Reply to thread

Message

[QUOTE="hungrychuck, post: 160010, member: 389"]
Nice story, Joyce.
 
I met him once, more briefly. It was in the locker room at the old Giants Stadium, 1979. His team had just laid a 35-7 beating on the Orangemen. I covered the game as a student journalist.
 
It wasn't a vintage PSU team. And it was an SU team that could put up points -- with Bill Hurley, Art Monk and Joe Morris leading the offense. But not on this day. Absolute beatdown. A few days later, members of the 1959 championship team would call a press conference and demand Frank Maloney's ouster as SU head coach.
 
The team played all its games on the road that year as the Dome was under construction. The Meadowlands meeting was one of our "home" games. Frank would survive the year and manage, just barely, to get SU to a bowl game, beating McNeese State in the Independence Bowl.
 
As for JoePa, I remember he was gracious, generous with his time and more complimentary than he needed to be of an Orange team his players had just dismantled. And this might sound strange, but he was Joe Paterno -- just as I expected him to be and just as he came across publicly in the many years since that moment. I got the feeling there was no pretense -- he was what he was.
 
The other lingering memory was of Matt Millen and Bruce Clark sitting shoulder-to-massive shoulder, shirtless, on a bench nearby. They looked like they did not require pads to play the game. How to get around those two? It seemed calling a taxi might have been advisable. It explained at least some of the 35-7.
[/QUOTE]

Verification

What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?