Blue White Illustrated

Georgia border, about 20 miles northeast of Augusta. In the fall, Bove paid a visit. "I needed to watch Ray in a football game," he said. "I get to the school Fri- day afternoon and Gary says, 'Come over to the pregame meal and eat with us.' I said, 'I don't want to be a distrac- tion.' He said, 'Nah, every school in the South is there.' I go over and I'm the only guy in a coat and tie with cuffs on my pants and a yankee. There were a lot of Clemson people. South Carolina was there and Oklahoma State. Their guy had been at Clemson and they wanted him badly." When Roundtree was about to an- nounce which school he would attend, Bove was there. That's when he encoun- tered Aiken's most famous athletic family, the Perrys. William, better known as the Refrigerator, would go on to play defen- sive tackle on the Chicago Bears' 1986 Super Bowl championship team. Michael Dean, the youngest of the 12 Perry chil- dren, would become a six-time Pro Bowler. Both were still playing for Clem- son at the time of Roundtree's recruit- ment. "Ray is playing in a basketball game," Bove said. "He was an outstanding athlete and was just as good of a basketball player as he was in football. But Clemson had the inside track. Notre Dame was also a finalist, and I'm sitting across the court from the team benches with a guy I knew, Mal Moore, an assistant for Lou Holtz. We could see the Perry brothers and their family wearing Clemson jackets taking up two rows behind the South Aiken bench. The South Aiken coach calls a timeout. Instead of the players sitting on the bench, he has them stand facing him and the crowd with those Perrys taking up all that space in the bleachers right in their eyesight. It was intimidating. I said to Mal, 'How are we going to get this guy?' But Ray wanted to be different. … The next day he picked us." As signing day approached, Paterno wanted to be there to accept Roundtree's official document. Paterno arranged for a Learjet provided by an alumnus – legal at the time – to fly he and Bove to Augusta, with Bove going on to Birmingham, Ala., to get the letter from another recruit, de- fensive back Kevin Woods. "I made Joe's hotel arrangements, and Gary Smalley picked him up at the air- port," Bove recalled. "Early the next morning, Joe called me and said he found out that Raymond did not have the letter of intent [form] we had mailed him. Joe sent the Lear over the next morning, and I gave the pilot a blank letter of intent. Years later, I asked Raymond whatever happened to that original letter of intent. He told me once he made up his mind [on Penn State] his mother collected all the mail and saved it, but he never opened another piece of mail." Others became involved As the recruiting efforts continued in the South, particularly South Carolina, others on the coaching staff became in- volved. Assistant coach Bill Kenney was the point man for Richardson in 1991. Bove was then the recruiting coordina- tor, but he also was recruiting in parts of Pennsylvania, including Berwick High School in the heart of Penn State coun- try, south of Wilkes-Barre. In 1991, Berwick's junior quarterback Powlus was rated by the G&W Recruiting Re- port and others as one of the top pro- style scholastic quarterbacks in the nation. "I could see from his sophomore year that Powlus was leaning strongly toward Penn State's successful foray into the South in the early 1980s to recruit foot- ball players was influenced by informa- tion in the now-defunct G&W Recruiting Report. The G&W Report, created by future Blue White Illustrated publisher Phil Grosz in 1979, was one of the few re- cruiting services then in existence. Working in cooperation with Orlando Sentinel sportswriter Bill Buchalter, Grosz began producing a six-page mag- azine-size report on Florida and a six- to eight-page report on the rest of Southeastern Conference territory. He quickly expanded the G&W Report into a 76-page magazine covering the entire country that could be purchased by anyone, including college football teams. "Knowing who the best high school players are is all about contacts," Grosz said. "I developed a list of about 200 coaches that I talked to on a regular basis. I learned that the best way to get accurate information on a recruit was talk to a coach of a team that played against one the players being high- lighted. "Through the South Carolina Football Coaches Association, I became a good friend of Gary Smalley when he was an assistant at another school before he went to South Aiken. He helped open the door to other South Carolina coaches and their players." After recruiting South Aiken receiver Ray Roundtree in 1982, Penn State dipped into the state for seven more scholarship players before retreating from the South in the late 1990s. Two more South Car- olinians recruited in the 2000s, Rodney Kinlaw and Kinta Palmer, were related to other Nittany Lions, Courtney Brown and Bryan Scott, respectively. The proliferation of internet recruiting websites brought an end to the G&W Recruiting Report in 2010. Grosz's Blue White Illustrated became part of the Ri- vals.com network and emphasizes re- cruiting in its content. –L.P. OPENING THE DOOR Recruiting report played role in spotlighting top Southern prospects in 1980s and '90s

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