From Paterno’s doghouse to elected office, one Nittany Lion stands out as Ron Bracken’s most memorable

Editor’s note: With most sports on hold and TV networks left playing replays, Ron Bracken is taking a look back at some of the top teams, players, coaches and games he’s covered in his more than four decades at the Centre Daily Times.

And so it ends.

If I had to guess, I probably interacted with a thousand Penn State football players. Some I developed close relationships with, others not so much.

I remember the New Jersey linebackers — Trey Bauer, Chet Parlavecchio, Greg Buttle and Mark D’Onofrio. All of them brash, tough and great postgame interviews because they said exactly what they thought and left it to me to clean it up so it could be printed. I really enjoyed those guys. Matt Millen was like that. He could have been from Jersey but Hokendaqua was close enough. He breathed some of the same air.

Then there were the poster boys for Joe Paterno’s program — Chuck Burkhart, John Shaffer, the Suheys, John Cappelletti, Jack Ham. Some were All-Americans on the field, others were All-American boys off it, at least for the most part. No one’s saying they were angels but they were ambassadors for the school and the team.

Then there was John Ebersole. I don’t know if he drinks Dos XX, but he’s the most interesting Nittany Lion I ever ran across.

Ebersole was from Altoona, graduating a year behind Mike Reid, the All-American defensive tackle. It was Ebersole’s lot to wind up in Reid’s shadow his whole career. Had he not he would have been an All-American in his own right.

It still mystifies me how Joe Paterno’s hair remained black after dealing with Ebersole for four years, because while Reid was busy playing the concert piano and starring in “Guys and Dolls” when he wasn’t playing football, Ebersole was busy being the wild child.

He loved motorcycles, which put him on Paterno’s dark side.

And while the coach may have known that Ebersole had a motorcycle, he didn’t know about his midnight runs back home to Altoona. If he had he would have gone bald.

You see Ebersole had a need for speed and he loved to see how long it would take him to get from State College to Altoona. This was before Interstate 99, so the trip took him on two-lane roads and through small towns like Port Matilda and Tyrone. At the time the trip was approximately 45 miles. His best time was 29 minutes.

He also had a temper, which got him into trouble on and off the field.

“I got into more fights in a game,’’ he once told me, looking back at has Altoona High days. “You’d look at films and the game would be going on and there I’d be, back around the 50-yard line beating on some one. When I look back I hate to think what my life would have been like without the regimentation of football. I was a crazy individual.’’

At minimum he was a renegade.

He once demolished a Volkswagen Beetle with his bare hands and feet. This was in the late 1960s when cars were more steel than plastic. Turns out that after a toga party one of the brothers from another fraternity made some comment about Ebersole’s date. The guy headed home to his fraternity in the Beetle. Ebersole and a member of the wrestling team chased him all through his fraternity house and couldn’t find him, so Ebersole took out his anger on the Beetle to the tune of $800.

That landed him deep in Paterno’s doghouse as well as the university’s. He had to go to summer school and get a B average just to get back into school. He made it and resumed his spot at defensive end on what may have been the greatest defense Penn state ever had. Lined up with Reid and Steve Smear and in front of linebackers Dennis Onkotz and Ham and free safety Neal Smith, it was almost impenetrable.

In the 1970 Orange Bowl against Missouri, the Lions were in a goal-line defense, which put Ebersole head to head with the Tigers’ center, who was an all-conference selection.

“John looked at the guy and said, ‘say night, night to the folks,’ ”recalled teammate Dave Joyner. “When they unpiled after the play the guy was out cold and all of the screws that held his face mask on to his helmet were busted. They carried him off the field.”

Ebersole didn’t spare his teammates from his wrath. As Paterno once said, “John had a little bit of a mean streak in him.’’

That came out during the two-a-day drills in August when the team had to stay in a dormitory. Each night a box of fruit was set out in the hall for players to help themselves if they got hungry. It was usually just apples and oranges, a perfect late-night snack for most, and ammunition for Ebersole.

“He would take that box and sit at the end of the hall with it,” Joyner recalled. “He’d wait for someone to step out of the elevator or come out of their room and he’d wind up like a pitcher and throw it at them as hard as he could. Those things hurt when they hit you.”

Once, on a flight somewhere, some of the players were in a card game. One of his teammates, Gary Gray, said or did something that ticked Ebersole off. He looked right at Gray and said, “Gray, I don’t like you.”

“I took my cards and got out of the game,” Gray said later. “John Ebersole was the scariest guy on the team.”

After his Penn State career was over, Ebersole was a fourth-round draft choice of the New York Jets. He spent eight years with them before retiring back to Altoona where had a beer distributorship and a sporting goods store. Then he ran for office and was elected a Blair County commissioner.

On a spring day in his office in the Blair County Courthouse years ago, he looked back over his life and told me he had no regrets.

“We all change as we get older,” he said. “You look in your high school yearbook and see guys who were honor students who are in jail now. And I’m sure there are people who are surprised at what I’m doing now. I’m somewhat surprised.”

When I interviewed Paterno about Ebersole, he admitted Ebersole was a challenge.

“He was just a big, raw-boned kid who did things on impulse and got himself into trouble,” Paterno said. “But John has done a tremendous job with himself. John was on the verge — he could have gone a lot of different ways. He’s one of the guys I’m most proud of.”

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In last week’s article recalling the great high school coaches I dealt with, there were several who were overlooked. That happens when you’re putting together a list that is subjective rather than objective. There is no set of numbers, no criteria to be met, that decides who makes the cut.

But these guys should have made it. They definitely deserved it.

So we’ll start with State College boys’ basketball coach Drew Frank, who guided the Little Lions to the PIAA basketball title in 2004. Sticking with coaches whose teams won state titles, I have to include BEA softball coach Don Lucas, who won a title at Penns Valley in 2001 and then took the Lady Eagles to the PIAA finals last spring, and BEA baseball coach Jim Gardner who coached the Eagles to the 2007 PIAA baseball championship.

Bellefonte’s Bucky Qici guided the Lady Raiders to four District 6 softball titles and 293 wins and then coached the girls’ basketball team to 101 victories; Bellefonte boys’ basketball and football coach Dick Bell makes the list along with BEA’s Curt Heverly, who coached the Lady Eagles to the 2014 PIAA finals in softball; State College’s Len Rockey, whose Little Lions won District 6 team titles in 2000, ‘01 and ‘02, and the late Ron Pavlechko, who took the Little Lions to the PIAA football semifinals.

This story was originally published May 17, 2020 at 8:00 AM.