Blue White Illustrated

From a whisper, PSU's new era builds to a crescendo O ne day in the spring or early summer of 1989, a friend walked into my office in downtown Washington, D.C., closed the door, and in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, told me he had a secret about Penn State that was going to revolutionize college football but I could not tell anyone, not even my wife. My wife, Carole, is a bigger fan of college football than I am, and we have been going to Penn State football games together since 1955. Our marriage of more than 50 years has not only been built around honesty and openness – and no secrets – but also a social life framed by college football, and especially Penn State, Michigan and Michigan State. I agreed to my friend's demand, figuring I could change his mind later. That's how I learned before the public and the media that Penn State was becoming a member of the Big Ten Conference. My informant told me it was not official yet, and certain legal requirements were still in progress. In fact, only a small handful of Big Ten university officials knew what was happening, my friend related, and even the league's athletic directors were still out of the loop. I admit I was skeptical. Penn State moving into the Big Ten seemed so bizarre at the time. Over the next few months I was given an occasional confidential update as the league presidents and their attorneys worked out the details. Eventually, everything I was told came true. To this day, I am bound to keep the name of my informant secret. Now, before anyone jumps to the conclusion that my source was someone inside the Penn State family, you need to understand my personal connection at the time with the Big Ten. I was then part of the faculty of Northwestern University, having begun running the graduate broadcast program in Washington for the Medill School of Journalism in the fall of 1983. I was also a big Michigan football fan and in the early 1970s was part of the radio broadcast team for home games at Michigan Stadium. I started rooting for Michigan the day my uncle Frank Agnello, then a schoolteacher in the Detroit area who had a master's degree from Michigan, took me to see that big, impressive stadium when I was barely a teenager. I was hooked. Strange as it seems now, I also was a fan of Michigan State football. That was because of Duffy Daugherty, the Spartans' head coach from 1954-72. Duffy was from Barnesboro, Pa., 30 miles from my hometown of Indiana, and he loaded his early teams with standout high school players from western and central Pennsylvania. It wasn't until I moved to Detroit in November 1969 that I realized Michigan and Michigan State were bitter on-field enemies, just like Penn State and Pitt. I still pulled for the Spartans against the rest of the Big Ten and even went to many of their games at Spartan Stadium when Michigan was playing on the road. And tailgating at the Michigan-Michigan State games every year is still a great memory because it included a mix of sports broadcasters (and their families) from both teams and some newspaper reporters covering the game. In the more than five years I spent in the broadcast news business in Detroit starting in late 1969, I became part of the Michigan sports media community with friends in radio, television, newspapers and the various college and pro sports teams. Even after I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1975 and then to Dayton in 1977 for other positions in broadcast news, I kept up my Detroit connections and even attended a couple of Michigan football games at Illinois and Wisconsin. Taking the Northwestern position in Washington enabled Carole and me to once again be in Beaver Stadium for Penn State football games, as well as travel to the then-familiar opponent venues of Morgantown, College Park and Pittsburgh. But my relationship with Penn State's athletic hierarchy was no different than that of any other fan who had season tickets. There was one more tie I had to the Big Ten in the summer of 1989. My oldest daughter, Vicki, had graduated from Indiana University in 1981. In her undergraduate days, she and her future husband, Jeff Rearick, turned me into a fan of Indiana basketball and the famous Little 500 bike race. So, there I was in the summer of 1989 with an unusual personal situation involving the Big Ten, knowing a secret that was going to rock collegiate athletics. When the official announcement of the Big Ten's invitation to Penn State was made in December, my informant and I talked all about it. Later, we all learned it did not go down as smoothly as some Big Ten presidents had expected. The key man behind the historic move was someone I had never heard of, Stan Ikenberry, then into his 10th year as president of Illinois, but a high administration official at Penn State from 1971-78. In fact, he was the provost when Penn State made its initial contact with the Big Ten about becoming a member. Until recently, my research (as reported by The Sporting News on Feb. 21, 1981) had pointed to late Decem-

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