Hall beckons Lions’ JoePa .
BY DONNIE COLLINS
12/04/2007
Someday, Joe Paterno insists, he’s going to bring his family back to New York City.He’ll take them down to Sheepshead Bay. They’ll walk around Brooklyn, and they’ll tour the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvestant section. They’ll see where their father’s long, unlikely journey started.
Someday, Joe Paterno insists, he’s going to bring his family back to New York City. He’ll take them down to Sheepshead Bay. They’ll walk around Brooklyn, and they’ll tour the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvestant section. They’ll see where their father’s long, unlikely journey started. They’ll see the literal road he took to get from meager beginnings to the head of a college football empire. “I think that would be fun,” the 80-year-old Nittany Lions coach smiled. Tonight, Paterno again will be in the city where it all began. This time, he’ll be in Manhattan to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon the second-winningest coach of all time by the game he says he is “endebted to.” Only two other coaches — Florida State’s Bobby Bowden and St. John’s (Minn.) John Gagliardi — have been inducted into the Hall when they were still active on the sidelines. He doesn’t get back to the Big Apple much. Only in important times, Paterno says.But the city is still as much a part of him as State College has become embodied by him. This city, his upbringing, are the root of his unlikely story. Radio daysHe remembers the game like it took place yesterday, he said with a grin. It happened in 1935. It was the first meeting between Notre Dame and Ohio State, and a 9-year-old Paterno sat on the floor, listening to the game on the radio. CBS Radio carried it. Red Barber had the call. Notre Dame was a considerable underdog against the unbeaten Buckeyes, but with a half minute left, Bill Shakespeare came in to play quarterback after the starter was injured.On Shakespeare’s third play, he faked a run and lofted a pass to receiver Wayne Millner for a game-winning 19-yard touchdown.“Maybe it was the drama of that game, sitting there listening to Shakespeare come back,” Paterno reminisced. “I don’t know. I don’t know what gets you.”Something about football did, though. Brooklyn, back then, was decidedly a baseball town.Football was a game played on pavement in the busy streets, pass patterns designed to be run around parked cars. This was a baseball town, stickball in the streets and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the hearts. Paterno was an usher for two years at Ebbetts Field. His family’s apartment was a mere block away from the high school where Frank and Joe Torre took their math and science classes.
BY DONNIE COLLINS
12/04/2007
Someday, Joe Paterno insists, he’s going to bring his family back to New York City.He’ll take them down to Sheepshead Bay. They’ll walk around Brooklyn, and they’ll tour the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvestant section. They’ll see where their father’s long, unlikely journey started.
Someday, Joe Paterno insists, he’s going to bring his family back to New York City. He’ll take them down to Sheepshead Bay. They’ll walk around Brooklyn, and they’ll tour the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvestant section. They’ll see where their father’s long, unlikely journey started. They’ll see the literal road he took to get from meager beginnings to the head of a college football empire. “I think that would be fun,” the 80-year-old Nittany Lions coach smiled. Tonight, Paterno again will be in the city where it all began. This time, he’ll be in Manhattan to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed upon the second-winningest coach of all time by the game he says he is “endebted to.” Only two other coaches — Florida State’s Bobby Bowden and St. John’s (Minn.) John Gagliardi — have been inducted into the Hall when they were still active on the sidelines. He doesn’t get back to the Big Apple much. Only in important times, Paterno says.But the city is still as much a part of him as State College has become embodied by him. This city, his upbringing, are the root of his unlikely story. Radio daysHe remembers the game like it took place yesterday, he said with a grin. It happened in 1935. It was the first meeting between Notre Dame and Ohio State, and a 9-year-old Paterno sat on the floor, listening to the game on the radio. CBS Radio carried it. Red Barber had the call. Notre Dame was a considerable underdog against the unbeaten Buckeyes, but with a half minute left, Bill Shakespeare came in to play quarterback after the starter was injured.On Shakespeare’s third play, he faked a run and lofted a pass to receiver Wayne Millner for a game-winning 19-yard touchdown.“Maybe it was the drama of that game, sitting there listening to Shakespeare come back,” Paterno reminisced. “I don’t know. I don’t know what gets you.”Something about football did, though. Brooklyn, back then, was decidedly a baseball town.Football was a game played on pavement in the busy streets, pass patterns designed to be run around parked cars. This was a baseball town, stickball in the streets and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the hearts. Paterno was an usher for two years at Ebbetts Field. His family’s apartment was a mere block away from the high school where Frank and Joe Torre took their math and science classes.
However, he also grew up near the parish where Vince Lombardi and his family worshipped. And while his parents had visions of law school for him, Paterno always had football on his mind. “My dad, who never owned a house, somehow came up with 20 bucks a month to send me to Brooklyn Preparatory School for Young Men, which was a Jesuit High School,” Paterno said.
“Because I wanted to play football.” Would he call himself a great player? Not exactly. But Paterno’s scouting report on himself was one of a player who could anticipate things before they happened, someone with enough of a feel for the game that he ran a no-huddle offense as Brooklyn Prep’s quarterback in 1944.It was there that he got his first informal taste of coaching from a religious brother by the name of Lenehan, a Notre Dame graduate who showed him the intricacies of the Notre Dame Box — the shift-heavy variation of the single-wing offense that Knute Rockne invented in the 1910s and Curly Lambeau brought to the Green Bay Packers in the 1930s. “I got caught up in it,” Paterno said. “And I was pretty good.” The big decisionAngelo Paterno, Joe’s father, died in 1955. His son, a fifth-year assistant at Penn State at the time, missed the Oct. 1 game against Army.Over the next 52 years, there would only be two Penn State football games played without Paterno on the sidelines: Oct. 15, 1977, against Syracuse after his son, David, was injured in a trampoline accident; and Nov. 11, 2006, against Temple after he broke his leg and tore knee ligaments during a sideline collision with tight end Andrew Quarless the week before against Wisconsin. Not a bad string of attendance for a guy who said he never considered coaching as a profession before Rip Engel hired him as a backfield coach, a 23-year-old fresh out of Brown University in 1950.It took three or four years, by his own estimation, for Paterno to decide that he would be putting off law school forever. Coaching football was his career calling, his avenue to making a difference. And letting his family know the news wasn’t easy. “I enjoyed the coaching part of it. I knew I was going to like that,” Paterno said. “But my dad had such a strong influence on me. He didn’t see me being a coach. I called him up and said I was going to coach, and he said, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do? I always thought you were going to be president of the United States.’ “That’s a long cry from being an assistant coach at Penn State.” Soul searching when Penn State promoted Paterno to head coach after Engel retired more than 40 years ago, he made $20,000. He didn’t even work under a contract until 1971, when he signed one after the New England Patriots offered him $1 million a year. Last week, when his annual salary of just more than $500,000 a year was announced, even his harshest of critics touted it as a bargain. Asked why money never meant much to him, Paterno responded quickly and matter-of-factly: “Because I had everything else.” Penn State provided Paterno with family, home and a livelihood. The only place that has been able to offer Paterno as much is Brooklyn, though. Speaking to a small gathering of reporters about his Hall of Fame induction last week, Paterno candidly admitted he had just one regret in his career: The 1978 Sugar Bowl. Unbeaten Penn State lost to Alabama that day in what Paterno called “one of the greatest defensive football games ever played.” The Nittany Lions had a chance to get the ball back inside the Crimson Tide’s 30 after a poor Alabama punt, with a chance to win. But the Nittany Lions had 12 men on the field on that punt. Penn State’s first national championship would have to wait — four seasons, as it turned out. But it nearly never came with Paterno on the sidelines. “I almost quit,” Paterno admitted, the rock of a coach choking up as he looked back. “I went home, said I was going to resign. Then I went to New York and walked around Brooklyn. I went to my parish. I was all set to quit. I didn’t feel it was right for me to stay. I spent three days in Brooklyn.” Making an impact He decided to stay, to honor a commitment to the players he recruited and the university that gave him the only chance to coach that he’d ever need.
There was the famous offer from the Patriots. Boston College also offered Paterno more money to coach there, and there were a few other opportunities he didn’t even care to mention, almost like they didn’t even matter.There is chance, and there is destiny, and who knows what it was that not only brought Joseph Vincent Paterno to football, but brought him from New York City to State College, and, ultimately, back to New York City and the Hall of Fame. Only one coach, Bowden, has won more games at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. None has led more teams to the postseason. None has won more bowl games.Seven times, he has led a Penn State team to an unbeaten record. Twice, his teams won national championships. When he was 79 years old, his Nittany Lions went 11-1, and he was the consensus National Coach of the Year. Beaver Field was a 20,000-seat stadium on the west side of Penn State’s campus when Paterno and Engel — who originally wanted a man by the name of Bill Doolittle to be his backfield coach — made their first drive to State College from Providence, Rhode Island. Now, Beaver Stadium seats more than 107,000 on the east side of campus. A bronze statue of his likeness stands outside Beaver Stadium today, and his family name is on a massive, state-of-the-art wing of the Patee Library, funded largely by donations from the Paterno family. His charity to the university is legendary in the college football community. “Deep down,” Paterno said, “I feel I’ve had an impact. I don’t think I’ve wasted my 56 years here.” That’s the way his parents would have demanded it, and the way he tries to continue to lead his life.
The father of five, grandfather of 16, and winner of 371 career games knows heDon’t count the Hall of Fame induction and his latest return to the Big Apple as the beginning of the last chapter, he’ll warn. And if history is a lesson, it’s a good warning to heed.“I think the perfect ending is, you drop dead at the end of the game after you kick the winning field goal,” he said, before breaking out in laughter. “They carry you off the field.“Everybody’s singing, ‘So long, Joe! You’ve been wonderful!’ ”
won’t be coaching forever. Three, four, maybe five more years, as he put it.
Link to Times Tribune article (here)
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