Paterno (19 page)

Paterno had reached new heights as an icon. Now all that was left was to lead one of the most remarkable and emotional seasons a college football team ever had. And, this being Joe Paterno’s sainthood year, that’s exactly what happened.

PATERNO KNEW THAT HIS 1973
team would be good. They had won ten of twelve games in 1972 and returned many of their best players, the biggest star being their running back, John Cappelletti. In the first two years of Cappelletti’s career at Penn State, he had played defense. The team already had great running backs in Lydell Mitchell and Franco Harris, and Paterno always wanted his best athletes on defense, always preferred winning low-scoring games in which his defense imposed its will. He would have loved for Cappy to become a great defensive player, but he struggled as a defensive back, and when he was a junior in 1972 Paterno relented and put him back on offense.

Few thought that would work. Cappelletti struggled holding on to the football, and for a time people called him “John Fumbletti.” But he found his rhythm as the 1972 season went along. He ran for 162 yards against Syracuse, inspiring the Syracuse coach and longtime
Penn State doubter Ben Schwartzwalder to whine to
Sports Illustrated
, “Cappelletti sure played better than he did in the movies we looked at.” The next week, Cappy carried the ball a school record thirty-four times against West Virginia. His football personality was coming into focus. He was big, strong, and virtually indestructible. He was relentless, always pushing forward for an extra yard, never worrying about himself or his statistics or even his physical well-being. Paterno loved the guy. He would never admit to loving any one player more than the rest, but it’s fair to say, based on the way he talked over the years, that he never loved any player more than he loved John Cappelletti.

In truth, he had a special affinity and love for the entire 1973 team. Through the years, whenever people asked Paterno how good his team was, he would borrow the line of legendary coach Bobby Dodd and say, “Ask me in twenty years.” He meant that he wanted to see what became of those players, how they lived their lives. It’s easy enough to go back and see what happened to those players from 1973.

Quarterback Tom Shuman, who readily admitted that his main job in 1973 was handing the ball to Cappy, remembered getting called into Paterno’s office so the coach could tear him apart over grades. Shuman offered a little insight into how Paterno did such things: “[He] very clearly let me know that I had a good bit of talent on the football field, but that I was going to be a huge disappointment to my parents, myself, and the university if I didn’t immediately get my nose into my books.” This was classic Paterno, using every angle to get inside players’ heads. His favorite trick was to use a player’s mother as motivation, saying, “I promised your mother that I would make sure that you got an education, and you’re making a liar of me.” Shuman, like hundreds of others, took the hint, hit the books, made the Dean’s List, played pro football for a while, and became a national sales manager.

Fullback Bob Nagle became a systems engineer. Flanker Chuck Herd became a conference planner at Penn State and worked as a personal ministry Bible school teacher. Split end Gary Hayman
became an attorney. Tight end Dan Natale owned a sporting goods store. Left tackle Phil LaPorta went into construction.

Left guard Mark Markovich had come to Penn State for the same reason so many did: because he felt Paterno was the first honest coach he had come across. Other coaches had told him he would be a star tight end for their program. Paterno said bluntly, “You’re too slow and don’t have good enough hands to play tight end. You’ll be an offensive lineman.” Markovich was taken aback but realized that Paterno was right. He became a second-team All-American offensive lineman and a first-team Academic All-American. He later became president of the Illinois Machine & Tool Works.

Center Jack Baiorunos became a dentist. Right end Buddy Tesner became an orthopedic surgeon, as did cornerback Jim Bradley. In fact Bradley was the longtime team surgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The other cornerback, Buddy Ellis, became a certified public accountant. Linebacker Mike Orsini became an otolaryngologist, or, as Paterno called him, “an ear, nose and throat doctor, what does he need the fancy title?” Kicker Chris Bahr, whose brother Matt also kicked at Penn State and whose father coached soccer at the school, worked as a financial planner. Others were teachers, executives, coaches, and brokers. John Quinn became a high school principal. Woody Petchel became a company president.

Paterno would readily admit he couldn’t see the big picture back then. He had this unformed idea in his mind, this idea about the difference between excellence and success. Later his teams would have great success. They would win national championships. They would become so popular that Penn State expanded Beaver Stadium to seat 107,000 people. Paterno himself would be named
Sports Illustrated
’s Sportsman of the Year, and he would make a lot of money. He and Sue would use much of that money to build a library and a student faith center, and they would endow scholarships and fellowships. But Paterno was always careful to say that success and excellence are two different things and not always intertwined. Success is nice, he would say. Excellence, though, is life-affirming.

In 1973 Penn State won every game on its schedule, almost all of them convincingly, and the nation yawned. Perhaps this was because Penn State did not face a single ranked team until it beat Pitt in the final game of the regular season and Louisiana State in the Orange Bowl. But 1973 was an odd season in the annals of college football. Six of America’s most beloved teams—Penn State, of course, but also Alabama, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Michigan—finished the season undefeated (though Ohio State, Michigan, and Oklahoma had a tie on their records). This left Penn State ranked sixth in the nation.

Paterno insisted, perhaps a bit too intently to be believable, that he didn’t care. “I’m not worried about the polls,” he said again and again. Penn State outscored opponents 447 to 129, and only two teams all year stayed within a touchdown. Cappelletti was a revelation. He carried the ball thirty-three times in a grueling victory over Air Force (“That was a great feeling, when I looked up and saw there were only seven seconds to go,” he recalled.) Two weeks later, before the West Virginia game, Cappy was visited by his younger brother, Joey, who had just turned eleven and whose leukemia was growing more and more aggressive. “What do you want for a birthday present?” John asked.

“Four touchdowns,” Joey said promptly.

“I think we’ll score four touchdowns.”

“No,” Joey said. “I want
you
to score four touchdowns.”

Cappelletti was not healthy; he had sprained his shoulder. But he was not the complaining kind. In the third quarter, Penn State led 35–14, and Paterno pulled his starters, including Cappy. “You’ve had a good workout,” Cappelletti would remember Joe telling him. At that point, Cappy had scored three touchdowns. He was going to say something to Paterno about wanting to score one more touchdown for Joey, but he did not. He was not the complaining kind. Instead he wandered off to the bench. It was Markovich, his best friend, who explained to Paterno about Joey. Paterno was adamant about keeping his players humble, about preventing his team from becoming
fragmented by stars or individual glory. He would say again and again, often with a bite in his voice, that he did not care about personal statistics or achievements. But he loved Joey Cappelletti.

“Cappelletti!” Paterno shouted. “Get back in there.” It was like a made-for-TV movie. In fact it would become a hugely popular made-for-TV movie called
Something for Joey
. Cappelletti plunged in from two yards out, his fourth touchdown of the day, the moment that soon would induce tears in living rooms across America. But nobody told that story after the game. Instead Paterno just said, “I don’t know if I’ve been around a greater football player than Cappy.”

Against Maryland the next week, Cappy carried the ball thirty-seven times, breaking his own school record. A week after that, he broke the record again, this time carrying the ball forty-one times against North Carolina State. He ran for 220 yards and scored three touchdowns. He seemed to be superhuman. “Cappy just literally took the game over. He just literally carried people,” Paterno said. The English lit major was so overwhelmed he used “literally” twice—incorrectly. After that game, Cappelletti was the favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

The next week, against Ohio University, Cappy ran for 204 yards and again scored four touchdowns. Paterno was now getting into the spirit; he had pulled Cappelletti from the blowout when he had 198 yards and put him back in so he could break the 200-yard mark again. In the last game of the year, Cappelletti carried the ball thirty-seven times in an overpowering victory over rival Pitt. He won the Heisman Trophy in a runaway.

When Penn State beat Louisiana State in a boring 16–9 Orange Bowl, in which Cappelletti played hurt and gained only 50 yards, the national media was unimpressed. “The match was so lackluster,” wrote John Crittenden of the
Miami News
, “that I hoped some of the Penn Staters would be honest enough to say, ‘We don’t deserve to be No. 1.’ That didn’t happen, though.” Not only did that not happen, but Paterno went the other way. “I just held the Paterno Poll,” he told reporters after that game. “I did it in our locker room. Our players
voted Penn State No. 1. It was unanimous.” He then bought championship rings for every player.

Paterno might have been happier coaching the 1973 team than he ever felt again. He would love coaching for the rest of his life, of course, but there was an innocence about 1973 that could not be repeated.
Sports Illustrated
’s William Johnson wrote a long feature on Paterno in November of that year, with the telling lead sentence, “It is arguable whether Joe Paterno, at 46, is an authentic folk hero.” That article followed a story line that would be repeated in countless Paterno stories yet to be written: the scholarly coach who lives modestly, babysits his kids, listens to opera as he draws up game plans, rails against cheating, and is most proud of his team’s high graduation rate. Yes, it was all true. But over time, it descended into cliché. Nobody’s that good. The cynics would pick at his record and his motivations. Some players got in trouble, some failed to graduate, and Paterno was called a hypocrite. The expectations changed. The Paterno children grew up, and their father was too busy to babysit his grandchildren. It would never feel easier or freer than it did in 1973, when everyone was young, when Paterno could speak his heart, and when the game plan was simply to give the ball to John Cappelletti while his younger brother, Joey, watched happily.

THE HEISMAN TROPHY DINNER WAS
the crescendo in a year filled with highs. Cappelletti had scribbled part of his speech on the back of an envelope. There was a certain part he wanted to get exactly right; after he thanked his parents, Paterno, his teammates, and others, he reached that part. Paterno knew it was coming. He had told Sue, who was sitting near the back, not to cry.

“The next part,” Cappy said, “I’m very happy to do something like this. I thought about it since the Heisman was announced ten days ago. And this is to dedicate a trophy that a lot of people earned, I’ve earned, my parents and the people I’ve mentioned and numerous other people that are here tonight and have been with me for a long
time. The youngest member of my family, Joseph, is very ill. He has leukemia. If I can dedicate this trophy to him tonight and give him a couple of days of happiness, this is worth everything.

“I think a lot of people think I go through a lot on Saturdays and during the week, as most athletes do, and you get bumps and bruises, and it is a terrific battle out there on the field. Only for me it is only on Saturdays and it’s only in the fall. For Joseph, it is all year round, and it is a battle that is unending with him, and he puts up with much more than I’ll ever put up with. And I think this trophy is more his than mine because he has been a great inspiration to me.”

Sue Paterno did cry. So did everyone else in the New York Hilton ballroom. Vice President Gerald Ford, who everyone suspected would soon be president, teared up. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who on his death would be considered for sainthood, was there to give the blessing and simply said, “You don’t need a blessing. God has already blessed you in John Cappelletti.”

Paterno saw Billy Sullivan after the ceremony, after the most remarkable year a college football coach ever had. “Do you see now why I couldn’t leave Penn State?” Paterno asked him.

“Yes,” Sullivan said. “Yes, I think I do.”

“I don’t know if he really understood,” Paterno would say. “But I did. There was no amount of money that could have made me as proud as seeing John Cappelletti that night.”

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

—
CATO THE ELDER

Joe Paterno

speech to Penn State Quarterback Club

winter 1979

Let’s talk about being number one. The big question is: “Is it worth it?” Personally, I never really felt it was important to be number one. I had always believed deeply in the statement that to travel with hope is something better than to arrive. It might end up being true.

But it wasn’t! To get to number one was generally fun. It was great excitement. The game we played against Alabama, though we lost, was a thrilling game to be a part of for everybody involved.

But you never get anything for nothing. And the price of number one can be too high unless we are careful.

You can’t turn back the clock. People . . . alumni . . . subway alumni [alumni that live in big cities like New York and Philadelphia and come in only for games] . . . they have had a taste of it and most of them will probably not be happy with less. A two-game losing season might be an unhappy
one. These are the new expectations. And in order to stay up with such high expectations, we have to do many things.