On Penn State vs. Alabama

It's not my first memory, but in some ways, it might as well be. New Year's Day, 1978: I'm five years old, and Penn State is playing Alabama for the national championship. I recall the room and its fireplace and its unsightly brown carpet, and I recall the faltering RCA television, and I recall the tumult among the adults inside when Penn State fails to convert on four downs from the goal line, and Alabama wins the game. I recall the retreat to the backyard of our house on Devonshire Drive, to construct a revisionist history of the scene with my friend Scott Holderman.*

There's a telling story in Joe Paterno's autobiography in which he discusses one of his first meetings with Bear Bryant. It takes place at a football banquet, and Bear urges Paterno to demand an outrageous sum of money, to demand a five-year contract with a rollover clause, to demand a car and a golf club membership and to demand two hundred tickets for each game, which he could then dole out as he saw fit, thereby turning those tickets in a power proposition. This was the how the Bear worked; for better or worse, he was a southern politician, leveraging favors for power. And Paterno was a completely different animal. It was, Paterno said, not a difference in scruples, but a difference in style.   

I bring this up because Penn State plays Alabama again this Saturday, in a game weighted with history. Back in the 1970s and on into the 1980s, the Penn State-Alabama rivalry was epic. It was Red versus Blue before Red versus Blue existed. For years, Eastern football was considered a second-class product--and Penn State was the Boise State of its era--until Paterno began defeating schools like Alabama. Even now, it feels like something of a metaphor for American regionalism; even now, it feels like Penn State represents the progressive culture of the Northeast, and Alabama represents the reactionary politics of the South, and those four downs at the goal line in '78 were something of a last stand for the old ways of American politics.

That's a gross oversimplification, I know, and probably riddled with holes, but that's how my brain works. I remember things the way I want to remember them. At some level, all history is revisionist. In my mind, Paterno calls the play-action pass he actually wanted to call on fourth down before losing his nerve, and Penn State pulls off a miraculous victory, the same kind of victory the kid in me somehow hopes, against all hope, they can muster this Saturday.

*For this occasionally irrational fealty to college athletics, it seems, Jeff Pearlman would declare me a loser. To which I say: Doesn't this argument in fact negate your well-documented hatred of Chuck Fusina? After all, if college sports should largely be reserved for the students who play them and the students who watch...and if your larger point is that we've lost our perspective on the games themselves...then shouldn't we in fact appreciate athletes like Chuck Fusina--athletes whose careers just so happen to peak in their late teens, or early twenties, athletes who have legendary college careers but aren't meant to play professional sports--far more than we actually do?

On the Fusina Feud, Cont'd.

And so Jeff Pearlman responds to my criticism of his criticism of the great Chuck Fusina--and he does it by "playing the USFL card." This is a low blow, Jeff, as we both know it is impossible to effectively parry against nostalgia for a league where an egomaniacal caricature of a billionaire, a personally fragmented running back, and an Oompa-Loompa briefly joined forces. It is also probably a bad idea to fan the flames of a virtual feud with an accomplished journalist who has handled the real-life Kenny Powers and the "real-life Emmitt Smith,"* but I am obliged to stand up for the honor of a quarterback who represents the one thing in the world of sports I still hold sacred--and I am not speaking of the Philadelphia Stars.**

Here's the thing: I cannot defend Chuck Fusina on the merits of his professional football career. And if I am being honest, I don't care very much about Chuck Fusina's professional career; I knew of him long before then. I knew of him in the fall of 1978, the year my family uprooted from New York to Pennsylvania, to a college town located approximately four hours from everywhere, to a hamlet in the geographic center of the state that will forever be defined by the distinct profile of its professorial football coach. I knew of Chuck Fusina because he was the quarterback of the local eleven, a group of young men who played in prison-issue uniforms in a stadium on the far side of town; I knew of him because that fall, in the backyard of a house on Devonshire Drive, my friend Scott Holderman and I would regularly re-enact the Fusina-to-Fitzkee connection.***

I turned six years old that fall. In New York, I had seen a few things; I watched the Yankees, because my father watched the Yankees; I watched the New York Cosmos, because--well, I have no idea why. But that was different; in New York, and in most big cities, there are so many passions outside of sports that the local teams often feel detached from the daily reality. But it's different in central Pennsylvania. And so the rise of Chuck Fusina portended, for me, the birth of the only true sporting passion I have left, the only connection that remains between me and my childhood:

I am a Penn State fan.

It kind of shames me to admit this, as I have based my entire career upon detachment and rationality. And I would like to think that I am not immune to criticism of said program (as witnessed here and here), and I do, in fact, find the blind worship of message-board acolytes to be a truly chilling proposition, but the fact is this: When a Penn State football game comes on the television, I am engulfed by a strange and powerful feeling. My temperature rises, and my temperament fluctuates, and I chew my clothing to pieces, and I emit guttural noises that have been known to literally frighten my girlfriend out of the room (in the wake of a last-second loss to Michigan a few years back, I actually jumped so high that I slugged her ceiling fan).

At age 36, I can honestly say that there is nothing else in the world that makes me feel this way. And I have a constant worry that one of these years, it will just go away, and I will be left with nothing, and all these decades I've spent indulging in this utterly irrational behavior will suddenly seem silly and useless, and I will spend my Saturdays watching The Beltway Boys and attending operettas. And I know Jeff has written (often and eloquently) about how sports no longer arouse any kind of mysticism for him, but I happen to think we need certain constants in our lives, and I happen to think this is one reason why sports fans cling to such irrational illusions. And this particular constant, in my case, began with Charles Anthony Fusina, with a quarterback who may be a footnote to nearly everyone else--but who opened me up to some of the most angst-ridden, passionate, pleasurable and entirely inexplicable moments of my existence.****

*Though I am not sure what this phrase--"the real-life Emmitt Smith"--actually means. Also, if you are reading this and you somehow haven't read Boys Will Be Boys, let me just say this: How can you possibly go wrong with a sports book whose primary Amazon.com "key phrase" is proctological?
**Though their move to Baltimore was, to me, the most crushing moment of my youth, on par with the cancellation of My Two Dads.
***This was Fusina-to-Fitzkee's rawer indie work, as opposed to their watered-down, pop-laden Philadelphia Stars material.
****And just to be sure there is a requisite amount of what the youth call "smack" and/or misplaced aggression in this post: The kind of man who cites The Cable Guy as "the funniest movie ever" is the kind of man who claims "Yellow Submarine" is his favorite Beatles' song. If you start arguing for the spiritual profundity of Weird Al lyrics, Jeff, I may have to call for a virtual intervention.

On the Greatness of Chuck Fusina

Ever since I started toying with this medium, a friend of mine has been encouraging me to pick a fight with another blogger. This, I am told by certain unreliable sources in their twenties, is the essence of blogging: One person says something flippant, another person takes offense to it, lines are drawn, Mountain Dew is spilled on keyboards, bandwidth is needlessly occupied, links are no longer exchanged, 140-character insults ensue, and Facebook friends are torn apart.

So, let's do this:

Today, in blogging about the exclusion of Artis Gilmore from the Basketball Hall of Fame, the esteemed Jeff Pearlman wrote this: "nobody cares about Chuck Fusina."

Well, Jeff: I care! When I was six years old, Chuck Fusina was my hero! In fact, I am looking live at a Sports Illustrated magazine cover (date: 11/13/78), which hangs on the wall next to my computer and carries a photo of one Charles Anthony Fusina, in a Pennsylvania State University uniform, on the way to leading his team into a heartbreaking Sugar Bowl defeat at the hands of Alabama (a loss I blame entirely on Bear Bryant's hat). Anyway, the SI headline: Chuck Fusina Dazzles Maryland! Did Artis Gilmore ever dazzle a prominent Eastern state? I think...well, maybe he did, but that's not the point.

The point is: Have you seen Chuck Fusina's moustache? I think Chuck Fusina's moustache, in its prime, could murder Artis Gilmore's afro with its bare whiskers!

Also, Chuck Fusina has a sandwich named after him at a most excellent deli that I frequented in high school! And this sandwich contains roast beef and capicola! That's double the meat, my friend!

In conclusion, Chuck Fusina: Awesome. About this, there is no dispute.