This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Joe Paterno’s head coaching career. Although he’s once again recognized as the winningest coach in big-time college football history, his legacy has not been completely rebuilt since he was fired shortly after the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke. His statue that once stood outside of Beaver Stadium has not been returned. Penn State had not publicly celebrated him or his 409 victories since November 2011, but on Saturday during Penn State’s game against Temple, the anniversary of his first game as head coach will be commemorated.
While his name may never be revered nationally as it once was, he does maintain the support of most of his countless former players, many of whom say his positive impact cannot be overstated, even now.
Town&Gown talked with a player from each of the six decades Paterno coached, and they each described what their former coach meant to them, then and now.
1960s — Steve Smear
A defensive tackle and co-captain of the undefeated 1968 and 1969 teams. Played in the Canadian Football League before becoming a State Farm insurance agent — a job he’s held for the past 38 years.
Steve Smear remembers one of his first face-to-face meetings with Paterno, a rookie head coach. He was a freshman who had just earned a lowly 1.6 grade-point average.
“He started with how my mom raised me, and she had nothing more than a seventh-grade education, and how I was going to break my mother’s heart,” Smear says. “He lambasted me. He had to dry that sweat off his face he was so angry with me.
“That kind of made me realize why I was there, and he would have done that with anybody who didn’t fulfill their obligations.”
Smear says he nearly left Penn State, though, before his sophomore year. He didn’t care for Paterno moving him from tight end to defensive tackle. He says he even talked to good friend and incoming freshman Jack Ham about going to play together at IUP.
Right after the spring practice, though, Paterno called Smear into his office again.
“He did know when to stomp on you and when to tell you to hang in there,” Smear says. “He said, ‘Hey, I know you’re discouraged, but we saw some really good signs, and you’re going to do well at defensive tackle.’ And I started the second game of my sophomore year there. A lot of times you don’t get what you want, and that’s OK.’
He said his fondness for Paterno has not waned through the years, even during the charges and unrest since 2011.
“One thing I always told my four kids, told them what Joe said, that you either get better or you get worse, you don’t stay the same,” he says. “And keep hustling, because something good will happen. That’s something everybody should follow.”
1970s — Scott Fitzkee
A state sprint champion from Red Lion. Developed into a standout receiver and kick returner and even punted at Penn State. He caught the pass short of the goal line in the 1979 Sugar Bowl that eventually set up Alabama’s memorable defensive stand against the Nittany Lions.
“I was pretty much in awe of [Paterno], and going there as a freshman I also was scared to death of him and probably was like that for three years,” Scott Fitzkee says with a laugh. “I was scared to make a mistake and scared not to show up on time. I was scared to not get good grades. He motivated you because you wanted to do things right for him.
“He was tough at practice. If you were supposed to run a 10-yard pattern to get a first down and you ran it nine yards or eight yards, you were in trouble. If you didn’t do well academically, you were in trouble and you may not play, no matter how good you were.”
Fizkee went on to play briefly in the NFL and the CFL, though he enjoyed most of his professional football success with Philadelphia and Baltimore in the USFL. He now runs a commercial roofing business in Maryland.
He still comes back to Penn State games regularly, including a tailgate reunion each year with his late 1970s teammates, including quarterback Chuck Fusina.
Fitzkee says he thinks of Paterno often.
“He had his rules, like if you showed up on time you were five minutes late,” he says. “And he’d say if there were 100 players and you were five minutes late then you just wasted 500 minutes of peoples’ time. Those things stick with you throughout your life. My whole life I want to be on time, and I expect my family to be on time. Those were things you were taught at Penn State. You say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and you take your hat off when you’re inside. They were always stressed at meetings or when you went away on a trip.”
Paterno’s lasting impact on him includes “the friendships we made there and still have and his legacy, the ‘Grand Experiment,’ we were all a part of that.”
1980s — Andre Collins
The former Nittany Lion linebacker started his career by winning a national title with the 1986 team. He would eventually play for a decade in the NFL. He’s worked with the National Football League Players Association for 13 years and helps provide financial, educational, and medical assistance to former players
He was one of 19 kids growing up in a house in Cinnaminson, New Jersey — and the oldest of five young men to play football for Paterno. Gerry, Phil, Jason, and Aaron would follow him.
“He was just electrifying,” Andre Collins says of Paterno. “There was just something about Joe, something he ignited in you that made you want to [succeed]. I think it was the work ethic Joe instilled in us. You could come in acclaimed as a player and start at the bottom and really have to scratch and claw and climb that mountain. You didn’t take anything for granted. Where you stand yesterday doesn’t mean that’s where you will stand today. You have to get up and earn it and live in this moment and be willing to work.
“For me, I just couldn’t wait to get down to the locker room every day, to be in a meeting room for 140 players, to hear what Joe’s message of the day was going to be. … It was the little things. Joe talked literature to history to so many different things. The way he challenged you with his words, you just believed that if you were willing to try and put in the work to be prepared, you would have success. I clung to that.
“He made me believe there’s only one way to do things on the football field, and that was 100 miles per hour. So I was fast. I had to play at 100 miles per hour or I would have gotten killed out there [in the NFL].”
1990s — Justin Kurpeikis
After a brief pro career, the standout defensive end worked his way into the medical field. He now runs Atlas Therapy, a physical-therapy clinic in State College with branch offices in Altoona and Mansfield.
Justin Kurpeikis grew up wanting to play for Paterno and Penn State — even though he was a high school All-American at Pittsburgh Central Catholic, next to the University of Pittsburgh’s campus.
“I had hoped for him to be demanding, to be tough, to be fair, and he was all of those things,” Kurpeikis says of Paterno. “I think the biggest thing was that though he encouraged us to be great players, it was more important to be the most valuable person and do things the right way, all the time.
“Even back then he was trying to tell us that [football] is a small part of your life, which is great, but let’s hope this is the basement, not the ceiling of what you do in life. … That really set a base of what you can do after [Penn State].”
Kurpeikis says he still calls on those lessons in his business life.
“Like take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves. And that’s so true, particularly when you feel like you’ve got a lot going on, and how do you get it all accomplished?” he says. “There’s also staying the course in life, the steady climb, the saying, ‘You’re never as good as you think you are when you win, you’re never as bad as you think you are when you lose.’ There’s no boom or bust mentality, you never get too high or too low ….
“Outside of my father, I don’t know anyone who’s had a better impact on my life. The stories and the lessons and anecdotes he would say, I find myself drawing on them every day of my life. And that’s a pretty profound effect.”
2000s — Graham Zug
The walk-on receiver from Manheim Township High earned his way into the starting lineup … and eventually to a scholarship. He caught three touchdown passes in a memorable victory at Michigan in 2009.
During a recruiting visit before his first season in 2008, Zug met the Penn State coaching staff along with high-profile, national recruits, including quarterback Pat Devlin. Although he wasn’t even up for a scholarship, Zug remembers Paterno bypassing the elite prospects to talk to him. Only later did he understand why.
“We were told he did that because everyone there was on the same level,” he says. “There’s no frontrunners, that’s why he did it. If he would have seen negativity from them or me, then he would know we weren’t the right people for Penn State.
“Right then, I knew I was in the right place and would be taken care of.”
He says the constant focus on academics and personal growth, as much as football, hit home for him at Penn State, and never really left.
Some of those lessons, he says, are part of his daily life, such as always walking on the “roadside” of a female. “You should always be protecting your family,” Zug says. “I think he knew if he made us better people and taught us to work with our schooling and families, then football would just come natural. If you have the work ethic for school, you’ll have the work ethic for football.”
Those things still stick with Zug, now a salesman for Scott’s Miracle-Gro and offensive coordinator at Palmyra High in Lancaster County.
The players he coaches today “constantly want to talk football to you. But I try to instill in them about working hard in school and then considering college, a lot of the little things Joe taught us.
“It’s hard to go through a day without something popping up about something he taught us.”
2010s — Derek Moye
He grew up near Pittsburgh and completed the childhood dream of playing for the Steelers. In between, he starred at Penn State with an impressive 18 career touchdown receptions. He now trains high school athletes at Grossetti Performance in New Castle.
One Penn State practice will forever be a part of him. Derek Moye was a freshman pushing for playing time when he ran a deep route down the sideline. He dove, hit the ground hard, but couldn’t hold onto the pass. He got up hurting and looked noticeably in pain as he slowly made his way back to the huddle.
Paterno saw an opportunity.
“Joe was yelling and screaming, saying I need to be tougher, and he made me go right in again,” he says.
He ran a slant pattern on the next play and that, too, fell incomplete. Later, he found out his collarbone had been broken.
“It was his old-school mentality, that if you’re hurting and you can still play, you try to make the most of it,” he says. “I wasn’t going to be the freshman to say I’m hurting and can’t play to Joe Paterno.”
Moye played in Paterno’s last season. Though Paterno didn’t run all aspects of the program like years before, “he still would go around to every player on the team and talk about personal things, ask you how you’re doing and how your family’s doing, how’s your mom, how’s your granddad. He knew about each and every person on the team. We knew he cared about us.”
His player rules, though, had not changed. Moye ticked off the ones about not wearing hats, earrings, or facial hair in the football complex and on road trips.
“At the time, they were just a hassle, but they did apply to you in real life,” he says. “You realized we were there for more than football and more than getting an education. He was preparing us for life after football and life after college.”
