The Lion in Autumn (13 page)

While the Tarmans pondered the move, the two couples celebrated the Paternos' apparent good fortune with champagne toasts.

But, more so than her husband, Sue Paterno remained uncomfortable with the thought of relocating. That helped explain Paterno's continued indecision. What would the move do to his young family? He thought back to his days studying Virgil's
Aeneid
, a book that had shaped the attitudes he carried into adulthood. “When you choose wrong, as Aeneas found out,” Paterno said, “life comes down on you with some terrible whacks.”

The Paternos stayed up late talking. At about 3:00
A
.
M
., his doubts
seemingly resolved, perhaps by the champagne, he telephoned Patterson and told the Penn State administrator he had decided to accept the Patriots' offer.

“After I got that call, I got in touch with the pilots who were going to fly the university jet and told them we wouldn't be going to Pittsburgh the next morning,” said Patterson, retired now and an affiliate professor of transportation at Penn State's Smeal College of Business.

The coach went to bed, joking to his wife in an effort to reassure her. “This will be the first time you've ever slept with a millionaire,” he said. She didn't laugh.

Paterno tossed and turned in bed as he continued his mental grapplings. State College was so comfortable. He loved coaching and molding young kids. They were so hungry to learn about football and life. It wouldn't be like that in professional football. A bad season or two and he might be wishing he had never left.

“I knew damn well what it was,” Paterno later wrote of the temptations pushing him toward the NFL. “The money. The house on Cape Cod. Hobnobbing with the hottest shots in a big-time town, being their hero, not having to worry, for once, about the example I have to set in a small college town, being watched by my kids. It was the only chance at a million dollars I'd ever have.”

Early on the morning of January 5, he awakened his wife and told her they weren't going anywhere. Paterno reached Sullivan before the owner had departed for New York, thanked him, and turned him down. “God bless you, Joe,” the owner responded. Sullivan, ironically, wound up hiring the winning coach in the Sugar Bowl, Oklahoma's Fairbanks. (Fairbanks would go 37–34 in nearly five seasons in New England. But days after his 11–4 Patriots clinched the franchise's first division title in 1978, reports surfaced that he had accepted the head-coaching job at the University of Colorado and he was fired.)

After talking with Sullivan, Paterno telephoned Tarman and Patterson.

“I guess it was about seven-thirty when he called and said he'd be staying at Penn State,” recalled Patterson. “Now the flight to Pittsburgh was back on. So I called the pilots and told them to be ready shortly. They said they couldn't go now because after I had canceled
the flight, they went out and got drunk. They said they needed twelve hours before they could fly again. I told them, I didn't care how they did it but I wanted that goddamned plane ready to leave in an hour.”

They flew to Pittsburgh and met with Queenan.

“They showed me the contract and said, ‘What do you think about this?' ” Paterno recalled. “I said, ‘Where do I sign?' They asked me if I didn't want my own lawyer to look at it. I said, ‘No, I trust Bob Patterson.' ”

While Paterno's salary has always been something of a state secret, administrators now hint that the deal he signed that day earned him about $100,000 a year. Whatever the details, and they were never made public, Paterno decided he also needed more life insurance. Patterson contacted a Pittsburgh doctor and set up a quick physical.

“Joe had been up most of the night and I didn't think it would be the best time for him to be taking a physical examination,” said Patterson. “But he went ahead with it anyway and, fortunately, passed.”

When Tarman learned neither he nor Paterno would be going to Boston, he set up a news conference for 10:00
A
.
M
. Saturday in Rec Hall to deal with all the questions the university had been getting about its football coach, especially in the wake of Young's story.

Most of the sportswriters who attended were by then aware of that story and assumed the news conference had been convened as a farewell for Paterno. They were genuinely surprised when the coach, wearing a glen-plaid sport coat and seated next to President John Oswald, revealed he was staying. He told reporters that unless there were some “drastic change” at the school, he planned to remain there the rest of his career.

“I thought about the Sugar Bowl game,” he told them, “and I didn't want to go out a loser.”

That raised an obvious question and someone asked it.

“Joe, does that mean you'd have taken the job if you'd beaten Oklahoma?”

“That,” said Paterno, “is an iffy question.”

As far as anyone knew, no coach had ever been offered a $1 million contract, let alone turned it down. That fact alone made Paterno an
instant national celebrity. No matter which side of the era's political divide you resided on, his decision had an unmistakable appeal.

Those who were dismayed by all the striking societal changes of the 1960s and early 1970s saw it as a reaffirmation of basic values. Here was a man who cared more for educating young people at a small-town college than making a fortune in the big city. On the other side of the political spectrum, Paterno's action was viewed in an anti-establishment light. He had turned his back on material gain, thumbed his nose at the powerful institution of the NFL.

It also gave Paterno a platform upon which he could expound on the theories he was developing about college sports. He would use it very quickly to criticize recruiting excesses, academic abuses, freshmen eligibility, the overemphasis on football, commercialization, polls, and the lack of a season-ending play-off. Writers began to characterize him as a Don Quixote figure, tilting at the sport's windmills. George Paterno used that analogy, too, when he wrote of how his older brother's rejection of the NFL had empowered him. He now possessed a moral authority that most other coaches lacked. In his late brother's words, the Penn State coach came out of the episode with “heavy artillery and a million Sanchos.”

Most of those Sancho Panzas were sportswriters, who began to lather praise on the coach. In their adoring eyes, his very public display of conviction, in combination with his Grand Experiment and the run of outstanding Penn State teams, made Paterno the ideal of what a college coach should be.

National newspapers and magazines commissioned stories on this coach who had made such a startling commitment.
Sports Illustrated
's William Johnson wrote that Paterno “did not believe that money is the root of all the fruits of life. . . . In these days when feet of clay and souls of brass seem to be the identifying marks of so many leaders, the mere fact that Joe Paterno expresses himself with an unforked tongue is apparently enough to warrant standing ovations and hero worship.”

Interest in Penn State football increased in the immediate aftermath, prompting the school to make plans to enlarge Beaver Stadium again. Marketing surveys of the Nittany Lions' fan base in 2004
revealed that many of those allegiances were formed just after Paterno turned down the Patriots.

The construction of the Paterno legend was moving ahead at full throttle. And like any legend, he was credited with qualities he didn't possess. Paterno's harder-edged complexities and shortcomings—his impatience, his biting tongue, his manipulative nature—rarely came through in the aggrandizing portraits. All that most Americans could see was his nobility. He seemed single-handedly to be defending loyalty, simplicity, and virtue against the disturbing forces that were just beginning to shake sports and the wider world.

While he welcomed the attention—and the unmistakable help it gave him in recruiting and fund raising—there was a part of him that was uncomfortable. When
Sports Illustrated
's Johnson asked him if he considered himself a “folk hero,” he cringed.

“I get letters from people who seem to think that if only Joe Paterno can spend twenty minutes with a kid, then his troubles will be all over,” he responded. “Nuts. People want to give me too much credit. I'm a football coach who has won a few games—remember?”

Still, grateful Pennsylvanians planned banquets to honor the coach. Requests for speaking engagements and interviews flowed into his office. Penn State even asked him to deliver its commencement address that June. Like Paterno himself, that speech was humorous, philosophical, didactic, and at times eloquent.

“W. H. Auden said it beautifully,” Paterno noted in that June 16, 1973, address, “when he wrote on the death of Sigmund Freud: ‘Every day there dies among us those who were doing us some good and knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living.' Live your life so that by some little thing you will improve your life just by living. But be realistic enough as you continue your adventure in life to understand that regardless of how strong you are and how smart you are, you will at times become discouraged.”

While Paterno was being anointed a sporting saint, it might have been left to his little hometown paper to remind his worshipful fans that not everyone had the same vision of the man.

“[He] has critics,” noted a January 9, 1973, editorial in the
Centre
Daily Times
that otherwise hailed Paterno's decision to stay. “Those jealous; those who disagree with his philosophies; those who can't believe he's sincere in his outspoken stands; those who can't tolerate or understand his brutal frankness.”

Paterno never did get that house on Cape Cod, although he did, years later, purchase a summer home along the New Jersey Shore. But the national reverence he came to command helped him overcome some of the bitterness he had felt about Brown. Over the years, as his prominence grew, old college classmates began to contact him or bring their children and grandchildren to visit with him in State College. The coach suddenly became an active and involved alumnus.

In 1997, Brown graduate Roger D. Williams pledged $1 million to establish a football coaching chair in Paterno's name. Two years later the coach showed up at an “off-year minireunion” to receive the William Rogers Award, recognizing “an outstanding alumna or alumnus whose service to society in general is representative of the words of the Brown Charter: living a life ‘of usefulness and reputation.' ”

He was among 297 who attended the Class of 1950's fiftieth reunion in the summer of 2000. Everyone knew who he was by then. There were cocktails and dinner on Friday.

On Saturday, there was a forum on leadership. Its principle speaker, dressed in a blue blazer instead of a white sweater this time, was Joseph V. Paterno of Brooklyn, still swarthy after all those years.

THROUGH THE WIDE WINDOWS
of Suite 1217 in the Sheraton Newton, downtown Boston's nighttime skyline glistened like a sequined gown. Inside the room that had been set aside for Joe Paterno's weekly media cocktail reception, several sportswriters were clustered near a wide-screen TV tuned to ESPN's Friday night college football game, Florida State versus Miami. Bowls filled with salty snacks sat untouched atop tables. Little blue flames lapped at the bottom of silver trays brimming with meatballs and chicken tenders. The small towers of plates and napkins flanking the food had not yet been disturbed.

Away in a far corner, as alone and unnoticed as a wallflower, stood a portable bar. A bored young bartender absentmindedly rolled an empty glass in his hand as Jeff Nelson, Penn State's sports-information director, approached. Without pausing—apparently without even thinking—Nelson reached out to adjust a bottle of Jack Daniel's, its black-and-white seal unbroken, its fetching amber contents untouched.

It was 9:30
P
.
M
. on September 10. Penn State's traveling party had arrived at the hotel, which sat atop a Mass Pike overpass, a half hour earlier. The Nittany Lions would be playing Boston College the next night at eight, in a nationally televised game in nearby Chestnut Hill.

Every Friday night in football season, home or away, Paterno and the sportswriters who regularly covered his team—three or four in the
early years, dozens now—assembled informally for drinks, snacks, and off-the-record conversation. The receptions had been a significant ritual for as long as Paterno had coached at Penn State. When Paterno first got the head-coaching job, he and Jim Tarman, the future Penn State AD who was then the sports-information director, had traveled around the East with a suitcase full of liquor, selling Penn State football. The format worked. The happily lubricated newsmen wrote glowingly of the bright young coach and his Grand Experiment.

Soon the traveling shows morphed into the Friday-night affairs. The first of those were held at Tarman's State College home, where Paterno and several writers would drink and talk for hours. Eventually, they moved to Paterno's house, then graduated to the Toftrees Hotel and Resort and later the Nittany Lion Inn. On the road, they always took place at the team hotel.

Nelson, a slight, bespectacled and extremely efficient forty-three-year-old who had been at the university for eleven years, was familiar with the road routine. Arriving at their destination on Friday night, the coach, his assistants, and players would collect their room keys and gather in a ballroom or conference room for a quick meeting. Then, usually before 10:00, Paterno would head for the reception.

The Jack Daniel's was for the coach. A glass or two of the Tennessee sippin' whiskey whittled away some of his harder edges. It also loosened his tongue. No subject was off limits during these informal sessions. He'd discuss with the writers freshmen redshirts, Republican politics, the literature of ancient Rome.

Occasionally, Paterno, who could be unusually glib even without whiskey, got burned by the format. In the late 1970s, when asked, not for the first or last time, if he were interested in entering politics, the coach said, “What, and leave college coaching to the [Barry] Switzers and [Jackie] Sherrills?”

The remark, disparaging the prominent Oklahoma and Pittsburgh coaches for suspect academic and ethical practices in their programs, turned up in
The New York Times
and elsewhere. Though the response actually served to further set him apart from the run-of-the-mill renegades in college coaching, it upset and embarrassed Paterno enough that he briefly boycotted the Friday-night receptions.

Typically, though, both sides benefited. The sportswriters got some valuable insights, saw and heard another side of the coach. And Paterno clearly enjoyed the give-and-take. He liked the Jack Daniel's too. For decades, one of the bags that Tarman and his successors brought on road trips contained a bottle of the coach's preferred sour-mash whiskey.

On this night, a few of the early arriving writers in 1217 nibbled on peanuts or popcorn. They wandered over to the bar, ordering beer, water, or diet soda. No one dared ask for a Jack Daniel's.

Several of them had come from a dinner hosted by Boston College in a Legal Sea Foods restaurant at a nearby mall. The conversation there had focused on Paterno and his future. Boston writers remarked on how impressed they had been with the seventy-seven-year-old Paterno's recall during their teleconference with the coach earlier in the week.

Whenever the suite's door opened, they all turned their heads, thinking it might be the coach. Paterno, who rarely missed one of the receptions, had been absent the week before, but that was only because of a conflict with the season-opening Beaver Stadium pep rally. The writers, who hadn't had an off-the-record crack at him in more than nine months, were eager to talk.

Maybe he'd clear up some of the lingering uncertainty about his future. That seemed to be the only Penn State topic their editors were interested in these days anyway. Despite their surface cynicism, as much a necessity of their trade as tape recorders and laptops, these dozen or so sportswriters relished the intimate sessions—for personal and professional reasons. The privilege of one-on-one conversations with a coaching legend lent them and their jobs a little cachet. And because Paterno increasingly limited access, they were essential for keeping informed. On the record, Paterno answered questions for only about fifteen minutes after games and thirty minutes during Tuesday teleconferences, one question for each reporter. That was it. You couldn't even try to catch him at the locker-room door after games without being shooed away by the sports-information staff.

Asked about Paterno's ever-more-restrictive rules and his diminishing availability, a Penn State marketing official hinted that the
coach had lost trust. He compared the media to “attack dogs” and said “it only takes a few [bites] to make the fence go up.”

Most of Penn State's beat writers fell into two categories: young and ambitious, or old and crusty. With very few exceptions, they were—and always had been—white men. Penn State was, for many of them, their only connection to big-time sports. The rest of the year most of them covered high school games for papers in small- and mid-size towns like Lewistown, Carlisle, or York. They derived a large measure of pride from their association with Penn State, from writing articles their readers craved about the Nittany Lions' exploits, from having a drink with Paterno on football Friday nights. A few years on the beat and some began to feel they had a stake in Penn State football.

But with all the recent losses, their jobs had become more unpleasant. Paterno frequently was disagreeable and difficult, making himself and his players unavailable, increasingly snapping at their questions. Asked earlier in the week to explain his decision to start Robinson as a wideout against Akron, he said simply, “I thought it would help the team.”

Readers and editors badgered the writers constantly, wanting to know what was going to happen to the coach. Would he stay even after another disastrous season? Were Penn State administrators pondering ways to push him aside? Were powerful alumni calling for his head? What the hell was going on?

As the relaxed writers continued to grouse and graze, they traded a variety of speculations, some half-baked, some plausible. The opening-week's victory over Akron had done little to quiet the buzz about Paterno.

Did you hear, said one, that the coach's four-year contract extension had been a reward for his agreeing to replace Ganter and take some authority away from Jay?

Another had been told that if this season turned sour, administrators were prepared to urge Paterno's wife to try to persuade her husband to step down.

“Big Penn State donors” among his readership informed another writer that Paterno planned to bow out at season's end if the Nittany Lions were at all successful.

At 9:55, the coach still had not shown up and the writers began checking their watches.

“Is he coming tonight?” asked Jerry Kellar, an ex–offensive lineman at Temple and now a
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
columnist.

“Sue's on this trip with him,” said Nelson. “But as far as I know he's coming.”

By 10:30, the room was more crowded. A few writers who had been to dinner in downtown Boston arrived, and were surprised to learn that the coach had not. For a while, the Florida State–Miami game was interesting enough to distract their attention from his absence.

“If he's not here by now, he's probably not coming,” Nelson finally offered during a commercial.

That led to more questions. Why would he not show up two weeks in a row? Was he ticked off by all the criticism he and his trouble-prone players had taken in the media the previous season, all the calls for him to resign? Or was this a further indication that he wasn't going to be bound by the old routines anymore?

“Maybe Sue won't let him come,” said one writer.

Finally, at around 11:00, one by one, the sportswriters began to depart.

Nelson scurried around the room, collecting empty glasses, brushing popcorn crumbs off the sofa. The bartender, his still idle hands folded behind his back, remained at his post.

The bottle of Jack Daniel's remained untouched.

Earlier that day, gray and bald heads had populated every window of the King Coal tour bus that sped north on Route 84, along the stretch of Connecticut River that runs between Hartford and Springfield. They were Nittany Lions fans on a weekend trip, en route to the next night's game. Most were retirees who had come from used-up towns in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region, places like Shamokin, Mount Carmel, and Ashland.

Paterno, for generations, had mined the rich vein of scholastic talent found in the state's gritty blue-collar towns. In particular, the close-knit communities in northeast Pennsylvania's coal country and those in
the hills and valleys surrounding Pittsburgh had yielded him a mother lode of talent. The sons of hard-nosed coal miners, and rail and steelworkers, were as tough as their names implied—Mike Munchak (Scranton), Jack Ham (Johnstown), Ted Kwalick (McKees Rocks), Denny Onkotz (Northampton). But when the industries that employed their parents began to disappear or relocate, the jobs vanished. The population aged. The small-town high schools consolidated. The state's economy stagnated.

Homestead, an old steel town southeast of Pittsburgh, was a good example. In 1950, the town had twenty thousand residents and its huge steel mill employed fourteen thousand workers. The mill closed in 1982. In 2004, Homestead's population was about four thousand, many of them elderly.

Only the retirement haven of Florida had a greater percentage of elderly residents than weary Pennsylvania. That demographic shift, triggered by a changing economy, had begun to affect Paterno's program. There simply weren't as many quality players in the state. And those there were were nearly as likely to go to a Big Ten rival or a Florida school as to Penn State.

On Saturday night, Boston College would dress twelve Pennsylvanians.

“It's not the hotbed it used to be,” Paterno explained. “You take the Johnstown area. . . . When I came here, there would be six or seven players that we would like to have. There might be three or four Notre Dame or Pitt or Michigan or Ohio State would want. There won't be two or three there anymore. What happened was a lot of the little coal towns joined together as one school. Where you used to have five schools with maybe sixty kids each out for football—three hundred kids—now you might have one joint school with fifty kids out.”

In 2004, you could, in fact, argue that Paterno had much in common with his adopted home state. Each had a glorious past, a depressing present, and an uncertain future. A rapidly changing world seemed intent on making both irrelevant.

Penn State did not reveal any statistical data about its fan base. But if the weekly Beaver Stadium crowds provided an accurate
reading, it, too, was graying rapidly. “If you were thirty or forty when that bond occurred [with Penn State football in the late 1960s and early 1970s], you're seventy-plus,” marketer Guido D'Elia noted. “We have a very high attrition rate we have to deal with.” Those on the tour bus certainly were Paterno's contemporaries. They continued to appreciate the man who had brought so much glory to their sons, their hometowns, their state. As such, they were less inclined to criticize the coach than the school's students, or the more casual Penn State fans in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

They longed to be impressed and the previous week's victory over Akron had encouraged them as much as the bookies. Las Vegas had upgraded the Nittany Lions into a two-point favorite over Boston College, even though they had not won a nonconference road game since beating Miami in 1999.

Many of the old-timers on the bus had been at Beaver Stadium the week before. That big victory had felt reassuringly familiar—particularly the explosive offense. Two 100-yard-plus tailbacks brought back memories of Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris. Tony Hunt's 77-yard TD gallop on the season's second play recalled Curt Warner. And not one but two quarterbacks had great days—Mills and Robinson running, catching, and throwing for touchdowns.

That couldn't possibly have been a mirage, could it?