He’s Teaching Them a Lesson : Holiday Bowl: Penn State’s Paterno tries to do it all and manages to win quite a few football games in the process.

SAN DIEGO —  Joe Paterno’s eyes squinted at the alarm clock next to his bed. It was 3:30 in the morning Wednesday. He thought briefly about getting up and going over some game plans, but while his mind was able and willing, his body told him to keep sleeping.

He pulled the covers back up, and the next thing Paterno knew--oh my gosh--it was already 6.

There was a game plan to prepare. Practice in three hours. Recruits to call. An ESPN interview later in the afternoon. And . . . oh, no, a Holiday Bowl luncheon aboard an aircraft carrier. That will take about three hours.

Paterno, 63, walked across his hotel room, opened his drapes, looked toward the sky and, yes, there was some hope after all. The sky was gray, thick clouds hovering above, and maybe, just maybe, rain would soon follow.

That’s right. Joe Paterno brings his Penn State football team to California for the first time in 16 years, and what does he do? He prays for rain.

“I’ve just got so much to do,” Paterno said while preparing for tonight’s game against Brigham Young. “It’s a lot tougher on the West Coast with the time difference. By the time you get ahold of recruits back east, they’re already having dinner or are out for the night.”

Paterno glances upward, begrudgingly concedes that it isn’t going to rain, tosses his sport jacket in the back seat of his car and is ready to commence another day in the life of a college coach.

Paterno has won more football games than any active coach with the exception of Bo Schembechler of Michigan.

He has been voted coach of the year four times.

He is the only football coach ever selected as Sports Illustrated’s sportsman of the year.

And he has led Penn State to two national championships, six undefeated seasons, 15 finishes in the top 10, a 31-game unbeaten streak and 19 bowl games.

But he has got to learn that he can’t control the weather, too.

“Don’t tell him that,” said Bob Phillips, a Penn State assistant, “or he’ll figure out a way to do that too.”

Yes, calling Joseph Vincent Paterno just a football coach is like saying Leonardo da Vinci was just a painter or Winston Churchill was just another politician.

Certainly, you don’t think a little ol’ coach such as Paterno had an influence in the recent decision by Big Ten presidents to allow Penn State into their conference, do you?

After all, wasn’t Schembechler just moaning and groaning the other day about the fact that he and the other Big Ten athletic directors were left in the dark about this historical decision?

“I’ll talk to Bo after the Rose Bowl,” said Paterno, his face breaking into an expansive grin. “I’ll talk to him the day after. Of course, if he loses, I may wait a month.”

Paterno, who prefers being called an educator instead of having the title of coach in front of his name, is Penn State.

This is a man who, in 1982, three weeks after winning the Sugar Bowl and the national championship, marched into a meeting with the university’s board of trustees and scolded them.

He urged the board to raise entrance requirements. He demanded that they hire superior and vibrant professors. He called for a fund-raising drive, in particular to raise more money for the school library.

Not one mention was made of athletics or about enhancing the weight-training facilities.

“Football is part of life,” Paterno said, “not life itself.”

Paterno was selected co-chairman of the fund-raising campaign and has collected more than $310 million. A total of $330 million is expected by June.

Of course, $150,000 of that can directly be attributed to Paterno. He donated $100,000 to the school library and $50,000 to the minority student fund.

“I’m not sure if I should have done that now,” Paterno said. “Now, my kids think I’m rich.”

Paterno laughed and said he certainly wouldn’t be in this business if he ever wanted to be wealthy.

The man behind the Photogray trifocals, with 20-20,000 eyesight, was supposed to be sitting in a three-piece suit with his Gucci shoes propped on his desk every day, not pacing the sidelines with a sweat shirt, white socks and a pair of sneakers.

He indeed was bred to be more than a coach. His aunt was in charge of foreign languages for a Long Island school district; his cousin became president of Chrysler, and his father went to night school until he was 40 to obtain his law degree.

When Paterno accepted Rip Engle’s offer in 1950 to be an assistant coach at Penn State, he promised his father he did it only to earn extra money for law school. It has been 39 years now, and Paterno has yet to take his first law class.

Yeah, he’s a coach all right: His 219-57-3 record certainly verifies that.

But how many coaches do you know who draw up game plans while listening to the opera, write opinion pieces for the New York Times or quote Browning?

How many coaches do you know who give their players permission to skip practice to study for a big test, install a two-hour mandatory study hall every night during a player’s freshman year and have a wife tutoring English and a son tutoring math to the players?

How many coaches do you know whose phone numbers are listed in the phone book, receive ovations when they simply rise to go to the bathroom during basketball games and have been the subject of look-alike contests--”I don’t know why anyone would want to win,” he says--the past three homecomings?

How many coaches do you know who drive a Ford Escort around town, live in the same house they’ve owned the past 22 years and once turned down a four-year contract worth $1.4 million from the New England Patriots to stay at a $35,000-a-year job?

“You know, every once in a while I’ll see the Super Bowl, and I’ll think how nice it would be to be involved in that,” Paterno said. “But that passes in a hurry.

“My wife and I, we’re not money people. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. People say, ‘Why don’t you get a BMW or something to drive in.’ Me? I’d be too nervous driving one of those jobs. They say, ‘OK, how about buying your wife a fur coat.’ Hey, she doesn’t want one.

“Believe me, we’re perfectly comfortable with the way things are.”

Paterno, who’s riding shotgun on the way to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium so he can talk about life at State College, Pa., never, of course, will be satisfied with himself.

Since the day he arrived at Penn State, he has been a brooder, a fanatic about details and a hopeless notemaker. He goes to bed at 11:30. He’s usually up at 5 a.m., but often feels guilty that he’s sleeping too much and awakens at 3.

Teams might beat Paterno with their talent. There are times he’ll even be outcoached. But never does Paterno want it said that he was beaten because of forgotten details.

“I just hate to lose,” he said, “God, I hate to lose. I know I preach a lot about being willing to lose, that there can be valor in losing to a better opponent, but I have never learned how not to hate losing.”

Winning is such an obsession to Paterno that his first thought on most mornings is the games Penn State has lost and what he could have done differently. It took him 10 months to get over the 1979 Sugar Bowl defeat, which cost Penn State the national championship. And he has been miffed for 20 years now that President Richard Nixon had the gall to declare Texas the national champion in 1969 when Penn State was undefeated.

Four years later, at Penn State’s commencement ceremonies, Paterno said, “If President Nixon knew so little about Watergate, how could he know so much about football?”

Of course, Paterno had himself partially to blame, too. He voted for Nixon in 1968.

He didn’t say who got his vote in 1972.

The telephone rang in Paterno’s room. It was Jack White, a former quarterback who played under Paterno in 1965 and 1966.

They chatted for a while, and Paterno learned that Jack is a dentist in San Diego. They talked a little more and, while discussing their families, White mentioned that he has a son who played high school football and will graduate this May.

He is Dan White of Point Loma, and he just so happens to have been the top-rated quarterback in San Diego County, passing for 3,169 yards this past season. He also happened to be The Times’ back of the year.

So, Paterno slammed down the telephone and drove straight to White’s house ready with a recruiting pitch, right?

Well, not exactly.

Oh, Paterno said he probably will talk with White while he’s in town. But to recruit him? Doubtful.

“I just don’t think it’s right,” Paterno said. “I’m just not sure a kid should come that far away from home unless there are very special circumstances, like he has family back east or we have some courses that aren’t available elsewhere.

“I’d feel awful to have a kid come so far and be homesick.”

This is why if you look at your program tonight, you’ll notice there are no California kids on the roster. In fact, there are only two from west of the Mississippi.

Penn State, adorned with its black shoes, nameless uniforms and plain helmets, simply is not for everyone. The campus is located two hours away from the nearest major airport in Harrisburg and it’s about a three-hour drive to either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.

“I think it takes a special kid to come to Penn State,” Phillips said, “and Joe knows this. He has a special knack of knowing what kids will fit in and what ones won’t. Very seldom is he ever wrong on a kid.”

It’s a great attribute, naturally, when a coach can project the ability of a high school player in college, but it’s much more difficult than that for Paterno. Playing football is not enough. He wants a diploma to go along with it.

“I don’t think any of us are smarter than any other team’s players,” said junior fullback Leroy Thompson, “but I think we work harder. Coach Paterno makes sure we’re going to those classes. If we have a big test coming up or something, he’ll even give us a day off or two.

“I came close to going to Miami. Out of high school, that’s where I thought I’d go. Once I saw the ocean, I just fell in love with the place.

“But during my visit, it was strange. They never talked about academics the whole time I was there, just football.

“Now, when Coach Paterno came to see me, he didn’t even talk about football. In fact, he hardly even talked to me. I just sat back while he talked with my parents, brother and sister. He said, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

“I came back, and they were all playing cards together. I guess I knew then where I was going.”

There’s actually one player on the Penn State roster, one Paterno didn’t want to embarrass by identifying, who had to do book reports before Paterno gave him a scholarship.

“He came from a tough inner-city school,” Paterno said. “He had the grades in high school, but the English fundamentals were not there. I wanted him to start reading.”

So, every two weeks, the player would read a book, write a book report and mail it to Paterno’s wife, Sue. Once he got to college, Sue continued working with him in English while David, Paterno’s son, tutored him in math.

“A lot of these kids have good minds, they just don’t use them,” Paterno said. “Colleges are starting to make a big deal out of the graduation rate, but that can be overblown, too. What good is a college education if you can’t write a letter or discuss politics?”

This is why when someone asks Paterno which team was the best he ever coached, the response will always be the same: “That will be determined by what those players contributed to society.”

It’s also why Paterno remains humble in discussing his coaching feats. He acknowledges that he’s not the same coach he was 20 years ago, when he called every offensive and defensive play. But he says he’s much improved from a year ago, when he says he allowed outside activities to detract from his time from the football field.

“I actually did more harm than good, just being around,” Paterno said. “My staff would have meetings and decide on something, and I’d put my two cents in and throw everything out of whack.

“I deserved the kind of season we had.”

How foolish, he now says, he was for leaving the first week of practice to attend the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where he seconded the nomination of George Bush. How silly he was to devote most of his week to being the driving force behind the college’s campaign fund. How wrong he was to delegate all of the authority to his assistants and expect success on the field.

He was awakened with a cold slap in the face when the Penn State season ended in 1988.

For the first time in 50 years, Penn State finished with a losing record--5-6.

Paterno thought a while about quitting, thinking perhaps he might have outlived his usefulness. Then he realized that he’d be quitting the program he so long has loved and decided that there’s no way he’s going to leave Penn State in any condition that’s less than ideal.

So he went back to the midnight film sessions. He put his his 165-pound body on that blocking sled. And he stuck that whistle back in his mouth.

Penn State lost its season-opener to Virginia, 14-6, but lost just two more games the rest of the season, finishing 7-3-1.

It was not a vintage Penn State season by any means, but, as Paterno will tell you, it’s the beginning of a new era.

He has told his freshman players that he’ll remain with them throughout their collegiate eligibility and, although he cannot make any promises, he’ll let them know that since he took over at Penn State, every player completing his eligibility has:

--Played on a team that won the national championship.

--Played on a team that had an undefeated season.

--Played in a bowl game for the national championship.

“It’d be nice to go out with another national championship,” Paterno said, “but I’m not even thinking of that scenario. If I don’t win another national championship, it doesn’t mean I’m not a success. It doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’m going to keep enjoying it.

“Nothing is going to change that, as long as I can help it.”