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also were well-respected. After naming Arnelle a third-team All-American fol- lowing his fantastic freshman year of 1951-52, Helms made him a first-team selection as a junior, when he led Penn State to its only appearance in the NCAA Final Four. The next season, Helms placed him on the third team, as the Lions reached the second round of the NCAA tournament. By the time of that 1954 Final Four, three other African American players were on the team and won letters: Jim Blocker, Jim Brewer and Earl Fields. It's almost cer- tain that no major college basketball team in the country had more Black players on its team at the time than Penn State. It was a different brand of basketball than fans of the modern game are accus- tomed to, with bruising body hits under the basket. Captain Jack Sherry and two other football players, Bobby Hoffman and Bob Rohland, had been asked to join the team in earlier years. Sherry and Hoffman once described their game to me as "basketball in cleats." There were no shot clocks or 3-pointers. It was a rough and tough game of intimidation, and not only did elbows fly all over the place but shoulders, hips and legs, too. "We banged people," said Sherry, who passed away in 2014. "That's the way our coaches, John Lawther and Elmer Gross, taught the game. Forget football players. Everything was to pound the ball inside to the big center and every- thing was down low and cut off. They wanted physical guys who blocked out. Nobody played the game like we did. Elmer taught you, 'Never give the base- line.' That was like the cardinal sin. A guy comes down the middle, he's going down. There's no way he's going to drive a layup to the hoop. We just came out and met him and 'boom!'" Hoffman, now 86 years old, still re- members it being "really, really physi- cal." "Everyone on the team had a physical mentality," he said in a recent telephone call. "That sliding zone defense was re- ally tough, and you couldn't drive that zone on us. You were going to get hit. They didn't call fouls like they do today." Hoffman said the 6-foot-5, 230- pound Arnelle fit in well with the style that Penn State wanted to play. "Jesse was big and powerful and strong in there," Hoffman said. "He dominated inside. He would rebound it and bank it in or put it in. Because of the rules, we weren't allowed to stuff it in those days." Arnelle remembered, too, as he told me in 2005. "We had a terrific time to- gether," he said with a big smile on his face. "[Our opponent] couldn't figure out where to shoot from. It had to be from the key because they couldn't get inside. So we won a lot of games as a re- sult." A magnetic personality Almost from the moment he stepped on campus in his freshman year, Arnelle drew people into his sphere like a mag- net, from fellow students and faculty to the waiters, janitors and other worker bees who kept the campus running. He became so popular that in his senior year, the students elected him to the highest position in student government, president of the All-University Cabinet. Unlike some of his predecessors, he was more diplomatic than dictatorial, bur- nishing his popularity. Ebony magazine in 1955 cited another example of Arnelle's diplomacy on the basketball court and football field: He would write "eloquent little thank-you notes to his mentors" at the end of each season. However, his diplomatic tendencies sometimes were misinterpreted by crit- ics who questioned his toughness on the football field. Some of his teammates re- sented Arnelle for one reason or another, but there is no proof racism was in- volved. He was a two-way end who usu- ally played more on offense than defense under the confusing substitution rules of the era. He didn't trade insults or punches with an opponent but picked his spots when it mattered most. The most memorable example came during the fourth game of his junior season in 1953 against Syracuse. With Penn State trailing 14-0 late in the third quarter, Arnelle recovered a Syracuse fumble at Penn State's 45-yard line, leading to a Lion touchdown a few min- utes later. Penn State tied the score five minutes into the fourth quarter, and with about a minute left in the game, it scored on a blocked punt but missed the PAT to lead 20-14. Syracuse wasn't done. As the game clock was winding down, and with the ball at midfield, the Syracuse quarterback heaved a deep pass toward the end zone. Penn State's star halfback, Lenny Moore, intercepted at the PSU 11 and raced up the Syracuse sideline to the 34-yard line before being pushed out of bounds into a throng of Orange players. Arnelle ran to the Syracuse bench and was one of the first teammates to help his good friend. Jim Peters of the Centre Daily Times described what happened next: "[A]n Orange player unnecessarily jumped on [Moore] and a free-for-all between both squads broke out. Players rushed from both benches, as well as coaches, and fans poured on the field from the stands. Fists were flying in all directions for several minutes before peace was restored and the game was al- lowed to end quietly." Another example of how tough Arnelle was on the football field was described in Football Stars magazine before the 1953 season. The magazine rated Arnelle as the third-best end in the country. In its profile, Football Stars cited an alleged incident in the last game of the 1952 sea- son at traditional rival Pitt. One of the Nittany Lions' captains did not want to use Arnelle on a trap play against Pitt's captain and future Hall of Fame line- backer Joe Schmidt. "Now [Arnelle] got mad," wrote the story's author. "'Nuts!' he shouted. 'You run the play. I'll fix that guy!' They ran it and Arnelle lay Schmidt out like a carpet. They tried again. The same thing happened. They kept on trying it. It worked all after- noon. Schmidt, the key defender, never got a clean shot on the runner at the line of scrimmage." Whether that actually happened can

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