherrill in a recliner, viewing the game.

  Sitting in Sherrill’s lap, snuggled against his chest, was Paterno’s four-year-old grandson and namesake, Joey.

  CHAPTER 19

  THROUGHOUT THIS SIX-GAME losing streak there was speculation that Paterno and Spanier, or Paterno and the trustees, or Paterno and major contributors, had been meeting privately to plot exit strategies, pinpoint a successor, or plan a retirement announcement. But despite the widespread perception, there had been very little behind-the-scene intrigue.

  “I had one meeting with a couple of people in the administration,” Paterno said, “and I said, ‘Hey, everybody just calm down. We’re OK.’ And that was it,” Paterno would say. “Now, what was going on beyond that, I can’t tell you.”

  At least two trustees, however, admitted privately that while they might not have met formally with the coach, they had had “casual” conversations with him about retirement during the season. They said he had rebuffed their efforts to convince him that, if nothing else, he at least needed to designate a successor.

  “The more you bug him about it,” said one of those trustees, “the more determined he becomes to hold his ground. He won’t let anyone dictate anything to him, even if they’re not really dictating anything at all.”

  Spanier, who had been responding to reporters’ queries only via e-mail, finally addressed the subject after the season. He indicated for the first time then that while the ideal scenario would have Paterno determining his fate, he retained the final say.

  “Clearly there are three key people in any decisions about any of our head-coaching positions,” he said, “—the head coach, the athletic director, and the president. We talk about these things a lot together, but I’ve such immense respect for Joe Paterno and so much admiration for what he’s accomplished and done for the university that I would want his voice to be a very strong voice in the scenario. Our preference is to have it be a decision that Joe makes.”

  In any event, the ongoing mystery exacerbated the atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the coach. Rather than address the subject at hand, he continued to blame the sportswriters for creating the rumors. That was disingenuous. After all, he could have attended a few Friday-night receptions and assured everyone—off the record, if need be—that nothing was happening and that he wasn’t going anywhere. Instead, in the information vacuum he permitted to exist, the whispers had become shouts.

  “If I had gone there [to the media cocktail gatherings] and they would have asked me, they [wouldn’t have believed] me anyway,” he would later say. “It was at that point where they had assumed certain things were going on and they didn’t want anybody to disrupt their assumptions. That’s what went on all year. They assumed this, assumed that. . . . There was no way to change their minds. They couldn’t change their minds. They were in too deep.”

  The conspiracy theorists searched for any sign, any statement, any hint, that indicated movement. And tha
t Thursday, two days before the Indiana game, they thought they had their smoking gun at last.

  The incident began when a pair of former Steelers, Tunch Ilkin and Craig Wolfley, the cohosts of an irreverent morning sports talk show on a Pittsburgh radio station, began lamenting the state of Penn State football with guest Leo Wisniewski, a former Nittany Lions offensive lineman.

  In the course of their conversation, Ilkin mentioned that a source at the university had told him Paterno would be stepping down soon and that Bradley, his longtime defensive coordinator and top recruiter, would be replacing him. Wisniewski added that he had heard the same thing and that when he arrived in State College later that same day, he’d check out its veracity. Much of Penn State nation had been eagerly anticipating news like this for weeks. The rumor quickly hardened into accepted truth, as telephones, e-mail, and Internet chat rooms disseminated the news around the state and nation.

  Back in State College, in his office on the first level of the Bryce Jordan Center, sports information director Jeff Nelson began fielding an avalanche of phone calls from frantic reporters. After making sure the news was not true and getting the OK from Curley, Nelson composed a terse release. It would be the first time he could recall that Penn State had formulated an official response to a rumor.

  “Statements made on a Pittsburgh radio station earlier today regarding the future of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno,” it read, “are unfounded and untrue. The meeting described in the radio report did not occur. The Board of Trustees has not met since mid-September. In his weekly news conference this past Tuesday, Coach Paterno reaffirmed his commitment to continuing to lead the Nittany Lion Football program. Any other statements to the contrary are untrue.”