MEN IN WHITE

The Nittany Lions claw their way back to life after a terrible year in this lively combination of color commentary and oral history.

Sportswriter Raymond, a Penn State alum who covered the school’s football team as a student journalist, opens with events that are now dimly receding into the past but were then shockingly immediate. In 2011, longtime coach Jerry Sandusky, who had been retired for more than a decade, was arrested for dozens of incidents of child molestation. Soon after, the school’s president and its famed head coach, Joe Paterno, were fired. Hired away from the New England Patriots, new coach Bill O’Brien was barely on the ground when the NCAA imposed a series of stringent sanctions, including the erasure of 111 wins, thus “dropping Paterno from first to fifth in the NCAA’s record book.” Given lost scholarships and other penalties, including a ban on appearing in postseason games, the team’s players would have been well within their rights to scatter to other schools—and indeed, recruiters quickly came calling. Instead, as Raymond chronicles, the team, urged on by linebacker Michael Mauti, pulled together to rebuild—had Mauti left, the author makes clear, it would have been game over. That rebuilding was tough work. As one player recalls, the first year involved “winter workouts, outside, twenty-degree weather, shorts and a T-shirt. Nothing’s gonna faze us.” The student body pulled together, too, coming out to cheer a workout as if it were a pennant game. Not so much the administration. As Raymond writes, “when the school’s administrators had quietly retreated from the heat of the Sandusky scandal, it was those student-athletes who stood tall, openly declaring their support for the institution and its record.” It’s those athletes whose voices resound in this well-crafted, multivocal homage.

Fans of Big Ten football will enjoy this tatters-to-touchdowns tale of gridiron redemption.