The Lion in Autumn (35 page)

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.”

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.”

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 graduated 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.