The Lion in Autumn (31 page)

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 what 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.

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 that 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.”

A short while later, Bradley, a Pittsburgh native, emerged from a coaches' meeting. Paterno hated cell phones, and his assistants always turned theirs off when they were with the coach. Now Bradley, as he always did, switched his phone back on to see how many calls he had missed.

There were fifty-three.

“What the hell?” he muttered. “I hope everything is OK.”

Bradley quickly found out why he had become so popular. And in between returning the calls and answering the questions, his phone rang again. This time it was Paterno.

“Congratulations,” the coach said, “on your new job.”

“Thanks, Coach,” said Bradley. “The first thing I'm going to do is give all my new assistants a big raise.”

The two men laughed. Sometime soon the scenario they were now joking about might well become a reality. But today wasn't going to be that day.

“We've had a lot of laughs about it,” Bradley said later. “Coach knew it was just a dumb rumor.”

Losing had revived a debate long absent from State College: Was Penn State being hurt by what were widely perceived as its higher standards? That week Paterno implied as much when asked how he planned to resurrect his slumping program.

“There are a lot of ways to remedy different things, and some of them I don't want to do,” he said. “I don't think it is the way Penn State wants to do it. There is a great wideout in the country now playing for one of the best football teams in the country, if not the best football team in the country. He's from New Jersey, and we never even looked at him because of the academics and things like that. We could take a step backwards, but that is not what I wanted to do for Penn State and I am not going to do it for Penn State.”

The New Jersey receiver was soon revealed as Dwayne Jarrett of Southern California. He told the
Los Angeles Times
that Penn State had indeed offered him a scholarship but that he turned it down because they emphasized a run offense.

“I heard that thing Paterno said about me,” Jarrett said. “I don't have any words, no reaction, to that. None at all. Penn State [offered] me a scholarship, but I wasn't too interested in going there.”

Whatever his academic record, Jarrett would catch fifty passes in 2004 for 734 yards and twelve TDs as USC won a second straight national championship.

Depending on how you viewed Paterno's remark, it was either an honest assessment of where Penn State stood, or an example of the attitude that had irritated so many of his coaching competitors over the years. If Penn State only took choirboys, rivals moaned to one another, how come so many of them had ended up in trouble last year?

Yet Paterno certainly appeared to be clinging to his principles. A week earlier he had shot down Sherrill's junior-college-player suggestions, and he admitted that it had been at least four seasons since he had asked Spanier to grant him an academic exemption for a recruit.

Football had made Penn State's fabulous growth over the last half century possible. But administrators, though benefiting enormously from the success of Paterno's program, traditionally tried to minimize
the cause-and-effect. Penn State was much more than a football factory and that's how it wanted to be seen.

In a 1986 interview, then-president Bryce Jordan told CNN's Larry King, “I think if you polled them [Penn State's alums] on their feelings, they are every bit as proud of the success of the Penn State artificial heart as they are of the great success of the football team.”

That was for public consumption. The university's true feelings were expressed in a private memo from the university's public-relations staff to Jordan just before that ‘86 interview:

“Penn State football success, for example, has enabled the university to realize additional recognition for its academic programs,” it read. “It has provided a visible vehicle for us to talk about academic standards and achievements. . . . Athletics-generated publicity has a positive effect on high school students in the very critical area of student recruitment, apart from athletic recruitment. . . . It provides entry for nonathletic university components to approach potential contributors in connection with fund-raising efforts.”

Eric Walker, who in 1956 had succeeded Milton Eisenhower as the university's president, learned that immediately. Upon accepting the position, Walker asked renowned scientist and mentor Vannevar Bush how to go about building a great university.

“Three things,” Bush told him. “More buildings, an outstanding faculty, and a great football team.”

Following the Northwestern game, Paterno vowed to do some soul searching.

“The problem with my soul searching,” he said a few days later, “is that I couldn't find my soul.”

While he was kidding, it was true that failure tended to make Paterno more introspective. And these days, with his being questioned and criticized at every turn, that tendency was inflamed.

He'd never thought that, with his esteemed record, he would have to justify himself to reporters young enough to be his grandchildren. But he did. He had never thought he'd be asked how he felt about hearing Penn State fans boo his players, chant “Joe Must Go!”
or deride his quarterbacks coach–son on radio talk shows. But he was. He'd never imagined that his brains and will wouldn't be enough to turn around a struggling team. But they weren't.

On Monday, two days after the Northwestern defeat, seeking a literary metaphor for the situation he and his team faced at the end of this miserable season, he thought of
Hamlet
. When Paterno addressed his players that day, he quoted a part of the Danish prince's soliloquy, letting them know that their “outrageous fortune” required an existential decision: Would they surrender to the unpleasant reality of 2–7? Or fight to salvage their dignity?

A day later, Shakespeare's words surfaced again when the coach's weekly teleconference began with a query about his own confidence. Had it been shaken by a second straight disastrous season? Paterno's response initiated a series of answers that, overflowing with literary allusions, recollections, contradictions, and ramblings, may have hinted at his mental turmoil.

“You would have to define what you mean by
shaken
,” he began, paraphrasing the Danish prince. “Obviously, I go back to
Hamlet
, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question. Suffer the slings and adversity of outrageous fortune or take arms and fight the enemy? By doing so eliminate the problem.' I have a lot of confidence in my staff and a lot of confidence in this football team. Things haven't gone, obviously, the way you would like them to go.

“Sometimes people think it's the planning, the plays, and sometimes the coaches or what have you. Yes, I get shaky once in a while. I would be less than honest if I told you I didn't. That doesn't mean that I lose faith. Even Christ said, ‘Take this away from me.' ”

The reference to Christ's words on the cross sounded like an admission that Paterno had thought about quitting. So he was asked again, in a much less direct fashion this time, if his recent record didn't warrant questions about whether he should return in 2005. His answer was lengthy, serpentine in its logic, and as enlightening as anything he would say publicly all season.

“There's no question about it. I have never disputed that. You have to understand that I have not spent this many years at Penn State or worked this hard to get Penn State football to a certain level [to just
leave],” he said. “I could have had fifteen jobs that would have been more lucrative and a lot of different things through the years in pros and college. I won't get into all of that stuff, but I have always felt that Penn State was a place that I was comfortable with and I wanted to bring my family up here, make the university and football as good as I could make it.

“I go back to my dad when I decided to coach. My dad says to me, ‘What are you doing, thinking about coaching?' My dad wanted me to be a lawyer. He graduated from high school, graduated from college, and then graduated from law school and passed the bar. He loved the law and always dreamed about my being a lawyer or my brother George being a lawyer. George did go to law school for a year. When I got into coaching and I came home and said, ‘I think I'm going to make coaching my career,' he said, ‘Well, do you think you can have an impact on anybody?' I said, ‘Yeah, I think I can have an impact. I think I can have an impact on this university. I think there are some people around here who don't realize how good they are and I am going to work my butt off to try to make them understand that Penn State can be a special place.'

“I've spent fifty-five years doing that. If you think that I am going to back out of it because I am intimidated, you are wrong. If you think I am going to stay when I think I am not doing a good job, you are wrong. Those things have to develop and have to evolve. Right now, I think we can get this thing done and do a good job. We obviously have to recruit some people. We have to recruit some skilled people. I have said that before. I don't want to hang around here and pull Penn State down. I have a great staff of coaches. I could walk out of this thing. I could call and tell you today I'm going. What does it mean to me? It doesn't mean a thing to me. What impact does it have on the program, the coaches, and is it the best thing for Penn State? They are the things that I think about all the time.