When it was all but over, Dick MacPherson sent for Ben Schwartzwalder, who watched from his seat in the Carrier Dome press box.

Syracuse led the defending national champions Penn State, 41-0, in the third quarter. It was 1987, and the Orangemen were about to secure the school’s most important victory since the days of Schwartzwalder, who guided Syracuse to its only national title in 1959.

MacPherson, the coach of the 1987 Orangemen, planned a celebration for the ages. When the final whistle sounded and Syracuse was victorious, 48-21, it snapped a 16-game losing streak to hated Penn State.

‘I always told him,’ MacPherson said, ”If we ever get them, Ben, you gotta come down. You deserve it.”

The players carried the 78-year-old former coach on their shoulders, across the sidelines, to shake hands with Joe Paterno.

‘(Schwartzwalder) said there will never be another present like that for him in his life,’ MacPherson said.

MacPherson remembers that day with precision, even now. His voice quivers when he talks about the jubilation of finally beating Penn State, Syracuse’s greatest rival.

But after 68 meetings in 69 seasons beginning in 1922, Syracuse and Penn State haven’t played since 1990. (There was no game in 1943. Syracuse canceled football because of World War II.) Penn State left Eastern football for the Big Ten. Syracuse moved into the Big East. Paterno and former Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel squabbled publicly about who was more selfish.

The rivalry was dead.

On Saturday, the two schools will meet on the Dome turf. The rivalry is still dead. Penn State doesn’t play the Eastern foes it once did – Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Boston College. It’s no surprise the Nittany Lions remain a force under the guise of the 81-year-old Paterno. Syracuse, meanwhile, is experiencing perhaps the worst stretch in its 119-year football history.

This is one game, a blip on the non-conference schedule for mighty Penn State; a day to celebrate the past for beleaguered Syracuse.

This is not how it always was.

The bitter ending

When it ended, there was anger, remorse and confusion. Penn State defeated Syracuse, 27-21, at Beaver Stadium on Oct. 13, 1990. (‘We should have won and didn’t,’ MacPherson still says.)

With the win, Penn State finished with a 40-23-5 advantage in the series.

In the days leading up to the final game, Paterno and Crouthamel blamed one another for the series’ demise.

They still do.

‘My professional relationships with Penn State, i.e. Joe Paterno, were not cordial,’ Crouthamel, now retired, said last week by telephone.

‘Joe was trying to create his own league with several other schools that ended up in the Big East – Pitt, Boston College and Rutgers,’ Crouthamel said. ‘We were going to form this conference where we share all of the money, except in football. Paterno was going to keep all of the football money, and we would share our basketball money.’

Paterno, who in 1990 served as both football coach and athletic director at Penn State, spoke at length about his efforts to form an all-sports conference with Eastern schools and called the failure one of his greatest disappointments.

‘I wanted us to have an Eastern conference,’ Paterno said in a teleconference call this week. ‘Syracuse and a couple other people were all wrapped up in Big East basketball. I thought I had almost pulled it off, but Pitt backed out.’

MacPherson said he thought Penn State should have been a member of the Big East. So, too, did Crouthamel.

‘I was very disappointed that we didn’t invite Penn State to join the Big East conference,’ Crouthamel said. ‘That was not my decision. That was the decision of the basketball (only) schools. They were a little scared of Penn State, the power of Penn State. They couldn’t see themselves in the same room with Joe Paterno. I think that was a big mistake. There was a lot of short sightedness in the room.’

Humble start

When it began, Syracuse dominated the series. They played the games at Archbold Stadium, the replica Roman Coliseum that stood where the Dome now resides; and at Beaver Field, a tiny venue on the other side of Penn State’s campus that was dismantled and moved to form Beaver Stadium in 1960.

The first game, played at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan on Oct. 22, 1922, was a 0-0 tie. Syracuse’s quarterback was Roy Simmons Sr., the legendary lacrosse coach.

Syracuse was 10-4-4 in the first two decades of the matchup. In the first 10 meetings, Syracuse outscored Penn State, 60-29. But in the 1940s, Penn State was 8-0-1.

At the time, Syracuse considered its chief opponent to be Colgate. But the rivalry with Penn State rose to prominence when Schwartzwalder was hired in 1949.

Schwartzwalder was brought in to beat Colgate, a team Syracuse hadn’t defeated in 13 straight attempts from 1925-1937. But after the Orangemen topped Colgate, 9-0, in 1951, Syracuse would never lose another game to Colgate again.

Enter Penn State.

‘(Penn State) was our No. 1 rival to start with, always was,’ said Ger Schwedes, a tailback on the 1959 national championship team. ‘As were No. 1 rivals, the coaching staffs. Schwartzwalder wanted to beat the head coach more than he wanted to beat the team.’

A rivalry at its height

When Schwartzwalder faced Rip Engle, the man who coached Joe Paterno at Brown and preceded Paterno as head coach at Penn State, the series had all the necessary ingredients.

The two schools split all 20 games, 10 wins apiece, during the 1950s and ’60s.

‘It became a rivalry up here because it was a hate thing,’ MacPherson said. ‘Ben couldn’t hate West Virginia because that’s where he went to school himself. Penn State went from (competing) with these people to dominating them. Ben didn’t like that.’

The closest game that the undefeated 1959 championship team played was against Penn State. Both teams entered the game undefeated at 7-0. Both teams dreamed of a national title. Syracuse took a 20-6 lead, behind touchdowns by Ernie Davis, Schwedes and Arthur Baker. But Penn State blocked a punt for a touchdown, then Roger Kochman ran a kickoff back 94-yards for the Nittany Lions. (‘I missed him twice. Great tackling,’ Schwedes said.) Penn State trailed by two, 20-18.

On the ensuing kickoff, the Nittany Lions kicked it to the dangerous Davis instead of Schwedes.

‘They always kicked it to me,’ Schwedes said. ‘But (Davis) caught the ball and stepped out of bounds on the 7-yard line.’

Syracuse had 93 yards to go and more than seven minutes on the clock to waste. What followed was one of the greatest drives in Syracuse history.

‘We kept the ball on the ground and killed seven and a half minutes,’ Schwedes said. ‘And we were ready to score with about 20 seconds to go, and Schwartzwalder called in the play. He said, ‘Don’t score.’ He didn’t want to rub it in.’

‘I thought we would have beaten them,’ said Paterno, who then was an assistant on Engle’s staff. ‘…That was a big-time game.’

The Orangemen were ranked No. 1 in the nation after the victory. And the rivalry with Penn State was cemented forever, even as Schwartzwalder momentarily put his hatred for Engle aside.

He was later repaid for that.

‘What people don’t know is when Ben retired in 1974, we had a dinner at the Hotel Syracuse,’ Schwedes said. ‘One of the first to come was Rip Engle.’

Bringing it back

When Sue Paterno knew Penn State would play at Syracuse this year, she was relieved.

‘I had a mental block about going back up there for a while,’ she said recently by phone. ‘And now I’m glad to go back because I’ve never seen the Dome.’

The last time the coach’s wife made the trip to Syracuse to watch Penn State was 1973. In 1975, she was in the hospital with back surgery. And in 1977, while she was driving up for the game, she received word that her son, David, was seriously injured in a trampoline accident. Joe and Sue turned around, skipped the game, and went home to be with David, who spent four days in a coma, but fully recovered.

Now, she has another chance. Of course, the circumstances of the game are vastly different than before. During the pinnacle of the rivalry, Sue Paterno was one of the legendary pranksters, who in 1966, dumped orange paint on the famous Lion Shrine statue on Penn State’s campus before the annual game against Syracuse. She wanted to excite the home faithful, which she thought were lacking in spirit.

It did spark the fans, however, not the ones she intended. After the paint was washed off, Syracuse fans doused the lion in orange again a few days later. Now, on the night before every Homecoming game at Penn State, the school holds the guarding of the Lion Shrine ceremony.

‘I just wanted people to get off their derrieres and cheer,’ she said. ‘It worked.’

That sort of enthusiasm could be difficult to find now. The programs are at two opposite ends of the spectrum. The fans will be overcome with memories, but the current players were too young to remember even the final days of the rivalry.

SU head coach Greg Robinson said this is a game that needs to be played.

‘If you’re going to Syracuse, you want to play against Penn State,’ Robinson said. ‘A number of our players have come to Syracuse because they’re going to get the chance to play against Penn State.’

Paterno made no commitments, but said he’d like to extend the current two-game series beyond next season. For that to happen, though, it would probably require Syracuse to surrender home games in any kind of deal.

And that, for now, will impede the true revival of this once-great rivalry.

MacPherson said he wouldn’t deliver any history lessons to the team this week. (‘It’s names of the past,’ he said.) The old coach is just thankful for Saturday’s game.

‘I never gave up dreaming that they’re going to be back together,’ MacPherson said, ‘and here we are, thank God.’

magelb@syr.edu

Published on September 11, 2008 at 12:00 pm