Paterno (9 page)

THE PERSONA THAT WOULD BECOME
so familiar to college football fans was coming into focus when Paterno first met Sue Pohland. He was argumentative, certainly, and obsessive and always certain, but he was also charming and funny and smart. He was a popular speaker on campus and around Pennsylvania. Reporters generally loved him. Players, even those he speared with sarcasm in his high-pitched voice, could not help but be drawn in by his energy.

His passion for education was apparent from the start. He hated the idea of players coming to college only to play football. He also hated the idea of teachers treating football players differently from other students. In his mind—and Engle believed this too—coaches were professors and football was a particularly intense class designed to teach discipline, focus, and various life lessons. For the rest of his life, Paterno would publicly uphold this ideal, graduating 80 to 90 percent of his players and influencing young men who would become doctors, lawyers, chemists, and teachers.

His purpose was so public that many people, especially late in his life, would wonder if he exaggerated his commitment to education or, worse, was an out-and-out phony. But it seems no matter how deeply you dig into the life of Joe Paterno, no matter how many players or professors you talk with, you find a man driven by the cause of education and repelled both by schools who took advantage of football
players and by football players who did not take advantage of their opportunity to learn. “I don’t see why people can’t just realize that Joe is who he says he is,” Sue said. “He isn’t perfect. But he tried to teach young men how to live.”

This passion was in place from the start. Here’s part of a letter a young Joe Paterno wrote in 1952 to a recruit named Earl Shumaker:

Dear Earl,

As I told you last December we definitely feel that you are the type of boy we want at Penn State—a good student as well as a good football player. All the people I have talk[ed] to about you have told me the same thing—you are interested in going to college to get an education first and to play football second. That’s the way it should be and we are only interested in boys who feel this way. Always remember you can only play football a few years, and if all you get out of college is four years of football you are getting cheated. No matter where you decide to go to school make sure that you will get an education that will enable you to have a happy and well-rounded life.

Sincerely

Joe Paterno

As an assistant coach, Paterno developed a reputation as a molder of quarterbacks. Football was a different game in the 1950s and 1960s; quarterbacks did not throw nearly as often as they would forty and fifty years later, and they called their own plays, a responsibility that coaches later took for themselves. It was important, then, to teach quarterbacks how to think, how to feel the game, how to anticipate what the defense might try. Paterno loved coaching like this; he did not want players to be like robots. He wanted them to develop their own rhythms and styles, to learn from their own mistakes.

He also believed in simplicity. If a play worked, he wanted his
quarterbacks to try it again. If the play worked again, he wanted his quarterbacks to try it yet again. He was not opposed to an occasional trick play; he developed the belief that a surprising gadget play such as a reverse or a halfback pass could turn the tide of close games. But like his Brooklyn counterpart Lombardi, Paterno believed that you did not win games by tricking teams; you won with precise execution of plays and by making fewer mistakes than your opponent.

His first great quarterback success was Milt Plum, whom he personally recruited. Plum was such a versatile athlete that he played quarterback, running back, defensive back, punter, and kicker. But he was a disappointment during his sophomore and much of his junior seasons. Paterno wrote about Plum in his autobiography, expressing his feelings about the mysteries of football and his own passion for teaching in a single paragraph:

In our first six games that season [1955] we broke even, confirming the mediocrity of both our team and our quarterback. If the electricity a quarterback transmits (or doesn’t) to a team defies analysis, another imponderable is what happens when that current suddenly transforms. In our seventh game of 1955, all the teaching, drilling, and praying I had pumped into Plum miraculously fused with his natural talent. He took charge. His passes clicked. His confidence lit the field and charged through the team. We surprised the experts in the press box by slipping past Syracuse 21–20, when we were scheduled to be crushed by them. On that day, Milt Plum became a star quarterback—and my first visible success.

Plum was brilliant in 1956. He threw the ball only seventy-five times the whole season, fewer than nine times a game. Forty years later, there would be quarterbacks who would throw that often in a single game. But Plum ran well, tackled hard on defense, intercepted seven passes, and one of his punts against Ohio State went 73 yards and stopped at the 3-yard line, perhaps the decisive play
in Penn State’s shocking 7–6 upset victory, one many Penn State historians believe started the modern success of the school’s football program. Plum would go on to a long and successful career as a pro quarterback.

Paterno’s next quarterback project would prove even more successful. Richie Lucas grew up in Glassport, just outside of Pittsburgh. Paterno believed that he saw Lucas’s great talent before anyone else did, before he even became a quarterback. Paterno was watching films of a more highly touted quarterback, Jerry Eisman of nearby Bethel, when he noticed Lucas, a player on the opposing team. Other schools soon noticed him too, and there was a recruiting battle to get him. Paterno won the battle, as he would hundreds of times through the years, by captivating Lucas’s parents, in particular his mother.

Riverboat Richie Lucas, as he came to be called, became a Penn State legend. He fit Paterno’s ideal of a quarterback perfectly: he was fast and tough, had a good arm, and could make good decisions quickly. But there was something else: as his nickname suggested, he also had a bit of the gambler in him. He liked to take chances, throw the ball downfield, go against conventional thinking. The conservative Paterno was quietly thrilled at this. He did not want quarterbacks who always did the “right” thing; sometimes, as he would tell players, you need to forget what you were taught and just make a play. Lucas instinctively understood that. In 1959 Lucas led Penn State to nine victories in eleven games and finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting behind Louisiana State’s Billy Cannon. He would eventually be inducted into College Football’s Hall of Fame.

Lucas’s senior year was the year Paterno had his first conversation with Sue Pohland. It was also the year other coaches around the country began to notice him. Weeb Ewbank, who coached Paterno at Brown, wanted him to become an assistant coach for the Baltimore Colts. Nick Skorich asked Paterno to be an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Eagles. Boston College invited him to interview for the head coaching job. And there were other offers. The only job that appealed to him was when the Yale head coaching job opened up
in 1962. Paterno was thirty-five, about to be married, and he saw the potential to fulfill his destiny there. Yale had a rich football history; it had fielded one of the first college football teams and was the nation’s most dominant football program before World War I. The program’s success had been sporadic after World War II, but Paterno thought he could rebuild some of the magic. “I wanted that job pretty badly,” he remembered. “The idea of being Yale’s coach for fifteen or twenty years was very appealing to me. I thought we could win some games, we could do it the right way, we could have an impact on some of the bright young men who would help form the future. If they had offered me that job then, I think I might have taken it.”

Yale did not offer the job in 1962. Two years later, however, the job opened up again, and this time they offered it to Paterno first. Many things had changed in two years, though. Joe and Sue were married, they had a baby daughter, and Paterno’s axis had shifted. He now saw his future more clearly. He wanted to be head coach at Penn State. Rip Engle told Paterno he was going to retire soon. Engle named him associate head coach, making him the clear succession candidate, and Athletic Director Ernie McCoy told Paterno that he was next in line. They all went to see the school’s president, Eric Walker, to get final assurances. “I want to know what my chances are to get the job,” Paterno remembered telling Walker.

“If you’re good enough, you’ll get the job,” Walker replied.

And Paterno, certain he was good enough, stayed at Penn State. “I’d just as soon stay here the rest of my life,” he told a reporter at the Penn State newspaper, the
Daily Collegian
.

There was one other job offer whose story is worth telling. During this time, a fellow Brooklyn native named Al Davis asked Paterno to be an assistant coach for the Oakland Raiders. Davis, however, never just asked for something he wanted; he went on the attack. But that story needs to wait because it’s more about Sue Paterno than about Joe.

SUE AND JOE SAW EACH
other around campus, and they talked every now and again about their mutual love of literature. Neither could remember exactly when their casual friendship became attraction or when attraction became love. They remembered seeing each other at a lecture on campus by the controversial literary critic Leslie Fiedler. They talked for a long time after that.

Joe said he fell first. After Sue’s sophomore year, in the summer of 1960, she worked as a waitress at the American Hotel on the Jersey Shore, in a five-block square with the magical name Avon-by-the-Sea. One day, at the house where she was staying with “sixteen girls, five bunk beds, one phone,” Joe called to say that he was in the area (“I don’t even remember what excuse he used,” Sue said) and wanted to meet her for pizza. She already had a date, and she thought so little of Joe’s call that she invited her date to come along. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Sue said. “He’s just a friend. You’ll see. He’s an old man.”

Joe was almost thirty-four. Sue was twenty. They saw each other around campus the next year, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1961 that their relationship shifted. Sue went back to work on the shore, Paterno rented a house a couple of towns away, and they would spend their free time together on the beach, reading books, discussing them, arguing, laughing. It’s easy to see what Joe saw in Sue: she was pretty and smart, energetic and forceful. What Sue saw in Joe is a bit more complicated. She could have seen a middle-aged assistant coach who still lived in the basement of another family’s home. (Jim O’Hora had had his “It’s time to leave, Joe” chat in June of that year.) Instead she saw a brilliant, kind man with honest intentions and ambitions to do something great. She was pinned to someone else, but that summer she fell in love with Joe Paterno.

“I figured,” Sue explained, “you know, ‘Dick’s really good-looking and really a good dancer but why spend the rest of your life with a petroleum and natural gas engineer?’ ” In other words, she was not attracted
to stability and the expected; she craved an unpredictable life. Joe Paterno offered that. At summer’s end, he asked Sue to marry him, and she accepted. They intended to get married three weeks later, before Sue graduated from Penn State.

First, though, they would have to tell Sue’s parents, Alma and August Pohland, and that turned out to be an adventure. The Pohlands had gone to New York to see one of Sue’s sisters and to catch a show, and so Sue and Joe went there to tell them the good news. They all met at the Hotel Astor in Times Square. Alma Pohland was a sensible woman; she hardly ever drank, and she was a devout Catholic. They had dinner and planned to see the show
Irma La Douce
at the Plymouth Theater. The conversation they had in the restaurant of the Hotel Astor wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Broadway.

Joe:
Would you like to have a drink?

Alma:
No thank you.

Joe:
We would like to get married in three weeks.

Alma:
I’ll have a whiskey sour.

Sue:
Well, we . . .

Alma (grabbing Sue):
We’re going to the ladies’ room.

Sue’s parents convinced her to graduate before she and Joe got married. Then, because Penn State qualified for a bowl game, the wedding was pushed back to May 1962. One of Paterno’s favorite and most polished bits when speaking to alumni groups and after-dinner functions was about their honeymoon. “We planned to go to Europe for two months. But we couldn’t afford it. So we decided on a few weeks in Bermuda. But there were a couple of things that came up with the football team, so that shrunk to two weeks in Bermuda, which became ten days in Florida, and then we settled on a week in Sea Isle, Georgia. The bottom line was that we spent five wonderful days in Virginia Beach—well, four days, because we had to detour to Somerset to see a recruit. Sue waited in the car. We lost him to Miami.”

“That’s true,” Sue said in her own retelling. “I think his name was Jack White or something. I don’t remember. I read a book in the car. Whatever.”

That was the word Sue would use many times through the years:
whatever
. She was not a particularly devoted football fan before meeting Joe, and she had no idea what life as a coach’s wife would be. But that was part of the attraction. “After about two years of marriage, I thought, I wasn’t
courted
, I was
recruited
. In those days, you used to be able to take out the recruits’ families for dinner, get the mother flowers, whatever. So that’s what Joe did for me, and I thought, I wasn’t courted, I was recruited. Only it wasn’t for four years.”

PENN STATE NAMED JOE PATERNO
head coach in 1966, a few months before his fortieth birthday. But before then, Al Davis made his push to hire Paterno and make him a coaching star. There were, as mentioned, many offers in the early 1960s, but this one was different because of Al Davis. Even in 1963—long before Davis had become the owner of the Oakland Raiders, the purveyor of a philosophy he called “Commitment to Excellence,” a pro football legend and villain in equal parts—he was a whirlwind.