The Orange-Maroon Game

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Orange and maroon replaced the traditional shades of blue and the white in the stands at Penn State’s spring football game, Saturday. Somberness overtook the usual festive feel of the annual intra-squad scrimmage, as the Nittany Lions remembered the victims of the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, last week. (More)

Fans wore the Virginia Tech colors. Members of the marching band, which is called the Blue Band, wore orange t-shirts and played the Virginia Tech fight song and a stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace,” the Southern spiritual that is so often sounded in times of tragedy and remembrance. The coaches pinned ribbons of orange and maroon to their shirts. And the players inscribed messages of support on the towels that hung from their waistbands.

Derrick Williams, a junior wide receiver from Greenbelt, Md., placed orange tape across part of his cloth and wrote on it in maroon marker, “We Are… VT.” Terrell Golden, a junior receiver from Norfolk, Va., wrote the letters “VT” on his. In the stands, the threads of Butler’s tribute took human form as the hundreds of students who normally sit together wearing t-shirts to form a solid block S against a white background, donned maroon and orange shirts to form the VT logo of Virginia Tech.

It is remarkable how a college community can unite in a time of tragedy, especially when that tragedy has taken place on another campus, in another state, some 360 miles away.

“It could have happened here, so it’s bringing everybody together,” Jamie Stahl, a Penn State freshman from Pittsburgh, told the Centre Daily Times, the newspaper here. “Plus a lot of people have friends at Virginia Tech.”

Stahl’s friend, Nicole Andres, told the paper: “It’s great to see all this maroon and orange. It could have been us.”

Most current Penn State students were in grade school when it did happen here, when Jillian Robbins opened fire on the lawn outside the student center at the Hetzel Union Building in 1996, killing Melanie Spalla, 19, of Altoona, Pa., and wounding Nicholas Mensah, 27, of Philadelphia.

“Crazy Jill,” as she was called, had purple-dyed hair, a background in hunting and training from the Army Reserves, and worked as a waitress at the Ye Olde College Diner, a College Avenue landmark known for its grilled sticky buns. She fired five shots from a rifle with a telescopic sight before aerospace engineering student Brendon Malovrh wrestled her down.

“I often think about the ‘Crazy Jill’ shooting when I’m walking past the H.U.B. lawn,” Joe Rokita, a 1999 Penn State graduate said. “I think to myself about what happened there, and how so many of the people walking around me have no idea what happened there 10 years before.”

Joe Paterno, the Penn State head coach, spoke at length at both a fan luncheon and a pre-game press conference about the Virginia Tech shootings and his university’s solemn reaction to them.

“To see all of those kids come across campus, you realize that there’s something about intercollegiate athletics that’s special,” Paterno said. “You’re almost fascinated by it. I’m so proud of this campus and the way that they’ve responded to the Virginia Tech situation.”

Paterno, 80, has long been a witness to both tragedy and triumph. As a child living in Brooklyn he would often visit the Lower Manhattan neighborhood where the World Trade Center would eventually rise. On Sept. 11, 2001, hours after the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 and left New York and the nation forever shaken, Paterno called for the postponement of Penn State’s game, scheduled for two days later, against Virginia. The rest of college football followed his lead and the entire schedule of games was cancelled for the week.

Paterno, who has been a coach at Penn State for 57 years, and the head coach since 1966, watched from the campus — in a place called Happy Valley — as the nation and the university community came together to grieve again and again: assassinations, wars and terrorist attacks. He has seen the passage of mentors and coaching colleagues, of former players, and his own brother, George, the former Kings Point coach and Penn State radio commentator. He watched in 2000 as freshman safety Adam Taliaferro was paralyzed while making a tackle late in a game at Ohio State. He watched a year later as Taliaferro walked again, leading the Penn State onto the field for the season opener against Miami, the last game before the world changed.

In a conversation in the elevator at the arena when the luncheon was held, Paterno recalled how he had watched Jackie Robinson play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, shortly after breaking baseball’s color barrier, while working as an usher at Ebbets Field. Minutes later, he appeared on the stage and told the thousands of fans about his connection to the more recent history — to the people of Virginia Tech and the tragedy there.

Jim Weaver, the athletic director, served as an assistant coach on Paterno’s staff in the 1960s. He and wife Sue are friends with the Virginia Tech coach, Frank Beamer, and his wife, Cheryl. And, James I. Robertson, Jr., a history professor at Virginia Tech who wrote the authoritative biography on Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, sent the book to Paterno along with a poem that struck the coach with a link to the shooting tragedy. Paterno read from the poem, “In a Land Where We Were Dreaming,” by Daniel Berlinger Lucas, at both the luncheon and the pre-game press conference:

“A figure came among us as we slept —
At first he knelt, then slowly rose and wept;
Then gathering up a thousand spears,
He swept across the field of Mars,
Then bowed farewell and walked behind the stars,
From the land where we were dreaming!”

As he finished reading the verse to the media, Paterno clutched a maroon Virginia Tech cap presented to him by Mike Herbstritt, an employee of Pen State’s Office of Physical Plant who lives in nearby Bellefonte. Herbstritt’s son, Jeremy, was one of the 32 students who died at Virginia Tech.

“I think about the kids going to college with their spears to conquer the world,” Paterno said. “And then all of a sudden they’re shot down.”

Outside, in the warm sun, the Penn State kids put away their spears for the day and put on the orange and maroon of Virginia Tech. Some painted themselves with a mixture of orange and blue, maroon and white, bridging the colors and the emotions of the two universities. Others held up signs, like: “We are Penn State, but today we are all Hokies,” a reference to the nickname for the Virginia Tech sports teams.

“[The students and fans] love this place and yet their love is deep enough that it carries across two states,” Paterno said. “I think it’s a great thing and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

College students have gotten a bad reputation for being out of touch with society and reality. They have been painted as narrowcast and narcissistic, the beneficiaries of prosperity and technology, the generation that uses Facebook and YouTube to insulate themselves from the real world.

It is an unfair assessment, a gross characterization and an exaggeration of a negative stereotype.

The reaction of the students at Penn State, and the wave of support for the Virginia Tech community from students here and on hundreds of other college campuses, has shown that young men and women are connected and that they do care.

It takes a tragedy for preconceptions to fade, for society to realize just how sensitive a student body can be, much like how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 brought attention to the kindness and compassion of New Yorkers.

Thousands of Penn State students were out on College Avenue, the main street that separates the campus from downtown State College, Saturday night. They poured out of buses and moved in mass packs along the sidewalks. They overflowed into the street en route to restaurants, bars and dance clubs. A typical Saturday night in College Town, U.S.A., but amid the low-cut shirts and shimmering skirts, the skin-tight Abercrombie shirts and stonewashed jeans, there were still the shades of orange and maroon.