ONCE IS ENOUGH : Penn State Passer John Shaffer Has Only One Flaw on His Record, but It’s a Big One

Like in Tootsie, when Dustin Hoffman’s character learned more about being a man by being a woman, Penn State’s John Shaffer may have learned more about being a winner by being a loser.

You know the movie. Except Shaffer’s particular role reversal came not on the big screen but on the little tube in last season’s national championship Orange Bowl game. The Man Who Never Lost, well, Lost. Pretty big, too.

All things considered, he’d have rather shaved his legs and dressed in drag; Hoffman got off easy by comparison. But who said self-discovery was a day at the beach?

Until that game, the modestly talented Shaffer had one of sports’ all-time winning streaks. In games he’d started, he was 54-0, going all the way back to the seventh grade. He was college football’s equivalent of the mortal lock. To be sure, nobody knew quite how this quarterback did it; his motion is kind of mechanical, and the ball seems to acquire its own flight pattern, often independent of his receivers’ routes.

So far, the kindest thing anybody has said of Shaffer’s passing came from split end Ray Roundtree, who was musing before Friday night’s Fiesta Bowl game with top-ranked Miami. “I’ll say this,” he said, laughing out loud, “he sure throws hard.”

Also, he sure wins. Coaches and fans like that, unclassic form aside.

That was, all the way up to the Orange Bowl game with Oklahoma. As for that game, Shaffer says he was under the impression it would take a moment or two of personal greatness for Penn State to survive. Numbers like 300 yards passing were being mentioned. No pressure, huh? He got about a quarter of the way there before he was yanked in the fourth quarter, Penn State on the way to a 25-10 loss, Shaffer on the way to shame and blame.

Since that game, after which his normally supportive coach voiced tremendous disappointment and a local newspaper discovered in a poll that Shaffer’s backup was better suited to the position, it has been tough going. Although his coach later came around in January to assume some of the blame for Shaffer’s three-interception day, and although his teammates remained behind him, Shaffer has obviously wrestled with this new notion of vincibility. And wrestles still.

Shaffer, to be true, has somehow won 11 more games, setting up another national championship game. And in the process, he has posted the best statistics of his career. Also, in the game that put Penn State in championship contention, Shaffer was flawless. He completed 13 of 17 passes, with no interceptions, to lead his team past Alabama.

That makes him 65-1. So how else to say it? The guy’s a loser.

He hasn’t seemed really to have gotten over it. Talking with an enviable poise--he’s practically a toastmaster--Shaffer has spent the week telling reporters how quickly he rebounded from that loss, a loss he took responsibility for immediately after the game, but has since tried to provide qualifiers for.

Yet he has spent as much time talking about how unfair it is to judge “a young man of 18 to 22 by four hours on a given Saturday.” The hurt, behind his cheerful and confident face, still surfaces.

It is amazing, as he talks about the matchup between second-ranked Penn State and Miami, between him and Heisman Trophy winner Vinny Testaverde, how quickly his talk turns to that one loss. Of course, reporters bring it up some, but Shaffer seems to embrace the topic, going way beyond the demands of their questions.

“The first thing I did back in Cincinnati,” the former Moeller High star says, “was replay the tape of the Orange Bowl game to see what happened.”

Although he surprised teammates after the game by appearing to shoulder the blame for defeat, Shaffer really wasn’t so sure. Was he really that bad? A newspaper wondered was this the best quarterback Penn State could recruit. Shaffer was new to self-doubt; let’s go to the video.

“I saw that a lot of what they said just wasn’t true,” he says. “Some things were, most weren’t.”

After a talk with Coach Joe Paterno, during which it was agreed that two of those interceptions might have been bad calls, his cheer was restored.

“He kind of took responsibility for the first two interceptions,” Shaffer says. “I knew they were tough passes. And we weren’t prepared. Any quarterback in that situation would have had a tough night.”

Shaffer was somewhat reassured by Paterno’s meeting, especially since the coach hadn’t sounded all that sympathetic after the game. He seemed to single out the passing game in the defeat. But there was additional hurt, the fact that he had to win his job back in the spring, and the newspaper criticism.

“If a kid loses, God forbid, and you crucify him because he didn’t perform to his abilities for three hours, well, that’s awfully tough,” he says. “After four years, there are some pretty rotten games you’ll play individually. My situation is nothing new.

“Anyway, winning is not the key to life. It’s nice to win and when you do, good things happen to you. And then again, sometimes good things still don’t happen to you.”

But since he had always won, his perspective was a little different. Although he was on losing teams at Penn State, he was never in a position to take responsibility for a loss. Whatever he started, he not only finished but won. Most people don’t have to wait until they’re a junior in college to began preparing for life’s inevitable losses.

Winning may not be the key to life, but for Shaffer, it had been a way of life.

You wonder just how Shaffer’s confidence has been shaken, although this past season would seem to answer not at all. But part of his ability to win games is to project confidence, and inspire it in others. Even his opponents allow a grudging respect.

Miami Coach Jimmy Johnson, who has been able to bask in the passing talents of Bernie Kosar and Testaverde, admits the obvious, that Shaffer is nobody’s idea of a pure passer. “But Shaffer is able to hit the passes to keep the chains moving,” Johnson said. “Then occasionally he throws the football for the big play TD.”

Dan Sileo, Miami defensive tackle, protests that the streak is a lot of malarkey.

“That all depends on where you go to high school,” he says. “All the same, to win that many games, even if you’re surrounded by talent, it says something. Think how much confidence he has to have. He wins, that’s all I can say of him. You can compare him to John Elway when he was at Stanford. Which quarterback would you want? Which one won?”

Shaffer’s teammates won’t try to fool you either, when it comes to playing up his physical abilities. But his compensating qualities are apparently awe inspiring.

“He takes control of people,” Penn State center Keith Radecic says. “He’s smart, he’s got great field sense, and does the little things. Some games haven’t been pretty, but we wouldn’t be here without him.”

Radecic says the team had little trouble rallying behind Shaffer, especially after Shaffer stood up and took the blame for the loss. The offense, altogether, wasn’t that hot. “We hated thinking we had put John in that position,” he says.

Paterno says that if Shaffer doesn’t look as flashy as his Miami counterpart, who threw for nearly as many yards in 10 games (2,557) as Shaffer had in four years (3,470), that’s entirely intentional.

“We ask the quarterback not to lose the game for us, No. 1,” Paterno says. “We don’t ask the quarterback to go for statistics. We think a Penn State quarterback has got to be a good passer, and be a leader out there. John is not a superb passer, but he is a good passer, better than he gets credit for.”

Anyway, the well-known philosophy at Penn State is team above all.

“The way Coach Paterno feels,” Shaffer elaborates, “is that the quarterback is one position on the field. I’m a more team-oriented quarterback. That’s why I came to Penn State. If I go out and have a great day statistically and we lose, then I haven’t done my job. If I go out and throw 3 passes or 30 passes, and we win, then I’ve done my job.”

These are platitudes, of course, the kinds of things coaches hang up in locker rooms. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not true. It doesn’t mean the players don’t believe them.

Shaffer knows, too, that in all those games he won, he didn’t win them single-armed. “It was the same at Moeller,” he says, “there was always a great tailback, a supporting cast. That’s why I chose Penn State, because they never relied on an individual. I don’t feel comfortable in that role. Maybe one or two games a season . . . but give me balanced offense any day.”

That’s what Penn State has, and what Shaffer directs. And it’s too bad that the quarterback gets too much credit when the team wins and too much blame when it loses. “You could chisel that in stone,” he says.

The whole idea of credit and blame may be a problem in sports. Shaffer, who has learned to suffer the blame as well as the credit, says: “You can’t lose sight of the fact that it’s just a football game. I had to live with three interceptions for a long time, but believe me, it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Nevertheless, the man who once lost a football game, would prefer to win. While refusing to admit that a victory in this bowl would chase the haunting memory of last season’s, he does agree that a nice symmetry would have been achieved. “It would be,” he says, “a fitting end.”

At 66-1, he becomes a winner. It’s the cutoff point.