The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

Now he told the Quarterback Club audience, “Sometimes I go to sleep at night thinking I could have done a better job for them.”

  That sentiment had brought Paterno to tears during a practice earlier that week. He had told his players then that he’d be back next year because he was afraid of both living and dying without football. Then, realizing that perhaps the mood he had created was too maudlin, he loosened up on the practice field. When a pair of arguing players exchanged punches, Paterno stepped between them. He told them how stupid it was for two guys in helmets and pads to be fighting, then he put on Tamba Hali’s helmet and told the combatants to strike him instead.

  Now the audience laughed as Paterno got ready for his wrap-up. Despite everything he had been telling his team, and his season-long denials to the media, no one except the coach and his wife really knew his plans. In fact, there was fresh speculation that week that indicated he was going to step down in a dramatic gesture after the Michigan State game. That way, the thinking went, he would have managed to avoid all the embarrassing farewells and media attention that otherwise would have marked his final season.

  As his concluding words sounded surprisingly emotional and valedictory, a confused buzz spread through the room. Maybe the rumors were true.

  “Hey, you know what?” he said. “No matter what anyone else says . . . in a lot of ways this has been one of the greatest years I’ve ever been around Penn State. The crowds have been great, even though we’re not fighting for the national championship or anything like that. You folks have shown up every week. You put up with my alibis and excuses and my feeble answers to some tough questions which I don’t really want to answer.

  “I can only say, from my heart”—he paused to inhale and to gather himself—“it’s been a privilege.”

  With that, he departed with a small entourage and entered the club’s elevator. One of his fellow riders was an old College Heights neighbor. Like anyone else stuck awkwardly in an confined space with a casual acquaintance, the coach tried to make small talk.

  “It’s been beautiful this fall, hasn’t it?” he said to the man. “The weather, I mean. Not the football.”

  Joe Paterno walked into his weekly radio show the following night, later than normal. He was hungry. He liked to eat with his wife at about 6:15, but on Thursday nights the radio show made that impossible.

  “I think she’s having some pasta tonight,” he said, raising his eyebrows in a look of relish, before going on the air.

  Until Paterno arrived, former players Mickey Shuler and Chuck Benjamin had been filling in for their old coach, answering Jones’s good-natured questions and defending Paterno whenever the opportunity arose.

  “I was on a team here that didn’t produce a lot of wins but did produce a lot of great people,” said Shuler, a onetime New York Jets tight end, of his 7–5 season in 1976. “It’s the same as what’s going on now. . . . Players don’t get as upset about wins and losses as alums and fans around the country.”

  Waiting for his cue, the coach kept flexing his right shoulder and grimacing. “I’m going to punch Wake in the mouth,” he laughed. “He gave me a shot today in the shoulder.”

  Thursday’s practice had been unusually lighthearted. In what was surely a clue to his level of introspection, Paterno had opened the workout by yet again quoting Hamlet, urging his players to cast aside thoughts of this latest losing season and “take arms against a sea of trouble.” The old quarterback even threw a few passes. And when he lined up at a wide receiver’s spot, the defenders jokingly insisted the linebacker Wake, a graduating senior, cover the coach because they didn’t want to precipitate any future reprisals. A subsequent collison with Wake caused the coach’s aches.

  When regular caller Jerry from Philadelphia came on the line, Paterno noted how sad he was that Jerry’s second-favorite team, Temple, was being drummed out of the Big East. “You would hope there’d be some loyalty there,” he said in what sounded like an echo from his own situation. “It can’t be all business and television and money and all this stuff.”

  When Mike from Lansdale criticized Penn State’s offensive line, the coach, warming to a conversation as he always did, seconded his assessment.

  “I agree with you. I think the offensive line’s been lousy. I’ve challenged them. We’ve had [a lack of] concentration, jumping offsides, holding, not being aggressive. . . . I’ll bet we have not gone against an offensive line that has better athletes than ours. I mean that. We’ve kept the offense as simple as we can and maybe that’s a problem. Maybe it’s too simple. I really don’t know. We have not really dominated the line of scrimmage, and unless you dominate the line of scrimmage you’re not really a good offensive team. . . . I think part of the problem is people can be aggressive up front because they don’t have to worry about our wideouts.”

  The conversations had enlivened him. During a commercial break, he was asked if he were surprised that the callers remained so upbeat, positive, and polite.

  “Ahhh, who knows?” he answered. “They’re being respectful. They might feel like saying, ‘That son of a bitch!’ Who knows? I don’t know. People are up and down. I think they’re fair and maybe a little bit condescending. I don’t know what kind of radio show you’d get in Texas or someplace else. But it’s been pretty consistent here.”

  It was while answering a question from Dennis of Allentown that Paterno finally gave voice to what he and everyone else around the program seemed to have been denying for months, maybe years.

  “What can I tell you,” he said. “We’re frustrated. You know, we’re frustrated. We’re frustrated. Frustrated. You know how to spell it? F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-E-D.”

  Earlier that Thursday, the Penn State trustees had met again behind closed doors. This session took on a special significance, since it arrived in tandem with the rumor that Paterno was going to resign after the Michigan State game. ESPN had ballyhooed the speculation all that day and Friday, even though the coach’s public comments on the subject continued to suggest he’d be back.

  Several of the trustees later said Paterno’s status never surfaced, either at Thursday’s meeting or at the shorter public session a day later. It wasn’t on their agenda, they said. And even if it were, there was no established precedent for dealing with a football coach.

  “The board is behind Joe,” said Chairwoman Cynthia Baldwin, “but his future is not a board issue.”

  The trustees already had turned the touchy matter over to Spanier, and most were glad to have done so. Those who were keenly interested in football, however, reportedly were assured by Spanier that the uncertainty surrounding the program would not linger indefinitely. Board sources told the Harrisburg Patriot-News that a clause in the coach’s contract extension mandated that he step down if the losing continued through 2005.

  The fourteen seniors’ final bus ride from the Lasch Building to Beaver Stadium that Saturday morning was a sentimental journey. Fans, as they always did, lined the route. Some held up signs praising the soon-to-be-departing players. WE’LL MISS YOU, ZACK, read one. Hundreds of the most ardent supporters clustered near the team entrance to the stadium, and they let loose with heartfelt shouts when the players emerged from the bus and began to walk down the tunnel.

  “It was very emotional,” Mills said of the ride. “It meant a lot to hear that after the up-and-down season I’ve had. Then, just coming off the bus . . . going into the locker room and you have all those fans screaming.”

  The final senior to enter Beaver Stadium’s field during the pregame introductions before the Michigan State game was Adam Taliaferro. The graduating New Jersey resident, inactive since the day four years ago when, paralyzed, he was carried off the Ohio Stadium field, walked out into the gloomy daylight with only a slight limp.

  “People forget he was one of the best freshmen we ever had around here,” Paterno said later. “You look back and remember him being carried off the field. Then [a day later] he was on his back and I was there with him, with his mother
and father, and we didn’t know whether he was ever going to walk again. . . . It is just a great story.”

  Taliaferro’s emotional appearance—he and Mills drew the loudest ovations—appeared to fire up the crowd of 101,486.

  Before those introductions, Paterno had walked over to the student section. Yet another “Code Blue” had been declared and the seats had filled in rapidly once the gates opened. Paterno didn’t appear to notice a sign there that read, WE WERE . . . PENN STATE. He was searching for five female students who usually occupied the first row. The previous week, they had sent him both a group photo and a note of encouragement, urging the coach to stop by and greet them. So he did.

  College students were notoriously fickle fans, and Penn State’s were no different. They had been upbeat when the season dawned, but their discontent was sparked early and it accumulated during the losing streak. From the same section where those five girls now sat, angry words had been hurled at Paterno, Mills, and others at the end of several home losses. Now, at season’s end, the students, too, sensed a reason for optimism.

  “I walk around the campus with kids,” Paterno said, “and if they are driving a car or something, they say, ‘Hey, JoePa, hang in there.’ Kids on the campus come up. I must have fifty letters from kids.”

  Linebacker Dan Connor said that this would be the Nittany Lions bowl game.

  Penn State had entered the Big Ten without a traditional rival. Someone, noting that the schools were the nation’s oldest land-grant institutions, decided Penn State and Michigan State should play annually for the “Land Grant Trophy.”

  Their games tended to be high scoring and, the last two years anyway, one sided. In fact, the 2003 Lions’ 41–10 loss at East Lansing was the only game in which Paterno conceded his 3–9 team had been soundly beaten.

  The fact that 5–5 Michigan State needed a victory to gain an actual bowl bid, provided a little more incentive in what was otherwise an unattractive matchup.

  Erratic Michigan State had averaged 39 points in its previous five games, walloping first-place, fourth-ranked Wisconsin, then leading the Big Ten, a week earlier, 49–10. But against Penn State’s increasingly stern defense, the Spartans looked confused.

  Phillips intercepted a Spartan pass in the end zone to kill one drive and the two offenses could manage nothing but field goals in a first half that ended with Michigan State ahead, 6–3. Then came the quarter Penn State had been looking for all season.

  Hunt’s 1-yard run capped a 75-yard drive on the half’s opening series and gave the Nittany Lions a 10–6 advantage. Following a Hali interception, it took just one play to make it 17–6, Mills running eight yards to the end zone.

  Posluszny, who led the team again that day with fifteen tackles, intercepted another pass, and—again on the first play following the turnover—Mills rumbled 10 yards for a touchdown. Shortly afterward, Donnie Johnson blocked an MSU punt. This time, with twenty-one seconds remaining in the quarter, Mills hit Robinson on a 6-yard TD pass as Penn State’s lead exploded to 31–6.

  “I wanted the third quarter to go on forever,” said Bradley of his defense’s play. “Everything was clicking. Guys were making great plays, great drops, great reads. . . . It was really fun to watch.”

  Mills’s scoring pass was the forty-first of his career, tying him with with Tony Sacca and Todd Blackledge as the school’s all-time leader. Despite his frequent struggles and relatively weak arm, the quarterback would also end the game as Penn State’s career leader in passing yards and total offense. The same fans who had booed him all season screamed, “We love you, Zack!” as the clock wound down on a 37–13 Penn State victory.

  As a smiling Paterno ran off the field at game’s end, a sideline reporter from ESPN, which had been hinting all weekend that the coach might step down, asked him whether this might have been his last game. Paterno looked as if he had no idea where such a crazy notion might have originated.

  “What else am I going to do?” he said for maybe the twentieth time this season. “Cut grass?”

  Paterno might have been the only coach in America who could have been greeted with applause as he walked into a news conference following a 4–7 season.

  “Holy smokes,” he said, gazing up to the balcony area where season-ticket holders were gathering after the game. “We get two wins and I get that?”

  Still, it took only two questions before the subject of his coaching status was raised.

  “Have I ever said I wasn’t [coming back]?” he said in response to the query. “Was that wishful thinking? No, I’m planning to be back next year. As I’ve said, I’d like to be able to put together a scenario where I can pick the time I want to leave and have somebody in-house ready to take over. . . . I feel comfortable with the people around me. I’d like to leave when there’s a lot of stuff on the table and the next guy can have some success. Rip gave me a great football team. I almost screwed it up my first year, but after that I was OK.”

  Then how did he explain his behavior all week, so emotional and reflective?

  “It’s tough to be around a bunch of kids who work as hard as this group has worked and have very little success,” he conceded.

  It didn’t take long before his mood was defiant again. He insisted the constant speculation surrounding his future had been of little concern all season. In fact, he said, he had barely taken note of it. If people thought he was spending time in an armchair, pensively pondering his future, they were mistaken, he said. He implied that, in private, he was just as likely to discuss great literature as football.

  “It’s really not bothered me at all,” he said of all the rumors and criticism. “Someone asked me the other day about my wife and how she takes all the criticism of me. I don’t know. We never talk about it. She’s in the middle of reading The Dante Club. And we’re talking about the fact that Dante was gay. And she wanted to know if I knew he was gay. I said, ‘Yeah I knew he was gay.’ She said, ‘Did you know Beatrice in his poem was not a woman, but a man?’ I said, ‘Yeah I knew that. I read Dante when I was fourteen years old.’ Now, I didn’t read it in Italian, but I read it. That’s what we talk about.”

  There were some other matters that needed resolving after the celebrations died down. Would Galen Hall be back? Though Hall had signed a three-year contract before the season, it wasn’t a crazy question. His offense had been pathetic and there clearly was friction with Jay Paterno.

  Hall, confronted by reporters as he exited the field after the Michigan State game, initially shrugged off the inquiries. But a few days later, he revealed that he planned to stay on. “Joe hired me to do a job, and we’re going to try to see it through,” he said.

  He called Jay Paterno “a very bright young coach,” but neither he nor the coach’s son denied that there had been disagreements. “We bust each other’s chops all the time,” Jay Paterno said of their relationship. “It’s very loose.”

  Before the process to shut down the facility began at Beaver Stadium that November afternoon, Jay Paterno also was asked if he could foresee a scenario in which his father might not return for the 2005 season.

  “Yeah,” he said. “If he gets hit by a bus.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THE NEGATIVITY THAT TYPICALLY TRAILS after a losing season like the smoky wake of a dying automobile didn’t linger long in Happy Valley. Although Penn State fans had found it necessary to boo and bellyache in 2004, they didn’t enjoy it—their native state was reflexive optimism. Confronted by bad news, they preferred to anticipate the next positive development, not dwell on a downbeat past. “I know that in places like Philly or Chicago, sports fans tend to be more critical,” said ex–Nittany Lions star Bob Mitinger, several months before his death in 2004. “It seems like they’re always looking backward at something that went wrong. But up here, at least when it comes to Penn State football, we tend to always look ahead, always look for the positive.”

  In Paterno’s postseason spin, the 4–7 season very quickly became something
to commemorate. On the snowy afternoon of December 12, at the State College Quarterback Club’s annual awards banquet, he termed the goal-line stand against Indiana “one of the most inspiring moments in all the . . . years I’ve been here.”

  “This team,” he continued, “could have folded on several occasions this season. Instead, it turned it all into a demonstration of pride.”

  At the crowded tables in a Penn Stater Hotel ballroom, middle-aged and elderly couples and their autograph-hunting children and grandchildren applauded the coach’s remarks. To unbiased observers of Penn State football, however, the words must have had a dissonant ring. It was great to build character through adversity, but you couldn’t sustain a nearly $50 million athletic budget on character alone. Graduation rates and good grooming were nice, but at some point didn’t there have to be bowl games and high national rankings again? His Nittany Lions had lost seven times, a record that, even in light of the nine-loss season that preceded it, should have embarrassed Paterno. But the old Lion remained defiantly proud.

  His positive words were notable for something else—they indicated that Paterno’s career had come full circle. A season after he became Penn State’s coach, he had angrily scolded members of the Quarterback Club for attempting to paint a happy face on a close loss to UCLA. Now, nearly four decades later, speaking to the same organization, it was Paterno who was trying to portray a 4–7 season as a Pyrrhic victory.

  Even before their coach’s brief talk, the departing fifth-year seniors—survivors from a 2000 freshman group more than twice that size—had adopted the same sunny tone. The Nittany Lions had gone 26–33 during their stay in State College. But not long after they and their parents posed for farewell photos with Paterno, they were predicting a bright future. Mills said he sensed a turnaround of the entire program in the last two games. Wake, like Mills an exiting cocaptain, thanked Paterno for “breathing down my neck for five years.” He told the gathering of fans and teammates that if he had to do it all over again, “I wouldn’t change a thing. . . . You guys are going to be playing on a national championship team before you leave here. I know that in my heart.”