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H I S T O R Y MOMENT INSPIRATION One of PSU���s true unsung heroes, Joel Coles helped turn despair into triumph with a locker room speech for the ages | J oel Coles had the misfortune of being a Penn State tailback at the same time as the great Curt Warner, but what Coles did in one crucial minute of the 1982 season was almost as significant as Warner���s running and receiving, which helped lead the Nittany Lions to their first national championship You won���t find his deed anywhere in the statistics for that year or in the official play-by-play records for the 11 regular-season games and the 27-23 victory over Georgia in the national title showdown at the Sugar Bowl. But almost to a man, the members of that ���82 team still credit Coles with saving the season, and so did head coach Joe Paterno. It all happened in the somber Penn State locker room at Legion Field in Birmingham, Ala., in the late afternoon of Oct. 9, 1982. Two weeks earlier, the Nittany Lions had upset No. 2 Nebraska, 27-24, in a controversial come-frombehind victory that lifted them to No. 3 in the rankings. But even with a week off to prepare, Penn State lost that October day to No. 4 Alabama, 42-21. The locker room was almost like a morgue as the dejected, sulking players slowly took their uniforms off, hardly talking to each other, with the assistant coaches drifting in slowly and everyone waiting to hear from Paterno, who wasn���t there yet. A year earlier, many of these same players had seen their hopes of playing for the national championship dashed following upset losses to Miami and Alabama late in the season. Now, that goal and dream had apparently ended again. Since the polls began issuing their final rankings after the postseason bowl games in 1965, only six teams with one loss had been declared national champion (Alabama and USC shared the title in 1978). Only USC in 1967 was rated No. 1 with one defeat before its bowl game, and the Trojans defeated No. 4 Indiana in the Rose Bowl to seal the mythical championship. Suddenly, a loud, angry voice broke through the locker room gloom. Coles, a fifth-year senior backup to junior Jon Williams, was standing up on a bench near his locker. Everyone turned. In Paterno���s 1989 autobiography, ���Paterno by the Book,��� the coach described what was happening: ���Any coach can imagine our lockerroom mood after that trouncing. But not every coach has had the luck to see what I saw then: the seizing of leadership by somebody on the team who had the genuine feeling and the simple nerve to seize it, and the way a leader can change the world. Our fullback, Joel Coles, not a headline maker,

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