The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  Among the 750 attendees at the ceremony, worries about the uncertain offense, Paterno’s shortcomings, and the 2004 season in general already had evaporated. While they curiously withheld any applause when Jay Paterno was introduced as a presenter, these fans obviously were enthusiastic about Penn State football’s future. The two late victories—which comprised the Lions’ first winning streak since late in 2002—and Paterno’s frequent hints of recruiting successes had them looking ahead eagerly. The noisy prelunch buzz was filled with talk about 2005’s favorable schedule, beginning as it did with home games against South Florida, Cincinnati, and Central Michigan. Paterno would have nine or ten starters returning from the defense that ranked in the top ten nationally in three significant categories—scoring (fourth, 15.3 points per game), pass defense (sixth, 162.3 yards a game), and total defense (tenth, 292 yards a game). And while the offense finished 2004 ranked 105th, most of that unit was back as well. There was experience. There was depth. There was speed. There was hope.

  For Paterno himself, the next season also held out the delicious twin prospects of redemption and revenge. Though he never admitted it publicly, he’d been upset by all the criticism. There was nothing he wanted more now than to prove that all the complaints and worries had been misguided. “Don’t ever tell Joe he can’t do something,” his late brother George had said, “because he’ll work harder than ever to make sure he does it.”

  The coach truly believed that, all things being equal, he and his teams should usually, in his favorite phrase, “lick the other guys.” That, he knew, was the problem. All things weren’t equal. Other teams had more talent than Penn State. But to admit that too often in public was to demean his players. It was wiser for him to blame the officiating or inexperience. Yet, in his heart, he understood that the quickest solution to the Nittany Lions’ troubles would be to search harder and more selectively for talent.

  The more Penn State struggled in 2004, the more he’d become convinced of that. All he needed to compete for a Big Ten title was a couple of game breakers. Even as the clamor about his status and recent record continued to intensify, he had been quietly hunting two of the nation’s best.

  The two players he had been elliptically referring to for much of the season were Derrick Williams, a six-foot, 190-pound wide receiver/ running back, and Justin King, a six-foot, 185-pound cornerback/wide receiver. Several recruiting Web sites had ranked Williams the nation’s No. 1 overall prospect and King the No. 1 defensive back. Both of them could fly. As an eighth-grader, Williams was timed at 4.4 seconds in the 40-yard dash. He got even faster at Eleanor Roosevelt High School. King, meanwhile, ran the 40 in 4.3 while at Gateway High.

  Paterno envisioned them as the dangerous wideouts and return men his last few teams had lacked, the breakaway threats who would frighten defenses and win space for his tailbacks and time for quarterbacks. Or, if he decided to keep King as a cover-corner, there were quick-footed defensive backs like senior Ethan Kilmer, junior Jim Kanuch, and freshman Deon Butler who he believed could make the switch to the other side of the ball.

  The two scholastic stars had met and become friends at the various football camps they’d attended throughout their highly scrutinized youth. By the start of the 2004 season, they were so close that it was widely assumed they’d attend the same college. In September, it didn’t appear that Penn State would be the one. Williams’s father, Dwight, had said, without explanation, that the school was “off our list.” That list, it turned out, included Florida, Florida State, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, all of whom had enjoyed considerably more recent success than Penn State and each of whom had won a national championship within the last decade.

  But when both youngsters and their families visited State College in the fall, they fell under the still potent spell of Paterno. In mid-November, King committed to Penn State.

  Still, Williams’s indecision remained unsettling. The previous winter Paterno had handwritten a long letter to the youngster. He promised him a personal visit that spring. “Ordinarily, I don’t recruit in the spring,” Paterno wrote. “But this year . . . the first day we are allowed to be on the road, I’m going to be in Eleanor Roosevelt High School.”

  He was. And when Williams and his family came to Penn State in late October—a trip that included the obligatory Italian dinner at Paterno’s home—they were further impressed by the coach’s “humility and generosity.” The few dozen Penn State players they spoke with that weekend expressed a deep affection for Paterno, a desire to see his legend restored. “And did you know,” Williams’s father said in a tone that mixed reverence and amazement, “the coach has a listed telephone number?”

  Paterno had been reassuring recruits for a decade that he’d be there throughout their Penn State careers. But for Williams, King, and others, he and his assistants had altered that pitch a little. Now, according to some recruits, youngsters were being sold a two-pronged prospect: If they came to Penn State, they could help Paterno end his legendary career with one final run at a national title, and they could begin a new tradition. The strategy was the clearest sign yet that Paterno would be gone when his four-year extension expired at the end of the 2008 season, just before his eighty-second birthday.

  “I’m telling kids that I’m going to hang in there until I think we’ve got a shot at another national title,” he said. “Is that two years? Three years? Or is that wishful thinking on my part? I don’t know.”

  The pitch ultimately worked with Williams. In a nationally televised news conference on December 22, the Maryland phenom announced he’d be joining King on the 2005 Nittany Lions. “That whole state is Joe Paterno,” Williams gushed. “It’s a great school. The facilities, the people, and the alumni—all of that was great.”

  That same day, in a Penn State football chat room at PennLive.com, a fan whose screen name was Dab824 excitedly tapped out what was on the minds of enthused Nittany Lions fans everywhere: “11–0 in ‘05!”

  Paterno might be old. He might be slowing down. He might have won only seven of his last twenty-three games. But he had just convinced two of the nation’s best high-school players to join him. What did that say about a program everyone had written off? What did that say about him?

  “When a team is on a down cycle like Penn State and when a coach is old and rumored to be hanging on by his fingernails, how can you not be shocked by Justin King and Derrick Williams both committing to Penn State?” Allen Wallace, publisher of SuperPrep magazine, told a Pittsburgh newspaper. “This shows Joe Paterno is fighting as hard as he ever has.”

  The rush of postseason optimism soon washed away any lingering discontent in State College. Each week, it seemed, brought more evidence of a revived optimism.

  There was surprisingly little public outcry when in February Penn State announced a $2–a-ticket increase for 2005 football games. The cheapest nonstudent tickets would now have a face value of $44. It was a rather audacious decision for a program that had plummeted so precipitously from its long-established norm. But, officials insisted, with the state providing an ever-smaller percentage of the university’s budget, it was the only way to ensure against an athletic-department shortfall.

  The price hike would help compensate for another drop in attendance. The Nittany Lions, who had been second in the nation in average crowds to Michigan in 2001, 2002, and 2003, fell to fourth in 2004, attracting 103,111 per game to Beaver Stadium. Coming on the heels of a decline of nearly 2,000 in ‘03, this attendance dip of another 2,500 meant there had been an average of 4,171 seats available at each home game.

  Another thorny Paterno problem fell away that winter when one of his chief antagonists departed State College. Heather Dinich, the young sportswriter for the hometown Centre Daily Times who often criticized and greatly irritated Paterno and his subscriber-relatives, got married after the season and left both the beat and the newspaper. In a subsequent opinion piece she wrote for New York Newsday, Dinich got in one last shot at the coach. “Yes, he has gradu
ated 86 percent of his players,” she wrote. “But he has lost 86.7 percent of his conference games over the last two seasons. It’s clear that Paterno will never leave on his own—not while he can still get down in a three-point stance, be quick with a whistle, and grab players ferociously by their face-masks. And definitely not while he is losing.”

  Still, the good news kept on coming for Paterno. On January 17, while claiming to raise money for his forthcoming wedding, the anonymous creator of JoePaMustGo.com auctioned off his Web site, the electronic gathering point for the coach’s critics and a symbol of his diminished stature. The site was purchased by James Arjmand, an eighteen-year-old Penn State freshman. The chemistry major outbid eighteen others with a bid of $1,010. A State College resident, Arjmand immediately shut down the Web site, saying he “wanted to do something to show appreciation for [Paterno].”

  Unlike the previous few off-seasons, Paterno rarely had to deal with questions about his future. The contract extension and the recruiting successes had pushed them into the background. Still there were a few minor headaches, some of which dealt with his secret salary.

  Paterno’s annual compensation, widely estimated to be one million dollars, was a constant source of frustration and fascination for journalists across Pennsylvania, primarily because it was so steadfastly hidden. Efforts over the years to have it made public have failed consistently, in large part because of Penn State’s powerful connections in Harrisburg.

  In 1990, Commonwealth Court had ruled that since Penn State was a “state-related” and not a “state-run” university—even though it received three hundred milion dollars in state appropriations—it did not have to open its books to the public.

  But in May of 2004, the board of Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System—which covered all state workers, including Paterno and Spanier—had decided that its pension records should be made public. An appeal by Paterno and other Penn State officials was rejected in November of that year, but the release of the information was delayed while the university took its pleadings to Commonwealth Court.

  The Harrisburg Patriot-News joined in support of the retirement-board ruling, its lawyers contending that if the data for only Penn State employees were excluded, the court would be creating a special class of state workers. Penn State’s attorneys insisted there was no compelling reason to release the information, and Spanier said the newspaper’s interest was sparked not by any interest in “a manner of accountability of taxpayers dollars [but by] a curiosity and a feeling of a right to know.” A final decision was expected by mid-summer.

  The salary that would be paid to the next Penn State’s football coach also became a controversial topic two months after the season. At a January 23 trustees meeting, Spanier was asked about the escalating salaries for college coaches.

  “The free-enterprise, market-oriented side of me says the market’s the market and we have to deal with that,” the president began. “On this issue, because Tim [Curley] doesn’t have loose change sitting around in his budget and Penn State is not going to be able to get into an arms race in intercollegiate athletics, our philosophy is that our coaches should be paid a fair salary and we think we can pay a fair salary. But we can’t go out and be offering one-million-, two-million-dollar salaries to coaches.”

  That response, not surprisingly, drew enthusiastic applause from professors when it was referenced by Spanier at a subsequent Faculty Senate meeting. But to Penn State’s football fans, the university president seemed to be implying that the school wasn’t going to conduct a thorough national search to find a successor for Paterno. For those cynics, it appeared to be further evidence that, rather than seek a high-priced, high-profile replacement, they would stay in-house. And that probably meant Tom Bradley, the popular but low-key defensive coordinator whom some alumni felt lacked a big-time coach’s presence and reputation.

  Spanier was on vacation when an aide telephoned and read him a Centre Daily Times column in which Ron Bracken accused him and the school of trying to cheapen the Penn State brand. More criticism followed from other columnists around the state, from radio talk-show hosts and in Penn State chat rooms. Stunned by the reaction, Spanier would respond that his statement had been “a pretty reasonable answer.” He labeled his noisiest critics “crackpots who think that I’m here to undermine or ruin or dismantle intercollegiate athletics.”

  But he did quickly backtrack.

  “We’re going to continue to go out and hire the best coaches we can,” he said, “and we will pay what we have to pay.”

  When spring practice for the 2005 season began in March, player discipline was not nearly the topic it had been the previous year.

  Either Paterno’s no-tolerance message had left an imprint on his team, or players were better at hiding their transgressions. There were no underage drinking citations, no assaults, no brawls at parties. In fact, the only embarrassing incident involved a bow and arrow.

  Center E. Z. Smith and Mike Southern, a backup linebacker who already had quit the team, were accused of damaging a campus apartment by firing several arrows into its walls during a party there. Smith, who previously had been forced to sit out the 2003 season because of two underage drinking violations, was suspended from the team. He was barred from spring practice and all summer workouts.

  Paterno said Smith’s status would be reevaluated when he returned for the fall semester, providing he had made restitution for the damage. But once again, he blamed the media for inflating the incident’s significance.

  “I said to the alumni group this morning, ‘You know what, if I hadn’t done a couple of things when I was in college, I might have been the first American Pope,’ ” he noted at the press conference that preceded the April 23 Blue–White Game. “I would love to have every one of you guys and girls stand up and tell me that you haven’t done anything that you would hate like the dickens to have put in the press. I am still dealing with twenty- and twenty-one-year-old kids.”

  On the field, despite a cry among alumni and sports columnists to make Morelli his starting QB, and despite Paterno’s insistence that the youngster was “too good to sit on the bench,” it seemed clear that Robinson was going to be Penn State’s quarterback at the start of the 2005 season.

  Robinson got the majority of the snaps in the storm-shortened Blue–White Game notable as a showcase for the speed of Williams and King. Morelli, meanwhile, continued to perform tentatively.

  “I think Michael Robinson has made great progress,” Paterno said. “I think he has made really good progress. Jay has worked with him and I think you will see a kid that is a really much-improved passer in his form. You would expect that since that is the only thing he has done. He hasn’t had to be playing wideout and running back. You would hope he improved at the one position that you groomed him for. I think he will certainly be a good quarterback. Anthony Morelli, eventually, is going to be a great quarterback. Morelli has a tremendous arm. He has handled a lot of things much quicker than I thought he would. The rap on him was that maybe he wasn’t the smartest kid in the world, which has really been unfortunate, because he has accepted things well and does some things well.”

  On days when the weather prevented him from walking back and forth to his office, Paterno drove his new silver BMW—a much flashier car than he had ever owned previously. In preparation for his fortieth season as Penn State’s head coach, he met daily with his assistants—all of whom had returned for ‘05—and began mapping out the practice routines. They would be much like they always had been:

  SUNDAY: Reviewing and breaking down game tapes. Coming up with a preliminary game plan for the next opponent.

  MONDAY: Going over the game plan at the various position meetings. Reviewing tapes of the opponents’ games.

  TUESDAY: Installing the plan during a lengthy, full-pad workout.

  WEDNESDAY: Meetings and workouts for 11 ⁄2 to 2 hours.

  THURSDAY: 1–11 ⁄4 hours of the same.

  FRIDAY: A qui
ck meeting and walk-through.

  SATURDAY: Game.

  He probably spent more time on recruiting trips than ever before, something he continued to enjoy. “As long as we can walk away from kids we don’t like,” he said. He chuckled to himself whenever recruits told him “my dad went to Penn State or my grandmother was a cheerleader.” Penn State, under siege in its traditional recruiting areas, was in turn trying to extend its geographical reach. Oftentimes, Paterno would fly in a university jet to see three recruits in a single day, each of them hundreds of miles from the others.

  Still, even now, at seventy-eight, there was little time for family or vacation. “I am really feeling the neglect of all my grandkids at this stage,” he said.

  His only extended off-season break from football came when he and other coaches from colleges that had six-figure Nike contracts traveled to Aruba for a combination excursion and meeting. Oddly, given his stance against commercialization, Paterno and Nike chairman Phil Knight had become unlikely friends. At Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, employees dropped their children off at the Joe Paterno Child Care Center. Knight spent the Blue–White weekend with the Paternos and was even made an honorary coach of the Blue team in that intrasquad game.

  Paterno vowed again to alter his personal workload in ways that would make him a more effective coach. Just as in the year before, when he had delegated some of his nonfootball duties to Fran Ganter, Paterno now continued to shed those old responsibilities. At April’s annual coaches’ clinic, he was present for only a few onfield drills and he never even showed up for the session’s evening social, something he always had attended in the past.

  “There are a lot of things that I have gotten caught up in and things that are expected of me that take up a lot of time,” he said. “I’ve been trying to work my way out of [them]. . . . This is going to be a fun year for me. It is, obviously, a big challenge for me personally as well as for the whole program. I kind of thrive on those kinds of things. I have spent an awful lot of time on just trying to be a football coach.”