Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/541265
W hen BWI editor Matt Herb asked me to write a column about my personal memories of Penn State's 25 years in the Big Ten, I thought in- stantly of how much my professional life has changed since 1990. Back then I was strictly a dedicated Penn State football fan, one of the mul- tiple thousands in the Nittany Nation who not only helped fill Beaver Stadium in the fall but also traveled to the away games near and far. Yet, my perspective was unique. I had covered Penn State football as part of the media in the late 1950s and sporadically throughout the '60s. But after moving to Detroit in late November 1969, I rarely wrote about the Nittany Lions except for covering bowl games and only saw one game at Beaver Stadi- um –strictly as a fan – until 1983. That's when I left the Midwest after 14 years and returned east to live and work in Washington, D.C. I was a longtime Big Ten football fan, too, and Michigan was my team, going back to the first time I walked into Michigan Stadium as a teenager. Detroit had been a second home since the late 1940s with close relatives from both sides of my family living there. For the first half of the 1970s, I worked in De- troit, primarily as a news executive for a television and radio station. Our radio station was one of several that broadcast Michigan games, and I helped out at home games. We also covered Michigan and Michigan State games for our televi- sion sports department, and college football outside the Big Ten and Notre Dame was rarely mentioned on our radio talk shows. Michigan home games were special, starting with the Friday night media re- ception. Our station's play-by-play sportscaster and backup TV sports an- chor, Don Kremer, took me under his wing, and we are still good friends to this day. Don brought me into his circle of close friends that included the sportscasters of the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings and a couple of sportswriters from the local newspapers. Every fall, the group, including wives, would travel in an RV to the Michigan-Michigan State game in Ann Arbor or East Lansing, and other Detroit sports people would drop by from time to time. The Big Ten Conference was then so dominated by Michigan and Ohio State that the media referred to it somewhat derisively as the "Big Two and the Little Eight." I was still a Penn State fan at heart, but it was difficult getting any in- formation about the Nittany Lion foot- ball team even in the Sunday newspa- pers. In November 1972, I wrote an article for a Penn State game day program about my experience with Big Ten foot- ball entitled "A Heathen Among Mis- sionaries." This excerpt from that piece summed up my frustration: "You really don't know what loneli- ness is until you've sat among 101,000 Midwest blue noses in Ann Abor, Michi- gan, and listened to the silence that greets Penn State football scores. … Three years ago this provincial auto cap- ital placed Penn State football some- where between an Italian boccia game and Polish soccer exhibition. Now days, at least, they've scratched out the soc- cer." Yes, a little hyperbole by your author, but not far from the truth. And keep in mind that this was the early '70s. Joe Pa- terno's team had twice finished No. 2 in the nation, won two Orange Bowls and a Cotton Bowl and was on its way to a Sugar Bowl game against then-No. 2 Oklahoma. Shortly after Penn State entered the Big Ten, I sent an updated version of that article unsolicited to Blue White Illus- trated's Phil Grosz, whom I had never met. He must have tossed it immediately into the trash, because I never received a reply. And that truly is one of my first personal memories on this 25th anniver- sary of Penn State in the Big Ten. Of course, Phil began using me as a contributing writer not long after the publication of my first book, The Penn State Football Encyclopedia, in 1998. As I wrote earlier in BWI, the book eventu- ally led athletic director Tim Curley to hire me to help start the Penn State All- Sports Museum and become its first di- rector in 2001. Ten years later, I have a column in BWI, and my seventh Penn State football book will be out this fall. That's how much my professional life has changed. When Penn State began competing in the Big Ten, I was an assistant professor of journalism for Northwestern, in charge of a graduate broadcast program in Washington, D.C. In my spare time, I was writing about the media, including a monthly column in the prestigious American Journalism Review titled "The Business of Broadcasting." At the time, my wife, Carole, and I were dedicated Penn State football fans, traveling to as many games as possible, home and away. We became season- ticket holders in the fall of 1984, and by 1988 we had a blue-and-white van and flew a white flag with the word "Prato" in blue above our tailgates. The traveling continued into the Big Ten, with trips to 2 0 1 5 P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L After 25 years, Big Ten inspires many memories