Thursday night brought me an opportunity to spend an evening with some of my heroes, five Penn State football players from the early 1990s -
OJ McDuffie, Ki-Jana Carter, Troy Drayton, Reggie Givens and
Brian O'Neal. The quintet, who all currently reside in south Florida and all played on the 1992 Penn State team together, were guests of the Greater Scranton Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association for "A Night of Penn State Pride." The former
PSU greats signed autographs and
participated in an extended Q & A session for the fans. It's been a long night's drive, but here's some of the highlights that I remember from the event.
On Running out of the tunnel at Beaver Stadium...All of the players were in full agreement that the emotions connected with being a Penn State football player on
gameday in State College were nearly
indescribable.
Brian
O'Neal commented that the best part for him was riding on the blue buses up to the stadium and hearing all the car horns going off in the parking lot and the hands pounding on the side of the bus as it drove by. Of waiting in the tunnel to run out before the game, he said, "If you could bottle that feeling and sell it, you'd be a
gazillionaire."
Ki-Jana Carter reminisced of how he would always race out of the tunnel and sprint straight to the handicapped section of seats in the north
endzone. In particular he recounted the 1994 Homecoming Game against Ohio State in which he was so fired up to take on his hometown team that he started crying in the tunnel. He then said that he ran so hard across the field that he was actually out of breath and hoping the offense wouldn't have to take the field first.
Carter also talked about how coach
Joe Paterno's method of making the players dress before boarding the bus to the stadium made them more focused for the game. He compared it to the NFL and other schools that have players wear suits to the stadium then get dressed once inside. Carter said that once a player puts that uniform on he knew it was
gameday and none of his
distractions would be brought with him to the stadium.
On What was the loudest opposing stadium they played in while at Penn State...While all five players said nothing compares to the roar of
Nittany Nation, each named an opponent's venue that stood out in his memory.
Ki-Jana Carter - Ohio State
Brian
O'Neal - Syracuse
Reggie Givens - Alabama
Troy
Drayton - West Virginia (Troy named the Penn State vs Miami game in 1992 as his favorite Beaver Stadium game)
OJ
McDuffie - Syracuse
On their recruitment by Penn State...Ki-Jana Carter - He was nearly set on attending Ohio State after growing up in Columbus, OH, but took an unofficial visit to State College with one of his high school coaches. He remembered that it was the way current players like OJ
McDuffie and other players from the Buckeye State treated him and took the time to make him feel at home that swung his decision away from Ohio State and to the
Nittany Lions. He added that most schools that recruited him came off as arrogant, implying that he should feel honored that they would let him play at their schools as opposed to taking the time to get to know him and really making him feel welcome.
OJ
McDuffie - He had a final five of Ohio State, Michigan, UCLA,
Notre Dame and Penn State. He crossed off Ohio State after it fired then-head coach,
Earle Bruce and didn't care for
Notre Dame at all after taking an official visit to South Bend. He returned home from his trip to UCLA to find a Fed Ex package containing a seven-page hand-written letter from Joe
Paterno on spiral-bound notebook paper, detailing all the pros and cons of signing with Penn State. He remembered being promised nothing but a great education and a chance to possibly play for a National
Championship. He said that Joe
Paterno and the letter he wrote were the main reasons he came to Penn State.
Brian
O'Neal - Brian grew up in
Cincinnatti and told a classic story about his recruiting experience with Ohio State head coach John Cooper. As he told the story, his mother was handling his recruiting since his father was an NBA referee and was often on the road. Coach Cooper visited his house to recruit him, and Brian had always figured he would play for the hometown Buckeyes. As his mom began to ask about the kinds of classes her son would take, the graduation rate at Ohio State and other questions about his non-football life at the university. Cooper kept blowing her off, saying that it would all be addressed during Brian's official visit, and kept trying to steer the
conversation toward football. Finally, after about ten minutes of not having her questions answered, Mrs.
O'Neal stood up and told the coach that she had better things to do than to be blown off by him and that he had to get out of her house. She shut the door behind the coach and told Brian, who was sitting with his jaw open to the floor, that he could cross Ohio State off of his list of potential schools. Just minutes later, Cooper called the house from the road and asked Brian how he thought the visit had gone. Brian told him that he had angered the one person in the house that he couldn't anger and that the Buckeyes' chances didn't look too good.
On how Penn State prepared them for the NFL...All the players said that NFL practices were no more physically demanding than what they went through at Penn State. Troy
Drayton compared playing for Joe
Paterno to going through four years of boot camp.
On the ill-fated 1994 season...Ki-Jana Carter confessed that not winning the National
Championship in 1994 is something that will probably haunt him for the rest of his life. He talked about how that year's team did everything it could to prove it was #1, but had to leave the decision up to a bunch of
sportswriters. He took solace in the fact that 15 years later, the team is still mentioned among the greatest college football teams of all time and that the controversy of that year was one of the reasons the NCAA felt it had to move toward the current
BCS system that guaranteed the two highest ranked teams would play each other.
On who the best player they ever played against was...Ki-Jana Carter - Greg Lloyd
Brian
O'Neal - Levon Kirkland
Reggie Givens - Reggie White
Troy
Drayton - Lawrence Taylor
OJ
McDuffie -
Deion Sanders
The Daily Collegian has a couple of good reads this morning about the upcoming season. Will somebody tell these young, enterprising journalists that it's the summer and they should be out slacking off at an internship instead of slaving away to write copy?
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