Hitting Reset on the Retirement Clock

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“Kee-ripes,” complained the legendary W.W. “Pudge” Heffelfinger, Walter Camp’s first All-America selection, in his 1953 autobiography, “This Was Football.” “How different modern football is from the old days when the coach wouldn’t dare make a decision without first consulting the team captain. Your head coach today has become an absolute dictator.” If Pudge had stuck around another half century, he wouldn’t recognize what the position of head football coach at a major university has become.


Frank Fitzpatrick’s fascinating look at Penn State coach Joe Paterno’s miserable 2004 season, “The Lion in Autumn” (Gotham Books, 320 pages, $26), is one of the best books ever written on the rise and fall of a great college football coach. Mr. Paterno is an ideal subject because he embodies so many of the contradictions inherent in running a big-time college football program. Probably the only English major from an Ivy League school to coach a gridiron powerhouse (and certainly the only one to have produced a defensive tackle, Mike Reid, who became a concert pianist), he has been, for nearly 40 years, what NCAA president Miles Brand called “a poster boy for everything that’s right about the game.”


In the last few seasons, though, Mr. Paterno has become a billboard for everything that can go wrong when a coach overstays his welcome. As Penn State football has faded, Mr. Paterno – the second-winningest coach in major college history, winner of two national championships, and the man who put Penn State football on the map – has increasingly lost control of the empire he created. After three decades of success that spurred nonstop stadium expansion, empty seats have sprouted at Beaver Stadium; the man who once had to field questions about his status as a folk hero now must endure chants of “Joe must go!” and fans with paper bags over their heads. The 2003 and 2004 campaigns, in which the Nittany Lions went a combined 7-16, marked a new low:



The Penn State decline that began in 2000 and lingered on like a bad dream for five seasons now had eroded Mount Joe Pa’s reputation. Losing had pulled back the curtain on Paterno’s wizardry, revealing him to many as a stubborn, aging mortal. His supporters still outnumbered his detractors by a wide margin, but the gap was narrowing every day.


The worst part of the Penn State decline – and the surest sign that matters were spinning out of control – was the shocking number of off-field incidents involving Nittany Lion players, offenses ranging from bicycle theft to sexual assault. “At times it was hard to distinguish Penn State from an outlaw program,” Mr. Fitzpatrick writes.


All of the reasons, for the decline of the program lead back to the 78-year-old Paterno, a noble and grizzled warrior who simply doesn’t know how to lay down the sword. On the field, his well-known conservatism has become more pronounced in recent seasons. “The teams that play us know what we’re going to run,” a star running back complained openly a few seasons ago,” The system is too predictable. It’s been around too long.” Critics also suggest that the high standards Mr. Paterno has insisted upon for his athletes work against him in an age in which blue-chip prospects can get an easier deal at some school in a state with a balmier climate.


Still others suggest that Mr. Paterno is haunted by the specter of his great rival, Bear Bryant (he was winless against Bryant in four attempts), who died less than a month after retiring as head coach of Alabama. In the words of a beat writer who covered Mr. Paterno for 20 years, “he kept hitting the reset button on his retirement clock.”


Perhaps Joe Paterno should read “A Fire To Win” (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages, $24.95), the new biography of a coach who stuck around one game too long. Woody Hayes coached Ohio State University from 1951 through 1978, winning 205 of 276 games and taking his teams to 10 postseason bowls. But the game best remembered by most football fans was Hayes’s last, the 1978 Gator Bowl against Clemson, where Hayes punched a Clemson player who had intercepted an Ohio State pass. Refusing to resign, or even to apologize, he forced his university into firing him.


As John Lombardo’s insightful and comprehensive biography makes clear, the infamous punch wasn’t thrown “out of anger against an unknown defensive lineman. Instead, Hayes was attacking everything that had failed him during the long and frustrating [final] season.” It was an ugly end to a great career, but one that came as more of a shock than a surprise to those who knew Hayes best.


“Motivation through fear was Woody’s biggest coaching tool,” writes Mr. Lombardo about Hayes’s apprentice years, and it remained his primary weapon to the very end. A fanatical disciplinarian and workaholic, Hayes “always worried about some force he couldn’t control” and became so paranoid about spies infiltrating his practices that he made all non-players, including the team doctor, wear Ohio State football shirts.


He tested the loyalty, love, and patience of nearly everyone in his life – including his wife, Anne, who once cracked, “Divorce Woody? Never. But there were times I wanted to murder him.” Amazingly, he managed to hold onto the admiration of even staunch foes such as his former assistant Bo Schembechler, who ended up coaching archrival Michigan. (Hayes hated the school and the state so much that once, when he ran out of gas, he pushed his car across the Ohio state line rather than give a nickel of his money to the Wolverine state.)


Woody Hayes’s story ought to function as a cautionary tale to Joe Paterno. To paraphrase Douglas MacArthur and Neil Young, football coaches, when they get too old, don’t fade away, they burn out.



Mr. Barra’s column on football appears in The New York Sun every Monday during the NFL season. His latest book is “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant” (W.W. Norton).


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