Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1454229
M A R C H 2 0 2 2 6 9 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M In 1963, Karras and Green Bay running back Paul Hornung had been suspended for one year by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle for betting on games they had played in. Karras also was ordered to give up his major financial share of a popular sports bar, the Lindell AC, which he co-owned with two close friends, brothers Jimmy and Johnny Butsicaris. Detroit's professional football and baseball players were regu- lar customers, as were many out-of-town players, too. In my article in the August 1970 issue of Sport, Karras admitted that he maintained his financial interest for "five more years." I had asked him why he lied to Rozelle. "Lying to whom? To a guy who's trying to screw me?" Karras replied. Karras included my interview with him in his 1977 autobi- ography, "Even Big Guys Cry." As the great Pittsburgher Andy Warhol once said, that was my 15 minutes of fame. Life Goals By the late 1970s, I had drifted away from sports writing into a career in television and radio news and college teaching, and I became well-known within the broadcasting and cable news industry. While working in Washington for Northwestern, I even had my own column, "The Business of Broadcasting," in the Washington /American Journalism Review. Looking back, when I started writing for The Daily Collegian in 1955, I never dreamed I would one day be an unofficial sports his- torian for Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics. With much of my childhood and teenage years spent visiting relatives in the Detroit area, my goal was to be the sports editor of the Detroit Free Press. I didn't accomplish that, but from 1972-75 I was the radio and television news director of the NBC affiliate, WWJ-TV, owned by the rival Detroit News. Once when Joe Paterno was in town in 1975, my colleagues surprised me by interviewing Joe and then airing his satirical comments about me during a television newscast. Joe and I kept in contact over the decades, and I know I would have never become the All-Sports Museum's director and historian without Joe's full support. Breaking New Ground I've written a couple of hundred articles for BWI, and some of them contained information previously unreported. My first was in September 2010 on the extensive history of Penn State ice hockey dating back to 1906. Two months later, I wrote a two-part series on Jeff Butya, Penn State's version of Notre Dame's famous walk-on Rudy Ruettiger. In June 2011, I recounted how Paterno had tried to get Penn State into the Big Ten in 1981, almost 10 years before it actually happened. Then in 2014, I spent hours looking at football game film to determine how the great Mike Reid set the school record with three safeties in one game, which also is the record for a season and a career. Because the NCAA only keeps safety records by teams and not by individuals, I thought that Reid might hold the national records, too. It was in the 1966 season opener against Maryland that Reid set the record. It was documented by the Beaver Stadium stat- isticians. But the game film told a different story. While Reid had blocked a punt for the first safety, he was nowhere near the spot where the third safety occurred and should have shared credit for the second with other players. My article in October 2014 had all the details, but Reid's initial safety statistics from the press box officials are still the record. In February 2016, I told of how future Hall of Fame basket- ball coaches Bob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino and Jim Valvano almost became the head coach at Penn State during a stretch of years from 1978 to 1983. In my interview with women's volleyball coaching legend Russ Rose in November 2018, he revealed surprising tidbits about his personal life. Like sneaking into the Arlington Park Race Track in high school to bet on races and working during his college years at a resort in Wisconsin that was right out of the movie "Dirty Dancing." Finally, there is the iconic "We Are … Penn State" cheer. I did the original research for Town & Gown magazine in 1999, and my story in the Oct. 27, 2011, edition of BWI went into detail on how the 1975-76 cheerleaders created the cheer, not Steve Suhey and Wally Triplett in 1946-47. During the Rutgers game last November, those cheerleaders were officially acknowledged by Penn State on the field as the creators. In the end, the great "We Are … Penn State" cheer is my ulti- mate BWI legacy. ■ The flag that Lou and his wife, Carole, would fly above their tailgate was a frequent sight at Beaver Stadium. PHOTO COURTESY LOU PRATO